Big data as a driver of organizational change

Analytics can “open up many doors for healthcare organizations” of all types, including life sciences companies aiming to get new medications to patients faster or to “provide regulatory bodies with evidence of drug safety.”  Or, for payers, analytics can “answer questions about future growth, profitability and sustainability,” or help them to detect and prevent fraud.”

It still amazes me that big organizations in so many industries are still talking about what analytics can do for them.  Of course, this headline is a little deceiving as there really is no "big data" to be found.  You get a lot of clicks when you have "big data" in the headline though.

Digital Trends for 2015 | Digital Marketing

Simon Morris writes:

More than 6,000 mar­ket­ing, and ecom­merce pro­fes­sion­als around the world took part in this year’s Dig­i­tal Trends sur­vey, which has been by far our largest response since we launched this annual survey in 2012. Thanks to all of the con­trib­u­tors who took the time to provide their per­spec­tive. I’m pleased to say the 2015 Dig­i­tal Trends report is avail­able now to download.

I can't wait to dig into this report and green some insight on what marketers are seeing.  I suggest downloading and perusing yourself.  

Per­son­ally, what makes this report inter­est­ing to me, is not just the trends but the insight into how a com­pany needs to adapt to cap­i­talise on these new trends. Two aspects are key here: Strat­egy & Cul­ture. As seen with the emergence of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence as an over­ar­ch­ing dri­ver, we aren’t talk­ing about small shifts in your mar­ket­ing organ­i­sa­tion, but the con­scious deci­sion to develop and align your activ­i­ties with the goal of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at the heart. How­ever, strat­egy change with­out cul­ture change is inef­fec­tive, to quote Peter Ducker ‘Cul­ture eats strat­egy for break­fast’.

These are concepts I have been writing about the last few days here and here.  Adapting to the "mobile first" shift in the consumers, organizations have to change their culture and structure.  The companies that will be successful in the next 5 years will be ones that adapt to these changes in their organizations, to put the customer first and align the organization around customer experiences instead of functional duties.

Are CMOs wasting money on faulty marketing analytics?

Manji Matharu writes:

CMOs are now at a crossroads between data quality and data results. It’s no longer enough to dabble in analytics and come out with the richness required for informed decision-making. The business needs integrated systems across IT infrastructure, and marketers — not IT pros — must champion the call for improved data controls and governance as their cause.

Data quality is the first step in all marketing processes.  Ensuring this is boring and hard, but it is a necessity.  This is the first step when I come into an organization, determine the quality of the data and work to fix that.  Once there is a trusted version of the truth, marketing analytics come to life.  

Data + Insight = Action and Back Again

Adobe Summit brought with it a great nirvana of a near-future where marketers are able to deliver relevant content to customers creating great experiences.  The words that permeated throughout the conference were those, content, experiences and data.  The big stars of the show were content and customer experiences, which I believe are extremely important as I have written before.  

However, there is no right content delivered at the perfect moment to create wonderful customer experiences without data.  Data is the key to making this all work, and not just any data.  No, I'm not talking about "big data", I'm talking about actionable data.  

Most companies are sitting on a treasure trove of data already.  Without purchasing third-party data, understanding every click, customers have data that can transform their business.  The issue is in interpreting the data, making it actionable.  Actionable data isn't a product, it's a culture.  

Actionable data is the combination of art and science.  The path to actionable data isn't necessarily going out and hiring a bunch of talented data scientists, though it doesn't hurt to have these people on your team.  The path to actionable data is marrying the data with the business acumen.  It's not enough to have data telling you something happened, there has to be an understanding of the business as to why it happened.

Once there is an understanding of what happened (science) and why it happened (art), you have actionable data.  Now you can create optimal tactics to deliver relevant content to create targeted experiences in the digital age.  The great thing about this process is it's circular.  Once a company creates great targeted experiences for their customers, customer behaviors will change and the entire process starts all over again.  There are always puzzles to solve and amazing content and experiences to create.  

