My settlement check is in and read more about the CLRB Hanson v. Google case arrived today. The lawyers got $5.25 million and I got this. Any suggestions on how to spend it?
So Excited About My Class Action Settlement
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Microsoft Down, But Hardly Out
I followed Microsoft closely for many years when I was in the technology press, visited the company every year or so and even sat down with Bill Gates for interviews a few times. I was always impressed by the competitiveness of the Microsoft culture, and wondered whether it could resist the disease that killed companies like Digital Equipment, Wang Laboratories and Compaq, and that nearly killed IBM and Novell.
That disease is described in Clayton Christiansen’s 1997 classic The Innovator’s Dilemma. Companies that dominate technology industries tend to become so addicted to the products that made them successful that they fail to respond to changes in the market and are done in either by low-cost competitors or a platform shift.
A new article by Kurt Eichenwald in Vanity Fair paints a dismal picture of Microsoft’s performance over the last decade and doesn’t offer much optimism for the future. The article is currently available only in the printed edition of VF, but you can find a summary here and dig up scans of the printed piece if you look around a bit.
Creeping Bureaucracy
Eichenwald documents a decade of missed opportunities, unforgivable delays, bureaucratic infighting and intellectual stagnation that made this once-fearsome competitor a caricature of the company that regulators on two continents tried to break up a little more than a decade ago. He recalls the Windows 95 launch, when people lined up around the block outside consumer electronics stores to get the first copies. Today, the idea that anyone would get that excited about any kind of Microsoft product launch seems unfathomable.
I only have a couple of comments to add to this well-reported piece. The first is that Bill Gates’ departure from the helm of Microsoft at the end of 1999 was the beginning of the downward spiral. While many people thought his self-imposed demotion from CEO to Chief Software Architect was a ruse at the time, it now appears that Gates really did step away from active management of the company.
He handed it over to the wrong guy. I personally like Steve Ballmer, and I have great respect for his competitiveness and sales/marketing skills, but he’s not a product guy. It seems that great tech companies only stay on top as long as there are technical visionaries at the helm, and it’s clear that Microsoft lost its vision years ago. Jim Allchin and Ray Ozzie perhaps had the technical chops to do the job, but neither seemed to have the natural leadership skills. Ballmer is the perfect guy to take a completed product and drive it into the market, but he’s obviously not the guy to get the product to market in the first place. I don’t see that changing, and I don’t see Microsoft turning around as long as Ballmer is in charge.
Misplaced Management Technique
My second comment is about the Microsoft management tactic called “stack ranking.” This forces managers at review time to designate two people out of every 10 as superstars, seven as average and one as trouble. The person at the bottom isn’t likely to be around very long.
Bloggers have been kicking the crap out of stack ranking since the VF article appeared, but it’s really not as bad an idea as it sounds. I worked at a company that used a similar system, and in the right scenario it’s actually pretty effective.
The goal of stack ranking is to force managers to make hard decisions about weak performers. Most managers hate even to give bad reviews, much less fire people, and stack ranking enforces a certain toughness that many managers could use, in my experience. It sends a message to the organization that poor performers won’t be punished by merely getting a 2% smaller raise than the top performers.
The problem is that stack ranking doesn’t work in organizations that put a premium on innovation and creativity. If Xerox had used it at PARC in the 1960s, we’d probably still be using MS-DOS today. Creative people shouldn’t have to worry about sucking up to managers and competing with the person at the next desk. They should spend their time being creative. Stack ranking works great for sales forces and process-oriented jobs, but it’s a disaster when applied to engineers, programmers, graphic artists or writers.
A lot of people are beating up on Microsoft right now, and with good reason, but this company is hardly a basket case. Futurist Thornton May recently told me that Microsoft goes into the top engineering schools each year and scoops up as many of the best graduates as it can get. It has a desktop franchise that won’t stop throwing off cash anytime soon and its position in the corporate data center is secure. The biggest problem there is that the future of the corporate data center is in some doubt right now.
Eichenwald contrasts Microsoft’s performance to Apple’s, and the Redmond giant comes off looking pretty pathetic. But then again, so does everyone else. This piece will hopefully cause some soul-searching within the Microsoft executive suite, and maybe restore some of the drive that once made that company so terrifyingly great.
Update: Dan Gillmor reaches much the same conclusion, although for different reasons. He points to some Microsoft innovations that the VF piece overlooked, and also notes the depressing effective of an antitrust settlement on the way a company works.
Crisis Heating Up for Progresso?
There’s a crisis brewing for Progresso, and it’ll be interesting to see how – and if – the soup maker responds.
