Smart is Dumb, and..

...dumb is smart.

I was reminded of the importance of what I read about years ago in the best-selling negotiating guide, Getting to Yes, watching TURN, AMC's new drama about America's first spy ring in the American Revolution. In episode two, a Captain in the Continental army charged with creating the spy ring, serves dinner to a captured British Captain in a gesture of apparent civility between officers. At the end of the meal, the British Captain, wishing to reciprocate, gives away the exact information the the Continentals needed. The dialog:

British Captain: "Now then, to business. What is it you wish to know?"

American Captain: "Oh nothing, sir. We already know all we need to know."

BC: "Truly? You know where we mean to strike after retaking New York?"

AC: "We know you have four thousand men stationed at Throgs Neck in Brooklyn, New York, as part of your occupation force."

BC: (incredulously) "Four thousand??? (derisive snort) Try six!"

Good information is critical to success, whatever your decision-making endeavor - military, negotiations, strategy, marketing, sales... And, it requires careful planning to obtain, and validate.

Just don't let your ego get in the way.

23 Reasons Not to Talk to Strangers? Or...

...Little Red Riding Hood?

My friend and former colleague Eric Pelletier blogs in a wonderful post, Croissants and fairy tales. How storytelling makes strategy happen that

...when people in a similar context, are exposed to the same facts, they tend to arrive at the same conclusions. And so, when they're in the same organization then, they're also likely to arrive at the same conclusion about the right strategy to take the organization forward.

While he focuses on the power of getting people on board via storytelling to implement strategies, I have little doubt he'd agree about the power of creating shared conclusions on formulating a winning strategy in the first place.

In The Biggest Problem in Strategy? Mindset, I noted how the railroads in post war America missed out on growth opportunities because they saw themselves in the railroad business, not the transportation business, and how Blockbuster missed out on digital distribution, ignoring intelligence on the looming threat. While railroad efficiency made enormous strides post deregulation in 1980, it basically kept the surviving companies in the game. Rail's share of freight traffic in the US (measured in ton-miles) declined from about 75% in 1930 (A Short History of US Freight Railroads, pp3) to 28% in 2000 (Freight-Rail Bottom Line Report, pp 14). Worse, its share of freight revenues dropped to a mere 6%. Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2011, shuttering the last of its outlets in 2013. Other examples of failed strategies aren't hard to find: cell phone manufacturers Nokia and Motorola; bookstores Borders and Barnes and Noble; computer manufacturer Sun; the plethora of desktop application software firms - remember VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Freelance Graphics and WordPerfect, all of which dominated at one time?

Storytelling works because of the evolution of the prefrontal cortex of the human brain, which helps us recognize and act on patterns. It also works, as Eric notes, because it creates a shared context, or "experience" (even if vicarious) in the tribe. 

But this pattern-recognizing ability is both a help and a hindrance, for individuals and groups. It helps tremendously when the situation is reasonably stable, but often fails us in times of significant environmental change, when we are unable to recognize new patterns. And the worst failures occur when the "tribe," and especially the decision-making leadership, is unable to jettison outdated mindsets.

The most powerful stories are the ones collectively arrived at, through shared experiences. And the most powerful of these are crises. IBM (where I worked for the better part of a decade), was able to reinvent itself in the early 1990s because the tribe members (the employees) knew there was no other choice, enabling Lou Gerstner to drive a change in the collective mindset. But it was painful, to the tune of 200,000 layoffs.

So I return to a theme readers of my blog will recognize: why not create simulated "crises" to enable decision-makers to "experience" the consequences of potential actions. Militaries, governments and airline pilots (see Chance Only Favors Prepared Minds) do this regularly. And some companies regularly incorporate scenario planning or business wargaming (among other experiential planning techniques), designed and facilitated by experts for maximum effectiveness, into strategy development.

Companies that invest in these now, incorporating the latest available intelligence on potential opportunities or threats, reap huge future returns and often avoid debilitating disasters.

The Biggest Problem in Strategy? Mindset

A question in a LinkedIn forum asks what the biggest problem people haven't yet solved in strategy?

My answer: decision-maker mindset.

In one of the most famous business articles ever, Theodore Levitt wrote about the mindset of US railroad industry in “Marketing Myopia” (Harvard Business Review, July / August 1960):

The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.

