My colleague Alex Slawsby made an observation while we sat in the office of one of our clients the other day. “Look around,” he said. “The room is full of products made by the company.”
Doesn’t seem so fascinating, does it? After all, any member of a “tribe” has markers to demonstrate their allegiance to the tribe. But Alex continued. “Don’t you think instead this room should be bursting with products made by competitors? Or other solutions consumers turn to instead of the company’s products?”
A few weeks ago, an innovation team was painstakingly working through a meticulously crafted spreadsheet detailing the growth potential of their idea. Executives trying to look smart lobbed in “gotcha” questions about specific assumptions in their calculations. Much discussion ensued.
I was an observer in this meeting. I sat quietly and took some notes. After the meeting the team leader said, “That was a really good review. The executives were really involved and we have deeper buy-in to our plan.”
I picked up an iPad in late April when I was swinging through the States. The Anthony family has been experimenting with it during the last six weeks in Singapore. I have five reflections on the device:
Selling 2 million devices in such a short period of time is a testament to the goodwill Apple has built up and the fact that the iPad is a well designed, intuitive product. But I’m not ready to pronounce Apple victorious yet. It could be that the real winners in the tablet world will be application providers that find unique ways to tackle opportunities in education or healthcare or develop other higher end, special purpose applications for the iPad or televisions.
It was hard to ignore the results of the IBM CEO study that arrived last week. As one of my colleagues noted, “Wow. This looks just like something we could have written.”
Indeed, top-level headlines describing how change is accelerating, how leaders need to become better at reinventing their businesses, and the critical importance of customer focus, echo critical themes explored by me and my colleagues in recent years.
It was September, 2005. I was fresh off of a workshop with a media company where the company’s CEO noted, “Trees don’t grow to the sky forever.” The company’s core business was strong, but the CEO told the group it had to innovate to sustain success in an increasingly turbulent environment.
A couple of days later, I was talking to my colleague Matt Eyring. He said, “So Scott, you’ve been a big supporter of Apple over the past few years. What do you think about buying some stock?”
The Edison Best New Products Awards recently bestowed a Gold medal in the Consumer Packaged Goods, Consumer Drug Segment to “Align Probiotic Food Supplement” from Procter & Gamble. This gives me the opportunity repeat a story that has important lessons for innovators everywhere.
I first met the Align team in 2004. The team was developing a probiotic pill whose daily use could alleviate the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. More than 30 million people in the United States alone are reported to have this condition. The best that most can do is to modify their lives to account for the condition.
The April 15 issue of The Economist published a simple chart that gave me chills. Look at it for a minute. What looks scary to you?
The chart displayed the number of pieces of mail sent by year over the last decade. When you look at the chart, the first thing you probably noticed was the precipitous decline in mail volume over the past few years. Indeed, mail volume has sagged 17 percent since 2006. Even though the postal service has furiously cut staff over that time period, it’s still pleading with regulators to allow it to consider additional strategic responses to address the disruption clearly affecting its business.
The other day I was meeting with the leadership team of a startup company brimming with transformational potential. The team had made tremendous progress in a year, going from an idea on a piece of paper to a fully functioning business earning real revenue.
Of course, any new venture is fragile. While revenues are growing, the company hasn’t yet hit breakeven. Its current projections suggest that point is still at least six months away. The company has some cash in the bank, but recently began looking for further external investment to help ensure it remains solvent.
For what seems like forever, Twitter has been the white-hot startup staring at a critical, unanswered question: How will it translate hype, and seemingly never-ending traffic growth, into profits?
Yesterday the company announced its intentions to offer corporations the opportunity to sponsor Tweets. So-called “Promoted Tweets” will appear when people search for particular terms. Only a single sponsored Tweet will appear alongside search results. The Tweet will appear as long as it demonstrates “resonance” with the audience by being clicked or re-Tweeted. Twitter doesn’t plan to charge companies whose sponsored Tweets don’t generate high resonance. Presumably Tweets with high resonance scores will pay price premiums.
On Wednesday I launched the Major League Baseball At Bat app on my iPhone during my commute to work and started watching the Boston Red Sox battle the New York Yankees. Later that morning I watched the end of the game on Major League Baseball’s website.
My first thought was, “Wow, what a wonderful world we live in! Crystal clear video on multiple platforms anywhere in the world.” My second thought was, “I can’t remember the last time I saw the end of a weeknight Sox v. Yankees game. Twelve hour time zone differences have their advantages.” (I’m in Singapore.)