Marketing Beyond Marketing

Adobe Summit has come and gone and if there was one big messaging push it was "marketing beyond marketing".  How can marketing be beyond itself you say?  Well that's a good question.  What Adobe had to say was marketing is your product.  So if marketing is your product, then as marketers we have to think beyond what we have traditionally thought of as marketing.  

I love going to conferences with great speakers and company examples of excellence because it really gets your mind flowing.  Of course Adobe is a company that wants to sell you their products in the end, but I truly believe they want marketing to advance regardless if they are your solution choice.  They want to be thought leaders in the space, which in turns sells you more products.  Which oh by the way, is an example of Adobe marketing beyond marketing.

Now as hokey as these tailgates can be, I believe Adobe is out in front of what lies ahead for digital marketing tools.  They want to enable that lifecycle approach to marketing that has only been a tagline.  To manage the customer experience from beginning to end and change the behavior of your customer by being relevant in the content that is provided takes marketing to a whole new level.  

But marketing has to go beyond marketing in organizations.  Up until now the brand marketer has been able to infiltrate the C-suite, but it is the age of the digital marketer and Brand is just one piece of the marketing puzzle.  Brand focused CMO's tend to be advertising first and lack execution around them.  They also tend to defend the brand in strategic meetings instead of evolving the brand around the latest trends, whether they be digital trends or customer related trends.  

Digital marketers have found the C-suite title, with the Chief Customer Officer, but I believe this is just a knee-jerk reaction to an identified problem.  The C-suite doesn't necessarily need to get larger, the role of the CMO must transform.  The CMO must be more of a generalist, someone that understands brand value and developing brands, but they must also be tech savvy and have an extreme customer focus.  CMO's can no longer be the spend first and advertising will fix everything type of leaders from the past, CMO's need to be savvy marketers with an eye on tailoring their marketing spend to better reach the customers when they want to be reached with an experience that matters.  An ad being fed that promotes awareness does not cut it anymore.

When your message is omnipresent in multiple channels when your customer wants it to be there, marketing has truly gone beyond marketing.  We are a long way from that reality, but the framework is being laid which will allow marketers to deliver meaningful content when it matters most.  It's cheesy, yet high concept at the same time, which is why I don't think many people in the audience understood what Adobe was trying to say.  I had a leader who taught me you have to say something seven times in seven different ways for people to understand what you were really saying, well this is one time in one way, so I can't wait to hear or see the next articulation of this concept. 

Adobe Marketing Cloud Summit 2015

Upon returning from Adobe Marketing Cloud Summit 2015 I've had some time to digest the experience fully.  The Summit is a great weak of digital marketing discussions.  Of course since this is an Adobe event, the discussions are around the products Adobe is selling with the marketing cloud.  Fortunately for me, and Adobe, the overarching strategy Adobe is putting together with their products is extremely compelling.  

Just five short years ago Adobe had $0 of revenue from digital marketing products.  I believe in 2014 the amount of revenue was over $1.2 billion, but I didn't write the number down, it's not important.  What is important is Adobe, through mostly acquisitions, has created the most compelling digital marketing hub/cloud in the industry.  Adobe rates highest on the Gartner Magic Quadrant and it is in its infancy.

Having come from a software product background also, it is impressive they have been able to start to integrate most of these products together.  What Adobe is setting out to accomplish is no small feat.  Creating a singular platform from many disparate products is what marketers have to do on a daily basis with their own systems, but Adobe is attempting to make that life a whole lot easier.

Last year we were introduced to the marketing cloud strategy, a set of 6 products with 6 core services that support all the products.  I was very bullish on what was being layed out by Adobe.  The idea of taking a customer through their lifecycle with the company from anonymous to known, from new to dormant, all in one platform is very appealing to me as a marketer.  Adobe is trying in essence, to let marketers control their own destiny.

Today marketers have to fight to get things done.  Marketers destiny is in the hands of many other groups, from website developers, IT, database engineers and creative agencies.  Sometimes it amazes me that we as marketers are able to get an email out the door, or target an individual on a website.  The amount of effort sometimes makes a campaign not worth doing at all.  