Take a more recent example, Blockbuster, which went bankrupt in 2011, closing its last stores in 2013. It didn't fail from a lack of intelligence. “The fascinating issue for me,” wrote Forbes blogger George Anderson wrote in Blockbuster Beyond the Grave “is that Wayne Huizenga and his executive team were well aware of the risks from digital distribution of media and discussed it at times.”

Given the lack of action, the Blockbuster executive mindset was clearly that not only would the near-term future be like the present, but also that they would have enough time to respond to a "real” threat, before a crisis hit. But by the time it did, it was too late.

Mindset is of course, useful. It helps us interpret the barrage of new information that bombards us daily. And it works, so long as underlying conditions remain essentially the same. But it often fails us in times of radical change (brought on by external factors such as changing market or economic conditions or new technologies, or internal decisions, such as launching new products or entering new markets). Unfortunately, senior executive decision makers, because of their long years of experience – they "know" the business, the customers, the competitors, the technology and the industry – are resistant to changing their mindsets.

So, to the question, the real challenge for strategy professionals becomes how to change decision maker mindsets. Unfortunately, most traditional “strategy” processes fail in this critical regard (we could have another whole discussion on whether most companies really practice strategy, or whether they practice planning and budgeting…). Given human nature, changing long- and deeply-held mindsets requires a crisis. As English author Samuel Johnson said, "nothing so focuses the mind as the possibility of being hanged in a fortnight."

But rather than awaiting a real crisis, forward-looking organizations find ways to create structured "crisis" experiences, where decision-makers collectively evaluate intelligence, develop new insight and assess the strategic and operational risks of changing customer needs, new forms of competition, changing technologies, new discoveries and emerging government policies.

This also means strategy professionals must change their own mindsets, from “producing” strategy documents and presentations and overseeing planning processes, to creating experiences that enable decision makers to create their own insights. Once they, and not the strategy professionals, “own” the insight, they will change their mindsets. And once their mindsets change, developing winning strategies becomes, if not easy, at least straightforward.  

____

                  

Creating Winning Strategies by Changing the Dialogue

In far too many companies, "strategy" has become a euphemism for planning or budgeting. The underlying - and unstated - assumption is that marketplace conditions are largely static: the future will be largely an extension of the past and, thus, all we need to do is optimize our current operations.

This assumption, unfortunately, has proved fatal in industry after industry. Just a few years ago, Motorola and Nokia were major cell phone players, Sun was a significant server manufacturer, Blockbuster was the source for many of us for at-home movie viewing, and Borders and Barnes and Noble were where we shopped for books...

To drive serious strategic discussions, you first need to accurately assess your source of competitive advantage. Here's a framework we've found useful:

Source of Competitive Advantage (worst to first):

1. Commodity with cost disadvantage

2. Commodity with cost parity

3. Commodity with 10% to 20% cost advantage

4. One-year offering development lead

5. Two-year offering development lead

6. Brand, patent, copyright

7. Owning the customer relationship

8. A string of dominant positions (for example, cost advantage + development lead + patent protection

9. Managing the value net or ecosystem

10. Owning the industry standard

Importance of Marketplace Insight

The first two, of course, confer no competitive advantage; unfortunately, a realistic assessment of their true competitive position would surprise many companies... Hence the importance of helping decision makers develop relevant marketplace insight. Answers to these critical questions will help:

• What are customers really buying? How are their preferences changing?
• What new initiatives are current competitors undertaking: operations, innovation, marketing, sales, customer service?
• What economic or regulatory trends will impact the industry?
• Which emerging competitors have the potential to change the nature of competitive dynamics?

Assessing the Consequences

Once the decision makers have grappled with these issues, they'll need to assess the impact on the organization, including:

• Systems and processes: Do we need to change our offerings development or production processes? Which need to be re-engineered? Which can we outsource? What support do we need from IT?
• People and skills: Do we need to retrain our existing workforce? Change our hiring requirements? Restructure the organization?
• Culture: Do we need to change the behaviors? If so, where? Only in specific functions? Or everywhere in the organization?
• Incentives: Do we have the right incentives in place? And how will we align these across the organization?
• Profits: How will we make money in the future? How can we protect our profit streams?