The trouble was kicked off by a recent NPR report that looked at the potential health risks of eating food stored in cans that uses the industrial chemical bisphenol A (BPA). BPA is an industrial chemical that has been linked to everything from infertility to cancer and cardiovascular disease. Recent research has concluded that canned food is a source of BPA exposure but does not answer the question of whether that exposure is a health risk. Nevertheless, some food makers – including Campbell’s – have already taken the proactive step of announcing that they will eliminate BPA from their containers.
Progresso hasn’t said anything yet. Now a petition on change.org demands that the company remove BPA from the linings of its soup cans. The petition was posted nine days ago and already has 95,000 signatures. It was the subject of a dedicated e-mail from change.org, which no doubt will move that number higher pretty quickly.
Critics are beginning to gather on Progresso’s Facebook page. The Facebook protest started less than a day ago, but some back-and-forth is beginning to develop. So far there’s been no response from Progresso. It’ll be interesting to see if the company learns from past mistakes of brands like Nestle and Chapstick, which inadvertently escalated customer attacks by deleting Facebook comments they didn’t like.
Progresso’s only viable strategy may be to announce that it’s eliminating BPA from its packaging, but that’s a bigger issue than crisis communications. What should Progresso do? It’s still early and they might actually be listening.
Update, 7/2/12: Progresso has begun responding to concerns posted on its Facebook page with a statement that I think is well-crafted and helpful. While the soup maker doesn’t commit to anything, it does acknowledge customer concerns and promises to at least investigate alternatives. The important thing at this stage of a potential crisis is not to leap to conclusions but to state that you are aware of the problem and are looking into it.
We take the concerns around BPA very seriously, and we wanted to let you know a little bit more about this topic and how we are pursuing other options. BPA is used in the lining or lid of most metal food cans in the U.S. to help preserve food and maintain nutritional value and quality. Scientific and governmental bodies worldwide have concluded that BPA is safe. However, we know that some of our consumers would like us to pursue alternatives, so we are currently working with our suppliers to develop and test alternative linings that do not use BPA. While we pursue these options, we’re entirely confident that the current packaging is safe for the fans of our soup. Thanks for reaching out to us, and we hope we can keep providing you with delicious soups in the future!
Research Finds Expanded Marketing Role Correlates With Business Results
At the risk of beating a dead horse, here’s further evidence that IT organizations need to take a more active role in supporting social business.
According to VisionsLive Market Research, IBM just released a global survey of more than 360 marketing practitioners and one of the key findings is that marketers want to be better aligned with their IT organizations. You can see a 28-slide summary of the top findings here.
There’s a lot of data about the lousy tools most marketers have two analyze the flood of data they’re collecting, but the relevant point for tech pros is that “nearly 60% indicate that lack of IT alignment and integration are significant barriers to the adoption of technology.” Marketers say they work pretty well with IT organizations in general, but those at top-performing companies have better-than-average relationships.
The research breaks the respondent base into two categories: Top Performers and Rest of Population. It finds that the best marketers have higher-than-average involvement in products, price, placement and promotion than average. They’re also more likely to be involved in customer service, supply networks and multi-channel marketing. basically, they’re assuming a more central role in business strategy.
However, they’re mostly flying blind because analyzing results is a huge challenge. Among the the top problems are measuring effectiveness, juggling data coming in from multiple sources and managing complex business rules. Eighty-five percent of marketers say they need an integrated suite to manage multi-channel communications. And who better to help them get there than the technology pros?
Other interesting data: E-mail is kind of a mess. Two thirds of marketers don’t integrate e-mail data with other customer information or they integrate data manually, which doesn’t scale. Only 21% have mobile marketing campaigns and 80% handle mobile marketing on an ad hoc basis. We’re still very early stage with that channel.
Overall, there’s a lot of good news for marketing in this research. It establishes that companies that expand the role of marketing beyond mere messaging are seeing better business results. That’s a good thing, right?
Did Coke Respond Effectively to Former Marketer’s Attack?
Coca-Cola is dealing with a minor crisis this week because of comments by a former marketing executive expressing remorse over his contributions to America’s obesity problem.
Todd Putnam, who was a top marketing executive at Coca-Cola from 1997 to mid-2000, told an audience at the National Soda Summit last week about a Coke strategy to replace all beverages in the American diet with its own products, a campaign the company called “share of stomach.”
New York City anti-obesity ad
Putnam said he now regrets his role in the campaign because it contributed to the nation’s obesity problem. “It took me 10 years to figure out that I have a large karmic debt to pay for the number of Coke’s I sold across this country,” he told the group. In a subsequent interview with the Washington Post, Putnam said that while Coke had a policy of never advertising to children younger than 12, “Magically, when they would turn 12, we would suddenly attack them like a bunch of wolves.”