There are three main thoughts I came away from the Summit with this year.

1. Audiences are the key to digital marketing
2. Adobe has a messaging issue
3. AEM should be the center of the marketing cloud universe

Audiences

I have always firmly believed the customer is the center of all businesses, yet I never believed they were the center of the marketing universe.  My belief is that everything starts with the customer and they are all different in their various ways.  Advertising tended to lump all the customers into one bucket and make the product the center of the universe.  Digital has come along and helped marketing become more targeted, but the hardest part of targeting is creating the single customer database.

Marketers have had to deal with a plethora of disparate databases of customers, which has made targeting especially difficult.  The need for database engineers to create a data warehouse bringing all the different customer databases together with each individuals spend slows the process of driving behavior through targeted experiences down to a crawl.  

Adobe audiences are referred to as a Core Service.  What that basically means is that all of the applications of the marketing cloud can use this customer database.  This makes audiences the key to allowing the marketing cloud to be the most targeted customer solution I have seen to date.  

Adobe tracks a customer from their first anonymous visit, to authentication, through the entire customer lifecycle.  The applications then allow marketers to target those customers in so many different ways.  From purchasing of ads, to email marketing, to push notifications for mobile apps, through retargeting campaigns, audiences can be used in all of these ways.  Same database.  No need for database engineers.  Hallelujah.

For example, a customer may come into the website, authenticate and reach a certain part of the purchasing funnel.  Through Analytics, this group of customers can be identified and a custom audience can be created.  Through AEM, email creative and a landing page can be created, by marketers, with approved assets from the brand team, to be used to create an email campaign for these guests.  With Target, different messages can be tested to determine what is the most effective message and offer for a customer to create the conversion.  Through Campaign, this audience can be used to send an email, measure the results, and a new audience can be created with all of the customers that didn't convert to create retargeting campaigns.  That's pretty powerful stuff right there.

Adobe Messaging

One of the concerning parts of the conference was the introduction of 2 new products for the marketing cloud.  The idea of having 6 products is already a little overwhelming.  The constant comments I was hearing from other attendees was confusion on what products they need and why.  This is a problem for Adobe.  I believe they have 1 product, the Marketing Cloud, with many features inside the product.  By keeping the multiple product structures, it is showing some infighting within Adobe.  As I said earlier, these products were purchased by Adobe to then be integrated into the cloud.  It seems those product owners are fighting for their power, which is making it confusing to develop the strategy with Adobe as a partner.

I also believe this product strategy makes the cloud more cost prohibitive.  Because so many products have to be purchased, it becomes more expensive than turning on features.  There also tends to be salespeople dedicated to the certain products, so there is a loss of 1 dedicated resource.  

I'd like to see Adobe move away from products an into features.  This will simplify the messaging and allow customers to purchase based on what they need, instead of what Adobe is trying to package.  It will allow more customers to be locked into the ecosystem of Adobe, instead of keeping their current products that aren't as integrated.  They should take some lessons from Apple.  The ecosystem is the most important play for Adobe right now and they should have a longterm vision for this strategy.  Once customers start crossing over into different products within the marketing could it will make it impossible to leave, because the customer database and all the processes are driven by Adobe.  

AEM is the Center of the Cloud

The digital marketing platform all started with the purchase of Omniture which turned into Adobe Analytics.  Analytics is the heart and soul of the Marketing Cloud and I believe has the largest  user base by far.  Analytics may be the soul, but I don't believe it should be the heart of the solution.  

Adobe Experience Manager is the heart of this solution.  It is the product that puts the marketers destiny into their own hands.  The ability to manage assets, create approved templates, change website messaging, create emails and create landing pages with variable content is so powerful.  It even can build mobile applications across platforms and manage all those apps in realtime.  

This is the heart.  Analytics allows the identification of opportunities to enhance conversion and make more money, but without AEM a marketer is stuck waiting for many other departments to help them take advantage of the opportunity.  Campaign allows for great multi-channel marketing, but without email creative and dedicated landing pages, the marketer is in a waiting game.  Target allows offers to be measured in real-time and a winner is chosen, but to get to that point, AEM has to manage all of the content and messaging.