Creating Winning Strategies

With all of the above in hand, decision makers can proceed to the important work of re-allocating resources to create:

• Differentiated value propositions
• Innovation, operational and go-to market initiatives
• Organizational alignment

Challenging work, all this, since it means the nature of the strategic discussion must change, from planning / budgeting to strategy, from past to future and from business-as-usual to new business models. Importantly, it means changing mental models - how decision makers interpret information about the marketplace. And this, in turn, means creating opportunities for dialogue and debate, v. reading reports.

But it could mean the difference between organizational life and death.

Will Your Assumptions Cost You $24 Billion?

As I passed a shuttered Blockbuster store, one of the last to remain open, I wondered what assumptions its executives used to guide their decisions.

Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2011, closing its last stores in 2013, in the face of competition from Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, Amazon.com and the cable / satellite providers. Dish Network bought Blockbuster's streaming service from the bankruptcy court for $321 million. In contrast, Netflix' market cap is worth over $24 billion today - and Blockbuster could have bought it in 2000 for a mere $50 million.

The Blockbuster executives didn't fail from a lack of market intelligence. NetFlix was founded in 1997 and began video streaming in 1999, followed by Vudu in 2004 and Hulu in 2007. And Blockbuster didn't even enter the DVD-by-mail business until 2004, long after Netflix had proven its success. Forbes blogger George Anderson wrote in Blockbuster Beyond the Grave:

“The fascinating issue for me is that Wayne Huizenga and his executive team were well aware of the risks from digital distribution of media and discussed it at times,” wrote loyalty marketing expert Bill Hanifin in a recent RetailWire online discussion.

Given their lack of action, they clearly operated under two critical - fatal - assumptions: not only would the near-term future be like the present, but also that they would have enough time to respond to a "real" competitive threat, before a crisis hit. But by the time it did, it was too late.

We all have assumptions, of course. They help us interpret the barrage of new information we are bombarded with daily. And they work, so long as underlying conditions remain the same. But all assumptions are susceptible to cognitive bias, particularly anchoring, where humans rely too heavily on the first piece of information they receive, using that as the basis for subsequent decisions.

But assumptions often fail us in times of radical change, when they need to be tested to ensure continued validity. Unfortunately, senior executive decision makers are the most resistant to challenging their assumptions. Because of their long years of experience, they "know" the business, the customers, the competitors, the technology and the industry. In turn, this leads them to lend more credence to facts or information that reinforce their world view (confirmation bias).

Given human nature, changing long- and deeply-held assumptions requires a crisis. As English author Samuel Johnson said, "nothing so focuses the mind as the possibility of being hanged in a fortnight."

But rather than awaiting a real crisis, forward-looking organizations create "crisis" experiences, where decision-makers collectively evaluate intelligence, develop new insight and assess the strategic and operational risks of changing customer needs, new forms of competition, changing technologies, new discoveries and emerging government policies, in structured situations.

They can then decide to weigh anchor - or even break the chains - and navigate to a new destination, before the storm hits.

How Good Are Your Marketplace Insight Capabilities?

Since posting Insight is Where the Game is Won and Lost, many have asked "how can we assess our insights capabilities to identify where to focus?" Building on both internal work I did in the early 2000s, and an article published independently by Herring and Leavitt in 2011,* here is a framework you can use to quickly evaluate your organization's insights capabilities. There are five dimensions to rate your organization on (directions at the bottom):

• Insights culture
• Sources used to generate the information base to help create insights
• Marketplace focus
• Personnel
• Early warning of emerging threats and opportunities

The organization's culture sets the tone for insights creation, which can address markets, customers, technology or competition. Initially reactive (Level 1), executives ask for data and task available personnel to gather information for a presentation or meeting, invariably sourced from easy-to-access published data, such as annual reports, existing market research or industry analyses. The initial focus is on traditional markets, customers, technology and competitors.

Soon, a frustrated executive or ambitious analyst determines that standardized profiles, newsletters and databases will improve organization awareness. Dedicated, often part-time individuals (becoming full-time as demand increases) standardize outputs, create delivery schedules and expand the fact base to include subscriptions to specialized industry publications, and start to focus on partnerships and alliances which impact growth and the ability to compete (Level 2).

Success begets more challenging questions, such as what does this data mean? how will the trends play out? and what emerging customers, technologies and competitors should we be concerned about? Improving capability requires teams of skilled analysts under a functional manager (Level 3). Since the answers are rarely contained in published data, analysts must incorporate validated opinion and observations from individuals who don't have the time to write it all down - customers, channel partners, R&D and sales personnel, their own executives, and industry observers and experts.