Coke’s response to Putnam’s comments was a statement that share of stomach is no longer “part of our company strategy” and that the business has “changed dramatically” since Putnam left 12 years ago. A spokesman said 41% of Coca-Cola trademark products in North America are now low- or no-calorie, up from 32% in 1999.
I wonder if the spokesman’s response was as good as it could have been? Specifically:
- Admitting that share of stomach is no longer part of the strategy is also an admission that it once was. The idea that Coke sought to replace staples like milk and fruit juice at any point seems damning to me.
- Putnam said that share of stomach was an active policy when he was with the company. While the percentage of low-calorie drinks Coke sells today is higher than in 1999, it isn’t much higher. This could be interpreted as a sign that Coke has not done much to advance the sales of low-calorie drinks over the last 13 years. Or that it is following, rather than leading the market.
Give Coke credit, however, for not pointing out that Putnam’s new company is focused on marketing healthy food and beverages. If you want to keep ma healthy lifestyle then stop drinking coke and start reading the OVP review to see the benefits you can get from it. Putnam unquestionably got some nice exposure for his new venture by trashing his former employer. Coke could have engaged in a war of character assassination but chose not to.
What’s your opinion? Did Coca-Cola articulate the best possible response to this problem?
My First Prezi
I’ve probably spent at least a couple of thousand hours with PowerPoint over the last 15 years and believe me, familiarity breeds contempt. I find conference organizers’ obsession with “getting the slides in advance” to be a bit annoying at times, as if the slides are more important than the message, but I suppose that’s the world in which we live.
Tomorrow I’m keynoting a local conference of educators, and my message is that they need to make some pretty fundamental changes in the way they do their work in order to meet the needs of today’s young people and tomorrow’s markets. So I thought the least I could do is to change the way I create my message. I tried Prezi, the online presentation service that comes at presentations from a completely different angle. Instead of a slide deck, Prezi uses a “canvas” onto which you can drop elements. The presentation zooms and pans around in an order you specify. It’s amazingly easy to use once you get the hang of it, and there are some very cool things you can do that you’d never consider with PowerPoint.
On the other hand, motion sickness is a real risk with Prezi. My wife, Dana, who is prone to migraines, took a look at the first version of this presentation and said it gave her a headache. I toned it down, but the experience still takes some getting used do.
Prezi isn’t right for every scenario, but it’s a nice new addition to my presentation toolkit. And it’s so NOT PowerPoint!
New Video Series Shows How Mobile Marketing Can Work for B2B
Christina Kerley is a leading voice in B2B mobile marketing, and she’s starting posting engaging educational videos that show how mobile devices can be incorporated into the B2B marketing mix. For example, conference organizers can replace those thick (and expensive) packages of conference materials with a mobile app that delivers latest information to the devices users are already carrying and builds in goodies like QR codes that people can scan to download slides and get bonus information. Thought-leadership material that companies are already producing should be optimized for display on tablets and smart phones because business travelers often have downtime in transit to catch up on reading.
CK has some great examples in this video series, which now includes six segments, each six to nine minutes in length. She’s promising to add a couple of new chapters each month. Here’s an example.
A City Yard Transformed
When we moved into an old urban home nearly six years ago, we knew one of the disadvantages was a postage-stamp-sized front yard. The previous owners had done some very basic landscaping – and for some reason had installed a full irrigation system – but what can you do with less than 600 ft.² of space?
The plumbing services Summerlin NV will undertake all aspects of plumbing work from a dripping tap to a blocked toilet right the way through to a complete bathroom makeover. We offer such services as tiling, flooring, painting & decorating.
It turns out a lot. We engaged Nancy Warren and Janice Welenc of Green Velvet Gardens of Holliston, MA to apply their imagination and experience to the problem. We’ve seen what Janice did to landscape her own home with the help from a Landscaping near Yardley (https://marrazzolandscaping.com/)and we had no doubt they would come through with something exceptional.
Which they did. We don’t have a good “before” photo, but you can get a sense from the picture below what they had to work with.
Janice and Nancy re-imagined the space built around a stone patio that’s just large enough to accommodate a table and a couple of chairs. The centerpiece is lawn space big enough for the twins to play in (at least for the next couple of years), Nancy started to find tips on how to aerate lawn so that it would be safe for the kids to play at all times. The center oval is surrounded by evergreens and whatever plants they could reuse from what was already there. A rhododendron that has never bloomed in five years was moved into the sun and flowered for the first time. We’re just delighted with the transformation.
If you’re looking for landscaping services in Metro West Boston, you can’t do better than Green Velvet Gardens. Have a look at their landscaping portfolio and see for yourself. As they say on eBay, “A+++++++”.