Content is the key to delivering targeted experiences to customers in the digital age.  Let me say that again, content is the key to delivering targeted experiences to customers in the digital age.  The faster a marketer can deliver that content, through whichever channel, be it mobile app, website, email, social or ad, the bigger a competitive advantage that company will have over its competition.  This is why AEM is the heart of the marketing cloud/hub.  AEM will ultimately create the competitive advantage, because without it, the content will not be delivered at the speed in which customers will not only demand, but will also change their behavior.  

Bravo to another great Summit from Adobe.  Adobe is truly the leader in this nascent category and they are continuing to push the envelope with their vision.  I am super bullish on Adobe and what the future holds for the Marketing Cloud  Plus, having Imagine Dragons play at the bash was super awesome!!!

Microsoft Is The New Google, Google Is The Old Microsoft

Very interesting article which has great points.  History has a funny way of repeating itself, even though companies made it to the top by being different from the competitors they dethroned.  How do companies become the very thing they more than likely mocked years before?  I think the pressures of Wall Street and investors drive conservatism.  Companies have to be true to themselves and keep that spunk as they become market leaders.  Apple seems to be one of the only companies that do this, however that was Steve Jobs, will Tim Cook be able to kill the iPhone when the time comes?   

For Google the good news is it still has plenty of time to wise up. Microsoft is fighting from a long way back and Search, Adsense, Android, Google Maps and Gmail market positions aren’t going to be troubled any time soon. But it does beg the bigger question: does Google in its arrogance even realise it has a problem? After all it took Microsoft a decade…

Twitter’s Dilemma

Good article to follow up on my post about Twitter.  Seems they have a product team that is talking about the right things, focusing on the product experience.  My fear is the "slave to two masters" part.  Should be interesting to see where the product goes in the next two years.

Twitter has a Growth Problem, or Not

Recently Twitter had their earnings call and the big story coming from the numbers was a slowing in the growth of Twitter's monthly active users (MAU).  There was plenty of commentary on the doom approaching for Twitter, as the MAU slow, so does the opportunities for Twitter.  

So I was looking at the number of MAU for Twitter.  That number has slowed to 288 million users. Let me say that again out loud, 288 million users.  These are mind boggling numbers.  Twitter made $479 million in revenue, which comes to a paltry $1.66 per MAU.  Now this number has doubled revenue, so that number seem to be growing.  

MAU is not the problem for Twitter.  If Twitter doubles the MAU, which is not going to happen, then revenue is still under $1 billion per quarter. The problem is the $1.66 per MAU.  This can also be attributed to Facebook having 7X the engagement over Twitter.  Twitters problem is their 288 million users do not spend enough time on the service.

Average time per MAU and revenue per MAU should be the main metrics for Twitter.  Twitter makes money on advertising.  Many say this is why MAU is the most important metric, I mean look at Facebook, they have 1.39 billion MAU and look at the money they make.  Twitter will never have the MAU of Facebook and it shouldn't worry about that number.  Twitter needs to have laser focus on making the Twitter experience the most engaging as possible.  288 million users is more than enough to have an amazing business.  I think 99.9% of the worlds businesses would kill for 288 million users.  

Recently Apple CEO Tim Cook made a comment that really resonated with me and I don't know if Twitter, or most companies for that matter, looks at their business in this way.  Tim Cook said "We're not focused on the numbers, we're focused on the things that produce the numbers."  Twitter needs to focus on what produces the numbers.  The product of Twitter.  The more their extremely large base of users engage with the platform, the more money Twitter makes.  It sounds so simple, but it isn't.  I feel Twitter doesn't spend enough time on making the platform the most engaging it can be.  

I don't have the answers on what will make Twitter more engaging.  I do believe that all of their focus should be on increasing the time each user spends on Twitter.  Make the platform more sticky.  If the focus is on the platform, then profits will follow.  Change the conversation to investors and make sure the organization is focused on the singular goal.  