The expanding organizational knowledge base generates new requirements: what are the implications of these projections? what options do we have? what should we do about them? how might customers or competitors react? how feasible is a new technology? Mature organizations assign or recruit a senior leader to answer these, using increasingly sophisticated research and analysis techniques and a well-nurtured source network. And the organization expands its focus to better understand the interactions within the industry value chain and how these will play out (Level 4).

Finally, a radical shift occurs, from an emphasis on producing reports to facilitating dialog: the organization structures insights-driven strategic decision-making sessions (Level 5). Key executives interact directly with well-prepared internal and external experts, to determine how to best position the enterprise for future success. Topics might include identifying and evaluating the strategic risks of potential new initiatives, untapped sources of customer value, the next generation of customers, emerging competitive threats (frequently through business wargames) and new growth opportunities.

The importance of early warning. 

The organization's ability to avoid surprises - a major executive concern - increases with the sophistication of its insights capabilities. Fledgling operations frequently start by looking at any of a variety of "megatrends" (example here), "boiling the ocean" to try to find a something the organization can act on. They progress to tracking studies, targeted assessments of specific marketplace issues and systematic monitoring of the periphery (emerging customers, competitors and technologies). But real breakthroughs occur when organizations form heavyweight teams, consisting of both internal and external experts, to address critical emerging issues through innovation and new business models.

How good is your organization's insight capability? Identify where it is in each category, sum the associated levels, and divide by five. If it is:

• below 2.0, it is drowning, with little chance of a lifeline in the next round of budget cuts
• between 2.0 - 3.0, it is treading water, with increasing odds of getting a lifeline
• between 3.0 - 4.0, the shore is in sight, but beware of undercurrents
• above 4.0, the beachhead is secured and the insights function is capable of making a real difference

Now ask what will it take to improve? And, importantly, what will be the impact on the business?

* Herring, Jan and Judith Leavitt, "The Roadmap to a World-Class Intelligence Program," Competitive Intelligence, January - March, 2011 

Growth is Hard

Columbia Business School professor Rita Gunther McGrath writes that only 8% of the 5,000 companies with over $1 billion in revenues grew sales by 5% annually over a 5 year period, and only 4% grew net income by at least 5% annually.* Compounding the challenge are the prevailing conditions found in many markets:

• The new product failure rate is repugnantly high: estimates range from a minimum of 40% to as high as 95%; 

• Few completely new categories have emerged in recent years;

• Risk aversion results in few real disruptive market strategies;

• Rivalry is intense and along many dimensions;

• The role of channels is becoming ever more pervasive and powerful; and

• Cost pressures continue to escalate, absorbing significant company resources to address.

Companies can beat the odds through a structured approach (chart):

• Marketplace insight – What is the customer need or problem a new growth initiative will resolve? How have recent competitive and supplier initiatives and technological developments impacted customer needs? What is going on in competitors’ minds, what are they planning, and how will they respond to our initiatives?

• Opportunity assessment and selection – How can we extend current capabilities to address new opportunities or change the nature of competition? How do we develop and test new growth opportunities beyond our current strategy? Which customer segments will we choose to serve? Which will we not serve?

• Strategy – How do we resolve a market problem / need in a valuable and differentiated manner? What is the value proposition? How will we capture value, what scope of activities will we perform and how will we protect our profit? 

• Organization alignment – What processes, systems, structures, and incentives need to be changed? What will inhibit successful execution of the growth strategy: culture, mindsets, resources, incentives?

• Execution – What specific actions will deliver the product / offering and profitably capture value? How will we measure success? How will we monitor results?

*McGrath, Rita Gunther, “How the Growth Outliers Did It,” Harvard Business Review, January – February 2012

What Role Does Marketing Play in Your Organization?

Is it

Reactive? Does it focus on promoting new initiatives or products developed elsewhere?

Passive? Does it respond to requests for marketplace information to strategy, sales or new product development teams?

Proactive? Does it actively develop marketplace intelligence as inputs to decision-making processes?

A driver? Is it actively engaged in creating new initiatives and developing the necessary insight required for innovative new factor, operational, organizational and marketplace strategies and plans?

Which role should it play?