A CIO Who Gets Social Business
One of my favorite CIOs is Tom Murphy, who long headed IT at AmerisourceBergen and who is now in transition to a new role (any company will be lucky to have him). Tom addressed the CIO Solutions Gallery at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University this morning on the subject of the role of CIOs in social media. Earlier in the day, a show-of-hands poll of his audience had indicated considerable skepticism among the audience about the value of social business in general and a clear sentiment that CIOs should not be closely involved with social business other than as gate-keepers. In light of that reluctance, I found Tom’s comments particularly refreshing. What follows is a more-or-less verbatim transcript of what he said. I hope other CIOs will listen:
To me this looks very much like the early days of the Web. Everybody figured they had to be out there but they didn’t know what it meant. We’re going through a lot of the same machinations. In the early days of the Web you saw consumer packaged goods firms throwing up Web sites without a lot of idea what they were trying to accomplish. The same is happening with the social space, but it’s happening so fast.
The speed of social media today is stunning. I think the biggest mistakes we’re making are around the consistency of the message, the brand quality and the way we have traditionally done things, which is a one-way dialog. By definition, social media is a two-way dialog between your customers and your employees. I have seen more mistakes with people jumping into the social media space without understanding this simple precept. This is a two-way dialog and someone needs to be handling that conversation.
Also, if you’re going to ask for opinions, be prepared for what you get. You need to be able to react to requests and to complaints. You turn this thing on and you get hundreds or thousands of dialogs coming in. How effective is the organization at responding to that? Do you have the tools to effectively engage in this dialog?
Social media is not a technical expertise. It’s a cultural expertise. Right now the pendulum is swinging more and more toward social media as the tool to communicate. It is a tool, but companies should not lose that direct contact with customers. There’s a risk of losing face-to-face engagement with customers and employees.
The other thing I worry about is the explosion in data collection. All this dialog has created a mountain of data and we have to figure out how to apply social analytics and who’s got the toolsets that can help us. How do we collect all this data and apply tools in a space that’’s moving so fast that people expect immediate responses. How do we do that while protecting the integrity of the brand?
Most of us do not have the skills to collect and understand the data we’re collecting. They’re spending a lot of money on this and there’s a lack of understanding about the value we’re getting.
The other issue I worry about is security. Social media doesn’t introduce new risk in itself, but it does present the opportunity to identify risks earlier. However, it also creates the opportunity to detect problems within the organization. If I can listen in on my associates’ dialogs, I can analyze it and identify potential risks in the organization before it’s apparent. I can identify individuals who may present a threat to the organization. Now there’s a big leap between doing that and taking action without evidence, and I’m not advocating a Big Brother approach, but I think a big part of the social future will be companies’ ability to listen in and understand what employees are talking about.
Organizations that are going to optimize social are going to need to make organizational changes, put tools in the hands of their employees and then get out of the way. But that’s not really a big leap. The fallacy of our current situation is that you think you have control and you don’t.
As the CIO I don’t want to own this space but I want to enable it. This is a fabulous opportunity to take your relationship with the CMO to the next level.
This is one in a series of posts sponsored by IBM Midsize Business that explore people and technologies that enable midsize companies to innovate. In some cases, the topics are requested by IBM; however, the words and opinions are entirely my own.
A Chance for CIOs to Lead in Social Business
I’m presenting a session at the CIO Solutions Gallery at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University tomorrow on the topic of “Measuring Social ROI: The CIO’s Role.” The subject got me thinking about a topic that’s close to my heart, which is the low profile IT executives have assumed in driving social business at their organizations. The absence of IT at the strategy table perplexes me, since social technologies are arguably the most important force guiding the evolution of relationships between companies and their constituents. IT departments played an important role in the last transformational change, which was the adoption of enterprise resource planning in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So why aren’t they more active in driving the socialization of business?
I created the presentation below largely for my talk tomorrow and wanted to share it. In particular, look at slide 3, which shows the results of a recent Economist Intelligence Unit Survey of 329 Business Leaders. The survey asked which group within the company had primary responsibility for social business. Not surprisingly, marketing topped the list. Surprising is that IT isn’t even on it.
Study after study has documented that companies are doing a poor job of measuring the results of their social media marketing efforts and have made only weak attempts to integrate customer service data and so-called “social CRM” to create a holistic view of their customers. IT leaders are experts at measurement, and they also have cross-functional visibility that makes them the most logical candidates to integrate islands of automation. This is an opportunity for them to pick up the ball.
I suggest in my presentation that there are several initiatives IT could lead that would give them a critical role in social business. They include standardizing and improving measurement criteria and give businesses a more complete view of their markets. Feel free to download the presentation; it’s posted on a Creative Commons Attribution License.
And please let me know what you think.
Measuring Social ROI: The CIO’s Role
View more PowerPoint from Paul Gillin