I love Twitter.  I spend most of the time on my phone using Twitter, however I still find it hard to find new things to see.  I love using an app called Zite, that learns what I like by simple thumbs up and thumbs down and then shows me articles that I would like to read based on the input.  If Twitter could incorporate ease of use like Zite, I believe the platform would be so sticky.  Good luck Twitter and stay focused!   

Analytics Capability Landscape: The importance of decisions

It amazes me that in the year 2015 100% of the straw poll wouldn't be for decision making.  In my humble opinion that is what analytics is all about.

It’s clear when you analyze analytic capabilities that there are three main reasons people use analytics:

• A need to report on some aspect of the organization

• A need to monitor the organization’s behavior or performance

• A need for the organization to make data-driven decisions

As part of my recently completed research on the analytic capability landscape, we did an interesting straw poll.  We asked those attending a webinar on the topic which of these was the business goal for their analytic efforts today and how did they see that changing in the next 12-24 months. The split is shown in an excerpt from the infographic at right. Today the split is pretty even with reporting and monitoring coming in at 37% each with deciding – making decisions – slightly under at 27%. This matches my experience – lots of companies are still focused on reporting, many have moved on to dashboards and performance monitoring as their focus while a growing number are explicitly focused on decision-making.

What Great Data Visualization Looks Like: 12 Complex Concepts Made Easy

Very cool visualizations.  My favorite one is the unemployment rate by county that iterates through time to show the growth.  Very powerful.

In Geography of a Recession, Latoya Egwuekwe uses a short animated visualization to show the spread of the 2008 recession across the United States. By overlaying time, data, and geography, she is able to display both the rapid progression of unemployment and the regions hit hardest. Symbolically, the country visually turns darker as unemployment spreads. This effect of time-lapse on visualization is key to provoking insight from the viewers.

'70 Percent of CRM Installs Fail' and Other Crappy Stats You Should Ignore

The big stat that I think is very interesting is the total amount of organizations that have marketing technology installed.  Such a low number.

by looking at data from 3 million businesses in our Fall 2014 report, that the truth — a statistically significant number across all sizes of business, and 151 industries — is much harsher. Marketing technology (as a whole) only has 4.1% penetration, let alone marketing automation.

Your Digital Strategy Shouldn’t Be About Attention

I really like this article.  Digital has the potential to be one-to-one in real-time, but so many marketers use it as a commercial.  I have been working with Adobe and their marketing cloud for a couple of years now and their vision is very compelling.  Right now it is just that, a vision, but it is getting closer to reality.  

To make such a vision a reality, marketers have to push companies with great visions.  The tools can't push the vision, they have to enable the vision.  If marketers continue to use these tools to push brands and not relationships, the vision will be wasted.  

It’s easy to win “clicks” by titillating people with Kim Kardashian’s naked behind or a list of the world’s cutest human-cat baby unicorn fairies. And it might lend a dreary day a moment of relieved escapism. But it won’t help anyone. To do that, you must educate. Not in the awful, misused corporate sense of the term: dully lecturing them about “product benefits.” But helping them develop the capabilities and skills they’re going to need to live better lives. What will your “digital strategy” help them become better at? Does it have a point? Skiing, dating, cooking, coding, creating, building? If the answer is no, you don’t have a strategy. You have a vaudeville show.

Sometimes There Really is an Easy Button

The road to Tableau was an eye opening experience for me.  Noah really nailed it, there is nothing I couldn't really do before Tableau, but it just is so fast to do an amazing visual analysis that allows me to see opportunities, that I am so much more effective.

There’s absolutely nothing that Tableau can do that I couldn’t do before, but that’s exactly the point: it lets me do the exact same stuff much faster, cutting down on the parts of my job that aren’t the most exciting and leaving more time for more valuable work. So far, the things I use Tableau for take less than half as long as doing them with my more familiar toolset, and I end up with the same results.

3 Ages of Data Viz?

A very interesting post about data visualization.  I believe the correct answer is somewhere between 2 and 3.  Excel days were just awful!  