Chance Favors Only Prepared Minds

Creating Crises

On January 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549, with 150 passengers and five crew, struck a flight of geese two minutes after take-off, losing power in both engines. Four minutes later, Captain Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger's crew landed the Airbus A320 in the middle of the Hudson River. Aided by first responders, there was no loss of life, and the five injuries and a number of cases of hypothermia were quickly treated.

How did these teams perform such an incredible feat? Was it a miracle? Perhaps. Most commercial flying is routine and pilots rarely experience a real crisis. The FAA reports the odds of a bird strike are one in 10,000, and experts estimate the odds of losing both engines are one in several million.

Yet the crew and first responders instinctively knew what to do. They had rehearsed responses to low-probability, high-impact events in simulated crisis conditions. It's part of their job.*

The chances of an employer going bankrupt in 2012 were 0.007%**, 70 times higher than a bird strike. How many executives rehearse responses to such a high-impact crisis? OK, maybe that's stretching the point. After all, company bankruptcies don't risk catastrophic loss of life.

But what if the odds of business failure were greater than one in two? Writes Harvard Marketing Professor John Gourville, "most studies estimate new product failure rates at 50% or more," ranging "from 40% to 90% across product categories."***

Alternatively, consider the difficulty of sustaining profitable growth. Columbia Business School professor Rita Gunther McGrath writes that only 8% of the 5,000 companies with over $1 billion in revenues grew sales by 5% annually over a 5 year period, and only 4% grew net income by at least 5% annually - that's less than one in 20.****

Why not increase the odds of success by taking a page from pilot training and have teams "rehearse" in launch or growth simulations?

Master motivator Lou Gerstner, who took over an IBM in its death throes in 1993, determined that the organization had the capability to perform incredible feats, if only he could refocus its efforts. Early on, he challenged his senior executives to attack their businesses as if they were their primary competitors, in effect "rehearsing" competitive responses.

Later, in the early 2000s, IBM embedded "crisis" simulation into the strategy process. Executive business unit teams went offsite to confront their biggest challenges, such as reversing a loss or identifying how to grow revenues by an order of magnitude, in response to likely market, competition and technology evolution. To make the "rehearsal" as consequential as possible, the teams had to present their solutions to the senior-most executives in the organization - the stakes were high. As English writer Samuel Johnson said, “nothing so focuses the mind as the possibility of being hanged in a fortnight.” At IBM, the teams had three days.

Organizations can similarly improve results by running simulations focusing on assessing and responding to growth opportunities, marketplace risks, untapped sources of customer value, the next generation of customers or emerging competitive threats.

While each simulation requires a different approach, the key to success is creating a realistic environment - a "crisis" - that challenges existing mental models and addresses the organization changes required to deliver a new initiative (structure, systems, people and culture).

It's hard work, but the results can be significant: IBM's EPS increased eight-fold over the decade following the launch of the strategy simulations, tripling the share price.

As Louis Pasteur said in a lecture at Lille University in 1854, "...chance favors only prepared minds."

*Newman, Rick, "How Sullenberger Really Saved US Airways Flight 1549," USNews & World Report, February 23, 2009
**42,008 bankruptcies in the US in 2012: "Bankruptcy Filings Down in Fiscal Year 2012," US Courts; 6,049,655 employers: "Statistics about Business Size," US Census Bureau
***Gourville, John, "The Curse of Innovation: Why Innovative New Products Fail," MSI Reports, Issue Four, 2005.
****McGrath, Rita Gunther, “How the Growth Outliers Did It,” Harvard Business Review, January – February 2012

You Can't Find What You're Not Looking For

Ask the right questions

Smoke detectors are programmed for early warning. But they don't detect CO2, equally as dangerous.

With a specific threat - or opportunity - identified, designing a system or capability to capture and process the relevant signals and issue an alert is pretty straightforward.

The challenge for companies is to articulate the potential business threat or opportunity. But in a dynamic marketplace, these are everywhere. Organizations simply can’t monitor every Bill and Dave or Steve and Steve in their garages or Jeff in his warehouse.

It is exacerbated when organizations obsess on collecting reams of customer data or developing in-depth competitor profiles, especially when these focus is on what the customers wanted or what the competitor did. The often-unstated assumption – the mindset – is that the future will be largely like the past and, circuitously, the historical facts support the prevailing view.

But there are no “facts” about the future.

