You're Not an Island

Cultivating the best talent.

To accomplish your objectives, you’ll need to rely on your team, which requires a combination of recruiting, training and leadership. “Your team is what makes matters most,” says Kristin Hambleton, VP Marketing, Neolane Communications, now part of Adobe. "You’re not an island – you need collaboration and leadership.”

Successful marketing executives recruit the best people they can. 

Kimberly Clark CMO Tony Palmer says, “the smartest thing I did when I started was to go out and hire four or five of the best people I could find in the disciplines. They were people who had a lot of weight in terms of skill set and experience, and that helped enormously. I think that very early on, the organization saw them as a skill set that they didn't recognize, and they tended to therefore be invited in more.”*  Adds Tony Wells, CMO of ADT Security Services, “surround yourself with good people – hire people better than you.”

Then, they build their team’s capabilities. 

Most importantly, says Ted Rubin, Chief Social Marketing Officer of Collective Bias, “teach mid-level marketing execs to speak to the c-suite in a way they understand – learn to speak their language – talk to me about sales / conversion.” Says Wells, “always look to develop people – make it possible for them do the best work of their career.” And Bloomberg CMO Maureen McGuire says “development of people is a daily task…It’s about coaching people through the process, helping them to understand the business and what’s good or bad about the work that they've done at the moment.”**

Finally, leadership is critical. 

“Know yourself, your job, your people, their strengths and weaknesses, says Tony Wells, CMO ADT Security Services. There should always be something exciting going on. Create energy.” Unfortunately, says Karen Masullo, EVP Social Media of Firestorm, “many marketers who move into executive positions tell their teams what to do without soliciting their input – allow your team to help you. Avoid being dictatorial.”

The management consulting firm Hay Group suggests using a variety of leadership styles,*** noting that a poor leader uses a single style, effective leaders use at least four and superb leaders can use six, and know when to use them:

Surviving in the Marketing Jungle

Marketing is about survival in a jungle that has no mercy, particularly for members of one of the least understood clans in the corporate world.

If you play the game well, you’ll get additional opportunities. Many companies now have Chief Revenue Officers, which formally combine sales and marketing. You could eventually get IT: Gartner research VP Laura McLellan* predicts that by 2017 CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs. And you might even have a shot at the top position, as did James White who become the CEO Jamba Juice.

Based on interviews and research, those who just focus on "marketing" are less likely to succeed. The successful CMO needs to think act like the CEO of a business – your business is the business of "understanding, attracting, and keeping valuable customers."** You need to become the CEO of Marketing™.

A 400-year advantage

In "Google Maps announces a 400-year advantage over Apple Maps," blogger Mike Dobson writes

If you go back over this blog and follow my recounting of the history of Google's attempts at developing a quality mapping service, you will notice that they initially tried to automate the entire process and failed miserably, as has Apple. Google learned that you cannot take the human out of the equation. While the mathematics of mapping appear relatively straight forward, I can assure you that if you take the informed human observer who possess local and cartographic knowledge out of the equation that you will produce...a failed system (emphasis added).

Questions

Do you ask questions?

Or give answers?

Which do you think is more likely to be successful?

Experience matters.

Dreaming of sushi

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a must-see documentary about the world's greatest sushi chef, 86-year-old Jiro Ono, the only sushi chef to receive 3 stars from the Guide Michelin. The restaurant, located in a subway station in the Ginza, has 10 seats. A 20-minute meal STARTS at $370, and diners often reserve a year in advance.

Jiro has been perfecting his craft for over 75 YEARS (his alcoholic father abandoned the family when Jiro was 7 and when he left home at 9, he was told he had no home to come back to), yet says "even at my age, in my work, I haven't reached perfection."

Great sales personnel (and lousy ones)

I love great sales personnel.

As much as I loathe lousy ones.

We were looking for track lighting at the local lighting store, from whom we had bought in the past. Those who've shopped for lighting know this takes some time and, often, in home consultations. After all, it is neither a small purchase, nor one you can easily replace.

Listening

We'd heard about a nice local deli, and stopped in to see the offerings.

Greeted with a smile, we asked about their prepared dishes, particularly vegetarian ones which, unfortunately, were on the sparse side. Because the store came with high recommendations, we persisted in our questioning.

Until the clerk offered us a sampling of the store's meatballs, something they were well known for.

Huh?

Everyone lives by selling something...

...said Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Sales reps, of course, sell products and services to customers.

CEOs sell their vision to their boards and employees.

CIOs sell their plans and budgets to the management team.

CFOs sell the company's investment plans to Wall Street.

CHROs sell the benefits of working in an organization to prospective employees.

Inventors sell their ideas to investors.

And CMOs must help sell all of these.

All require an in-depth understanding of both the offering and the buyer.

What are you selling?

And have you done the hard work to develop the insight required?

Experience matters.

Branding overload

Last week I wrote about the brander's paradise that is South Beach. This week, I spent some time in Manhattan, which most would think of as a brander's paradise.

But right now I only feel fatigue. And I'm not just talking about Times Square.

Manhattan, everywhere, overloads the senses.

How not to write sales letters

Occasionally I get a sales letter that is so bad I can only scratch my head. Here are extracts from two that inspired me to write this post, in the hopes that none of you will similarly ever waste your resources.

The first was accompanied by a slick (expensive) brochure:

Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions

Who hasn't heard at one time during their career, from a boss, 'don't bring me problems, bring me a solution?'

How silly is this? If all your boss does is ratify a solution, what good is s/he? Further, if you have a solution, why the heck aren't you out there implementing it?

Worse,what does this say about the organization that encourages this sort of behavior? That they don't trust their people? That they are so risk averse that no one is encouraged to make a move because of fears of making mistakes? Think about what this does to  employee motivation and engagement.