The Real Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs part 2

I decided to break up this post into 2 parts because there were so many lessons and I liked most of them.  So here are the remainder of the lessons from the Walter Isaacson HBR article.

Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups

When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his version of empathy—an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers. He developed his appreciation for intuition—feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom—while he was studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”

When I was a product manager for a software company that catered to database marketers and analysts, customers would always speak in terms of features.  "I want the product to do this" was a common request.  I quickly learned that putting features into the product just made the product more complex.  The true genius is in solving the problem the customer is having in the most elegant and simple way possible.  Customers mostly focus on what they can see and what they already know.  To be great you have to translate what your customer is asking for and then really solve their problem, because adding features can spaghetti your product before you know it.

Bend Reality

Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force. An early example was when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wozniak to create a game called Breakout. Woz said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Woz knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it.

I believe that people want to be great at what they do, but when left to their own devices will let the fear of failure get in their way.  Failure is a much bigger enemy of greatness than the lack of talent for the individual.  The fear of failure gets in the way of taking risks and leapfrogging yourself.  If you can put your team in an environment where failure is viewed as a success or a learning opportunity on the way to greatness, your team will succeed in greatness.

Impute

Jobs’s early mentor Mike Markkula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three principles. The first two were “empathy” and “focus.” The third was an awkward word, “impute,” but it became one of Jobs’s key doctrines. He knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. “Mike taught me that people dojudge a book by its cover,” he told me.

First impressions make all the difference.  The product, experience or the deliverable have to focus on delivering an experience worth returning to in order to succeed.

Push for Perfection

During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt it wasn’t perfect. That happened even with the movie Toy Story. After Jeff Katzenberg and the team at Disney, which had bought the rights to the movie, pushed the Pixar team to make it edgier and darker, Jobs and the director, John Lasseter, finally stopped production and rewrote the story to make it friendlier. When he was about to launch Apple Stores, he and his store guru, Ron Johnson, suddenly decided to delay everything a few months so that the stores’ layouts could be reorganized around activities and not just product categories.

In the world of database marketing there is always a push for perfection.  The mantra I use is "The campaigns are a living, breathing entity".  A good database marketer is always looking for ways to improve the performance of a campaign.  It is never complete, it will never be perfect, but one should always strive for perfection. 

Tolerate Only “A” Players

Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of preventing what he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around. “I don’t think I run roughshod over people,” he said, “but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest.” When I pressed him on whether he could have gotten the same results while being nicer, he said perhaps so. “But it’s not who I am,” he said. “Maybe there’s a better way—a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code words—but I don’t know that way, because I am middle-class from California.”

It’s important to appreciate that Jobs’s rudeness and roughness were accompanied by an ability to be inspirational. He infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. And we have to judge him by the outcome. Jobs had a close-knit family, and so it was at Apple: His top players tended to stick around longer and be more loyal than those at other companies, including ones led by bosses who were kinder and gentler. CEOs who study Jobs and decide to emulate his roughness without understanding his ability to generate loyalty make a dangerous mistake.

Find great people and then get our of their way.  Great "A" players will be great without you telling them what to do.  Set the expectations, guide them when needed and then be hard on their results.  If their results are subpar, let them know.  You don't have to go Steve Jobs on them, but an "A" player will be harder on themselves then you could ever be.

Engage Face-to-Face

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

Jobs hated formal presentations, but he loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings. He gathered his executive team every week to kick around ideas without a formal agenda, and he spent every Wednesday afternoon doing the same with his marketing and advertising team. Slide shows were banned. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Greatness happens with spontaneous collaboration between individuals who trust each other.  Meetings with different groups who are not accustomed to working together and are forced to collaborate never work.  Grabbing a few individuals from their work space, bringing them into a meeting room, getting into the issues at hand can encourage an atmosphere where greatness can evolve.  Great ideas do not happen on a timetable.  They happen spur of the moment and they can be lost if left to fester.

Know Both the Big Picture and the Details

Jobs’s passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule. Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design.