Creating the necessary insight requires asking the right questions:

• How will new technologies and business value propositions impact our customers, products, services, and business growth?
• Which industries, customer segments and offerings categories offer the best likelihood of future business growth?
• Who are the most threatening traditional, emerging and potential competitors? Why?
• Where are the greatest long-term profit streams according to the capital markets?
• What is required for future competitive success?

How many organizations have good answers to these questions? How many have the leadership that asks them?

You can’t find what you’re not looking for.

Next: Creating Crises

Avoiding "Surprises"

Early Warning

Early Warning

Had these experienced commanders and executives (see the prior post, "Surprise") known what was coming, they could have redeployed assets and avoided catastrophic “surprises.” Today, of course, we can see that the available information provided sufficient early warning of clear threats - hindsight is 20/20.

But why is it these leaders couldn't see the signs at the time?

In retailing, it is not as if amazon.com and its offshoots were unknowns by the late 1990s. However, the prevailing view of traditional retailers was that marketplace success required opening as many stores as possible to both gain share and blunt competition. These built vast organization structures around site location, logistics, inventory, HR and downstream (promotional) marketing. And the most successful developed sophisticated information systems that reported operational performance variation in increasingly exacting detail. Have a hot selling item in one location? Easy - find excess inventory and load it on the next shipment. Poor performance in another? Schedule a performance review with store management to isolate and fix the root cause.

What they didn't have was an information system to warn of emerging strategic threats. No doubt these executives received information about the impact of Internet business models. But, unlike the internal information, it was unstructured, arriving initially in dribs and drabs. By the time clear trends emerged, the successful early Internet movers had learned from their mistakes and established defensible niches.

Caught in the daily exigencies of running an enterprise, these leaders simply weren't programmed to evaluate the nature of the available early warning intelligence within the context of their brick-and-mortar operational mindset and information expectations. And, eventually, when they did assess the threat, they were constrained by the amount of investments required to overcome the first-mover advantage, which would have required diverting significant resources from successful operations.

Waiting until information is absolutely certain (right hand side of the chart) results in a crisis, forcing leaders to rapidly rethink critical assumptions: maintaining outdated mindsets when bombs are falling or bankruptcy looms is suicidal. But it may be too late: they have very little flexibility in how to respond – you can’t re-position a fleet immediately or turn a brick and mortar operation into an e-commerce one overnight.

On the other hand, way back in relative time (the left hand side), leadership has more leeway in deciding where to deploy assets. However, the uncertain and often conflicting information makes it difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the existing organization mindset.

Avoiding “surprise” requires speeding up the processing of relevant information, moving the information certainty line upward and the intersection of the two lines to the left, when there is more decision-making flexibility.

Creating the intelligence necessary to challenge assumptions earlier requires choice and focus – every startup or new technology is a potential threat. And, perhaps perversely to some, the solution is not simply amassing and sorting through vast amounts of data. 

It requires asking the right questions.

Next: You Can't Find What You're Not Looking For

First Things First

Congrats! You're a Marketing Exec - Now What??? listed the five things SpencerStuart* identified that CMOs must do well:

• Get the marketing mandate right
• Build meaningful relationships with functional and business leaders
• Agree on how to measure success
• Collaborate with external partners
• Cultivate the best talent 

Let's take these one at a time.

Congrats! You're a Marketing Exec - Now What???

Throughout your career, you've focused on becoming better and better at your job. You've deepened your technical skills, you've learned how to keep your boss happy and you've learned how to manage. But the game has now changed completely.

First, you’re going to get LOTS of advice and counsel about what marketing is and needs to do. You’ll get it from the CFO who fancies him- or herself a creative copywriter, the top sales person who is convinced that one more event will generate enough leads to meet his or her quota, the head of product development who just knows that if you can write that brochure describing every single one of the features of the new product customers will be beating down the door. And, of course, from the CEO and board.

Some of this will be well meaning, some will be self-serving, and some of it will be uninformed bordering on ignorant.

Unfortunately, you can't ignore it. You've got to listen and find ways to incorporate these suggestions into your programs, or risk alienating your constituents.

You've also got to establish your independence.

How do you walk this fine line?

Let’s look at some research. SpencerStuart, the executive search firm,

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™.

Forget Everything that Got You Here

You've just landed that CMO or executive marketing job you've wanted for years.