Instead, try telling your employees to stop bringing you solutions, and bring you problems instead.
They'll be skeptical at first, but if you're firm in telling them 'if you already know what to do, why are you asking me for permission?', they'll get the message pretty quickly. You'll soon be amazed at changes in attitudes and increased energy levels.

And you'll probably find that your job becomes a lot more interesting as well - the good ones are not going to bother you with trivia (and if they're not good, why are they still working for you?) and the problems they bring you are likely to be really interesting - helping solve those will have a real impact.

Organizing for the coming boom

Listening to more doom and gloom from the financial pundits this morning risks becoming depressing; I'm going to try to focus on what's next. Not only more cheerful, but if we're lucky and can pool some good thinking, we might collectively prosper. This entry centers on organization structure; while technologies and offerings clearly will drive an economic renaissance, their creation requires organizing individuals and teams.

Over the past century, technology advancement, globalization and capital market innovation have dramatically increased the speed of doing business and raised the standard of excellence in business performance. Alfred Chandler, in his classic Strategy and Structure developed the theme that new structures were required to mobilize capital and organize workers in larger physical plants than the world had ever seen. Increasing need for specialization required managerial coordination of clearly-defined roles and largely self-contained processes (production, accounting, sales) through a series of hand-offs. 

The first great advance was the functional structure, which relied on tabulator technology to control diverse operations and whose attributes include functional accountability, command-and-control decision making and, ultimately, management by objectives. 

Tabulator era

Henry Ford's River Rouge plant, which became the world's largest integrated factory on completion in 1928, is a prime example of a vertically-integrated functional organization. Eventually employing over 100,000 workers, initially a seemingly-impossible organizing task, the plant was able to turn raw materials into running vehicles within a single complex. It had its own docks, 100 miles (160 km) of interior railroad track, its own electricity plant and ore processing.

However, while Ford focused on reducing cost, GM President Alfred Sloan's new methods of managing a complex worldwide organization, focused on customer segments, propelled GM to industry sales leadership by the early 1930s, a position it retained for over 70 years. He established a structure to prevent product lines (from lowest- to highest-priced) Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac from competing with each other, and keep buyers in the GM "family" as their buying power and preferences changed as they aged. And, thanks to consumer financing via another organizational innovation, GMAC (founded 1919), easy monthly payments allowed far more people to buy GM cars, while Ford was moralistically opposed to credit. GM under Sloan became famous for managing diverse operations with financial statistics such as return on investment, adapted from DuPont, which at the time owned 43% of GM.

Yet, however successful Sloan's GM organization was, the major difference between Ford and GM was that GM had five self-contained functional divisions v. Ford's one.

Mainframe era

IBM's announcement on April 7, 1964, of the model 360 - the 'mainframe' - portended the next great advance in organization - process and team orientation. As companies increased their information processing capability by orders of magnitude, they were increasingly able to extend processes beyond individual operations through increased managerial span of control. This was  facilitated by scientific approaches to job design, first tested in the WW II Office of Price Administration.  

Eventually, this resulted in significant management delayering - including at IBM in the early 1990s - as process coordination improved work flow across functions, geographies and industry sectors, something previously provided by hierarchies of middle managers. It also paved the way for early matrix structures.

Client-server era

This set the stage for the next phase: technology- led organization deconstruction, heralded in 1993 by Champy and Hammer's massively successful (2.5 million copies - for a business book!) Reengineering the corporation. This launched the Business Process Reengineering movement, enabled by the distribution of processing power through the rise of client-server computing. Add in new Enterprise Resource Planning software, and the increasing quality and reach of the build out of the early internet (Web 1.0), and now processes could realistically be performed without direct line-of-sight, independent of location, either a very good or very bad thing, depending on where you sit. The first great experiment was the outsourcing of Y2K coding to India in the late 1990s, when companies in the industrialized world, unable to find enough skilled programmers to do the necessary work to prevent feared shut downs of their operations on January 1, 2000, desperately searched the globe for the necessary skills. Once the outsourced Y2K work was completed, in a modern example of Say's Law ("supply creates its own demand"), the Indian companies began moving up the business process food chain.

Networked era

Technology, of course, never stands still, and even as firms were grappling with the possibilities to reduce costs offered by outsourcing, much like Henry Ford, new Alfred Sloans are arising, enabled by the capabilities poffered by the ever improving global infrastructure. Now, global networked eco-systems, built on 'Web 2.0' IT platforms promising varying degrees of geeky attributes like open architecture, interoperability, virtualization and standardization, extend the reach of more traditional human attributes like collaboration and socialization.

While we don't know yet how this will play out, we are already seeing some of the possibilities of this networked world, bringing to life the reality portended by Hamel and Prahalad's 1990 piece, "The Core Competence of the Corporation." Self organizing networks, aided by evolving contractual arrangements, can now bring together - sometimes for a single task - specialized organizations (and individuals), regardless of location or affiliation, to conceptualize, develop, design, manufacture, market and distribute products, eliminating industrial-age line-of-sight managerial overheads required to coordinate work flow (current models include the film and construction industries). With a relentless focus on results and productivity, as the need for a specific eco-system ends, these organizational components seek new eco-systems to join, driven by economic self-interest, and the failure to adapt to new needs has dire consequences.

While technology-led business transformation has enabled companies to respond to new challenges, the increasing demand of investors for greater accountability has more recently created significant operating tension between the financial need for control and line managers' need to respond to the market. More and more, managers are resorting to 'heroic efforts' to accomplish 'undoable' jobs caused by outdated organization structures. But individual heroic efforts are not sustainable, risking burn out, and the most significant challenges organizations face now are creating operating models to meet future demands, followed by designing doable jobs, then training leaders in the necessary competencies and finally adapting their cultures so employees can thrive.