Probably the biggest issue with leaders is they are one dimensional.  It's great to have a vision and be able to articulate that vision, but if the leader is so detached from the execution of the vision, they lose respect from the team.  Beyond just losing the respect, the team may build or execute on something that is in an entirely different direction once complete.  The leader needs to be involved with the team on the details to ensure the vision is executed to perfection.  Being both visionary and implementer is key.

Combine the Humanities with the Sciences 

He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation. And he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.

Combining two disparate disciplines into one creates bridges for teams to collaborate in one distinct language.  This ability os very rare in individuals.  The passion that an individual has usually overtakes one discipline for another.  When doing analytics, I often articulate to the team it is a combination of art and science.  The science part can give you an answer, but without the art side, the articulation and strategy coming from the data will get lost in interpretation.  The nuggets of information cannot be articulated in pure scientific form for a strategy to unveil itself to the business side.  

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.

An admixture of these cultures was found in publications such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space, and its subtitle was “access to tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Jobs—who became a hippie, a rebel, a spiritual seeker, a phone phreaker, and an electronic hobbyist all wrapped into one—was a fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school. He took it with him to college and then to the apple farm commune where he lived after dropping out. He later recalled: “On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’” Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life—the women he dated, the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis, the way he ran his business—his behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence, and eventual synthesis of all these varying strands.

Even as Apple became corporate, Jobs asserted his rebel and counterculture streak in its ads, as if to proclaim that he was still a hacker and a hippie at heart. The famous “1984” ad showed a renegade woman outrunning the thought police to sling a sledgehammer at the screen of an Orwellian Big Brother. And when he returned to Apple, Jobs helped write the text for the “Think Different” ads: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes…” If there was any doubt that, consciously or not, he was describing himself, he dispelled it with the last lines: “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

The world will miss out on all the great things Steve Jobs would have done over the years he lost.  

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

In the latest HBR article by Walter Isaacson, the author of the Steve Jobs biography, had more interesting things to say about the man who cofounded Apple and made it into the most valuable company in the world.  This article goes into the management style of Steve Jobs.  This article comes at a perfect time because I have been talking to my team and others about this very topic and how Jobs was portrayed outside of the company is probably too harsh compared to the reality of the day-to-day life at Apple.  My take on Steve Jobs is he demanded excellence, however if he was such a tyrant and maniac, he would never be able to keep "A" players.  

In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.

Isaacson goes on to list many reasons why Steve Jobs was a great leader that are getting missed by most pundits and scholars.  These are the attributes that made Jobs a great leader.

Focus

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

Focus is so important in an organization.  Without focus, organizations have individuals who determine what is important for themselves or their departments, even if it is not in the strategic direction of the company.  Many of these decisions might make a profit, but what all of these decisions will take is time.  Time is the most important asset of a company and if individuals are using their time to pursue endeavors that will not move the company forward in a focused direction, it is a massive opportunity wasted.  Focus comes from the top and Steve Jobs was more focused than any other CEO of such a large company.

Simplify

Jobs’s Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing brochure. To see what that means, compare any Apple software with, say, Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered with nonintuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features. It is a reminder of the glory of Apple’s quest for simplicity.

Simplification takes extreme time and effort.  Most organizations don't obsess over the details, they want to get the product to market, to be first.  Simplicity is what makes Apple successful.  I love reading tech pundits talk about Apple and they don't appreciate some of the simplicity that Apple sweats and what that means to a normal person using the product.  It's so easy to build products for yourself, it's very tough to build products for others.  Jobs had a knack at designing for others.

Take Responsibility End to End

Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated.

Own the entire experience.  An organization cannot create the ultimate experience without ownership of all aspects from beginning to end.  This is what Tim Cook is talking about at the end of keynotes when he says only Apple can do this.  Others are trying to copy the model, but it's very hard.

When Behind, Leapfrog

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

The obsession for great products or experiences allow for leapfrogging the competition.  So many times companies are content with catching up to the competition.  Always understand what the competition is doing, but focus on making the best product or experience. 