Congratulations! Bask in the glory.

For about a minute.

Now focus on this: 45 months* - or if you're in healthcare, automotive, restaurant or communications / media, 28 to 32 months.

That’s the average life of a CMO (and if you're not the CMO, you need to start thinking about his or her replacement...)

And that’s the good news – the lifespan is up from 23 months in 2006! But less than four years is hardly a career, and what you do during three critical time periods will determine your success, and your tenure:

Generating meaningful insights

with Liam Fahey

Intelligence that makes a difference – that creates insights – is almost always the result of collaboration between intelligence professionals and decision executives. Neither one alone can create and leverage intelligence. 

Executives influence the direction of intelligence work. They shape the context for the work: they identify the current and emerging issues and decisions, questions they want addressed, areas and topics they would like explored, and, the nature of the dialogue they desire with the intelligence professionals. 

Intelligence professionals create understanding and meaning out of disparate and always incomplete data, disconnected viewpoints and perspectives, and an ever-changing competitive environment. 

When they work in tandem, they co-create an understanding of change and its business implications. This understanding influences what the organization thinks about (e.g. which emerging opportunities or risks need attention), how it thinks (e.g. identifying, challenging and refining core assumptions), the decisions it makes (e.g. what strategic moves to make, what business unites to support) and the actions it takes (e.g. where to allocate resources).

The critical role of the executive in intelligence

with Liam Fahey

Insight is where the game is won and lost notes that "Intelligence as an influence on decision making has not yet fully bloomed in many companies," listing a number of reasons why.

What an intelligence organization looks like notes that "...today’s most successful intelligence teams have adopted a post-industrial, networked model, co-creating insights with decision makers..."

These lead to a series of observations gained over several decades working with some of the world's leading organizations:

What an intelligence-driven organization looks like

with Liam Fahey

What an Intelligence-Driven Solution Looks Like

Insight is where the game is won and lost notes that "Intelligence as an influence on decision making has not yet fully bloomed in many companies," listing a number of reasons why.

To address these challenges, today’s most successful intelligence teams have adopted a post-industrial, networked model, co-creating insights with decision makers, not just producing documents, powerpoints and spreadsheets. They build and sustain an intelligence capability that delivers real business results by:

Insight is where the game is won and lost

with Liam Fahey

Intelligence enables superior decision making when it generates insight

Every organization faces a critical need: to understand the emerging and future world better and faster than rivals.

All rivals are looking at the same world, so the real battle is to determine who “sees” the underlying change more incisively than the competition. Capturing “change insight” before rivals creates the potential for competitive advantage: knowing where the marketplace opportunities may be, where the risks or vulnerabilities may be and, importantly, knowing what to do. In short, without superior insight, winning over time is simply not possible.

Amazon's "Surprise" Attack on the Grocery Business

The news that Amazon is readying a major roll out of its online grocery business will catch many grocers unprepared.

This despite the fact that Peapod has been perfecting its model since 1989, reaching sales $500 million last year, there are an estimated 1600 online competitors, and Wal Mart decided the category was large enough to enter in 2011. And Amazon's initiative has been five years in the making.

Many will justify their lack of action because, at $6 billion, the category is just over 1% of the $550 billion food market in the US. It's just not big enough, yet, they'll say.

And one morning, they'll wake up, "surprised" at how big the category has become and try to mount an effective response.

It will be too late.

What did they do wrong?

Surprise rarely occurs because of lack of signals; it's due to either misreading indicators or when an organization's view of the environment, conditioned by past perceptions, prevents it from correctly seeking or interpreting indicators or emerging trends.

Take Pearl Harbor - why did the US navy fail to detect anytime in advance the movement of the most powerful fleet in history? It was not as if Japan's blue water fleet was a surprise - in 1905 it destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet; nor were Japan's expansionist intentions a secret - it invaded Manchuria in 1931. Given this, "intelligence officers could perhaps have foreseen the attack if the US, years before, had...flown regular aerial reconnaissance of the the Japanese navy, put intercept units aboard ships sailing close to Japan...or recruited a network of marine observers to report on ship movements." [Kahn, "The Intelligence Failure of Pearl Harbor," Foreign affairs, 70, no. 5 (Winter 1991/1992)]

In other words, you can't find what you're not looking for. Said another way, we create our own surprises.

What "surprises" await your organization?