Put Products Before Profits

John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales executive from Pepsi. He focused more on profit maximization than on product design after Jobs left, and Apple gradually declined. “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”

I worked for a company where the owner had the philosophy of "Get famous first, then the money will come".  That has stuck with me through my career.  Focus on making great products and experiences because that is what will make you famous.

Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works)

What amazes me about Amazon is how Wall Street treats them.  I love companies that put their profits back into the company to make the future better.  Some companies, like Apple, cannot necessarily put all of the profits back into the company, it goes against their strategy of extreme focus.  

However, the secrecy of all the spend is what baffles me.  Not that Amazon has to tell anyone where it spends its money, but that Wall Street gives them a break on it.  Apple doesn't say what their future products will be and Wall Street gets very upset, yet Amazon spends billions of its profits on reinvesting in Capex and then tells Wall Street its none of your business what we are spending it on and Wall Street says, "ok".  

The thing that would worry me about Amazon is lack of focus.  The varying array of different businesses Amazon has gotten itself into continues to grow.  From the article:

Amazon is in fact organized not just in these segments, but in dozens and dozens of separate teams, each with their own internal P&L and a high degree of autonomy. So, say, shoes in Germany, electronics in France or makeup in the USA are all different teams. Each of these businesses, incidentally, sets its own prices.

The bigger Amazon becomes, the harder it is to manage.  Amazon then becomes a conglomerate and eventually starts doing nothing well, just runs a bunch of revenue through its coffers.  This leaves the valuable revenue and cash flow at risk, giving an upstart the opportunity to out perform Amazon by focusing on one part of their business.  If that happens to be the profitable retail business, Amazon could find itself vulnerable as it may be focusing on other business lines and be too late to react.  

Graphic: Android's split personality, 2014 edition

Interesting and true take.  Without that fragmentation, Android would never have the market share it currently has, however that fragmentation makes it very difficult for developers and smartphone manufacturers to thrive in the ecosystem.  

This is exactly what happened in the Windows vs MacOS past.  At the beginning of the "war" the Windows environment had a plethora of people making money.  Developers were making a fortune in software and manufacturers were making very good money in making computers.  Of course Microsoft was making the most money out of all of them.  

However, over time there becomes a race to the bottom.  In the Windows example the developers never felt the hurt as much as the manufacturers because Windows owned the enterprise.  The manufacturers however hardly make any profit.  

The interesting thing to watch in the Android vs iOS "war" will be the long term game.  The smartphone wars are very young and already all the manufacturers have gone straight to the bottom.  Since this "war" doesn't have high-end enterprise dominance, developers are not making more money on the marketshare winner, they are making more money on the profitshare winner.  

So even though the marketshare won the day in the previous "war", we are not seeing the same behavior in this war, so over time I believe the fragmentation will hurt Android.  That's why Google is going with the Android L philosophy moving forward, which I think is a necessity for long-term survival.  

The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers

Today, he runs the marketing team like an independent agency within the organization complete with its own engineers — a strategy he highly recommends for small teams that need to get a lot done fast.

An interesting article to set up an in-house agency to support all of marketing.  As a database marketer, I truly believe the team needs its own database and its own engineers to maintain this database.  It has to be separate from the IT processes that slow down progress.

Why?

Why shouldn't marketing data be included in the rest of the organizations data?

The simple answer is time.  Most data put into data warehouses are used for analytics.  Sounds just as important right?  Analytics is the driver of making money in the organization correct? 

Sort of.  This data can also include financial data that has different processes based on financial rules, especially for public companies.  Some data might include credit card information, which need to be PII compliant.  This data needs strict data governance and encryption of sensitive data.  All of this takes time.

Time is the enemy of marketing.  The amount of time it takes to get data into a marketing database relates to an amount of revenue that is being lost.  Most data requested into a marketing database is used right away in segmentation for campaigns.  These campaign changes either drive revenue or save on expense.  Having engineers able to get data into the marketing database in an expedited process gives an organization a competitive advantage. The quicker new data equals the more efficient database marketers.  All this leads to more money to the bottomline.