Yep.
Why Your Employees Need to Make More Mistakes
...for a new company, a willingness to make mistakes is a strength that management should seek to leverage.Why? Because mistakes are what happen when you're moving fast. Or, to put it another way, if you want to minimize mistakes, you will also have to slow down. If you're too consumed with preventing mistakes, you'll sacrifice speed. In today's competitive landscape, this is not an acceptable tradeoff for a young company, for which speed is one of the few natural advantages over larger, more powerful incumbents.
Couldn't agree more. In my line of work, CRM/Database Marketing, innovating and acting quickly is much more important than worrying about mistakes. I always tell my team if we aren't making mistakes, we are moving too slow. This is why we were able to integrate a Marketing Automation system, new data warehouse design and a new BI platform within 4 months and with a team that is only 5 deep.
Platform updates and the rate of innovation
the really interesting thing is that there are now 200m people using iOS7, where last year 'only' 100m people upgraded to iOS6 in the opening weekend.
Apple is truly playing a different game then anyone in the mobile space. Google has done a herculean effort to own the platform race from a market share perspective, but Apple just keeps moving everyone forward with new technology. Looking around at all the people around me, most not technical, upgrading their OS's to the latest version. That is amazing. You never saw this in the past and Apple is moving hundreds of millions onto new platforms in a week. Tough to keep up.
What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong in his Theory of Low-End Disruption
Cool article about Clayton Christensen and his Theory of Low-End Disruption. I think there are some great points in this article that highlight Apple as the use case.
I don't subscribe to the theory of low-end disruption in the consumer space. I think Ben Thompson is right on. There are so many cases of companies that thrive without having to serve the low-end, even when the competition puts out a decent or "good enough" product at a much lower price point
- BMW, Mercedes and Audi in cars
- Apple in consumer electronics
- Rolex and Tag in watches
- Four Seasons in hotels
The list can go on and on. Companies don't have to play the market share game to be successful. It takes so much more effort to satisfy the masses, the support costs and the scale the business has to grow are just two reasons why a business should think twice.
I prefer serving the fewest amount of customers to make the most profit. In that model I can give better customer service and create a much more loyal base to maintain profit share.
The Three Tribes of Social Shopping
Do people share what they plan to buy, or buy what they share?That’s the question my colleagues and I had to ask after discovering that a significant number of Pinterest users go on to buy the items they have pinned. As we reported in Harvard Business Review, 21% of Pinterest users say they have purchased an item in-store after pinning, re-pinning, or liking it on Twitter, and 36% of users under 35 said they had done so. Look beyond in-store purchases, and the numbers are even bigger:
29% of Pinterest users have purchased something (in-store or online) after sharing or favoriting it on Pinterest
22% of Twitter users have purchased something after tweeting, retweeting, or favoriting on on Twitter
38% of Facebook users have purchased something after liking, sharing, or commenting on it on Facebook
Very interesting article. What they still didn't answer is the act of sharing a driver? Does the customer share because it is available to share or does the share drive a purchase? And the outcome is to monitor and ask a lot of questions from people who share your products on social media channels. Sounds pretty pricey.
For marketers, the opportunity of social lies in the ability to reach and inspire the “thinkers” and “leapers” — to find and drive sales from people who might never otherwise move from interest to commitment.
First you have to identify these people. The key is predicting who is not going to purchase and nudge those potential buyers, that will optimize revenue. If you nudge everyone with discounts or more ads, you might have just spent money on people who were already going to purchase.
Nate Silver on Finding a Mentor, Teaching Yourself Statistics, and Not Settling in Your Career
I had the pleasure to sit through a keynote at the Tableau Conference in Washington DC and the speaker was none other than Nate Silver. It was a very good keynote and his book it a great read.
I find it very interesting what he says about education and working with data. I find the same thing. I don't have a background in Stats or Math, however I feel I have a good intuition with data. I have always loved numbers and working with them, but have never liked the mechanics of math or stats. I think in todays age of technology, it is more important to have the intuition than the mechanical knowledge.
Again, I think the applied experience is a lot more important than the academic experience. It probably can’t hurt to take a stats class in college.
But it really is something that requires a lot of different parts of your brain. I mean the thing that’s toughest to teach is the intuition for what are big questions to ask. That intellectual curiosity. That bullshit detector for lack of a better term, where you see a data set and you have at least a first approach on how much signal there is there. That can help to make you a lot more efficient.
That stuff is kind of hard to teach through book learning. So it’s by experience. I would be an advocate if you’re going to have an education, then have it be a pretty diverse education so you’re flexing lots of different muscles.
You can learn the technical skills later on, and you’ll be more motivated to learn more of the technical skills when you have some problem you’re trying to solve or some financial incentive to do so. So, I think not specializing too early is important.
When I look for new hires i tend to find people who are smart and try to figure out their critical thinking. The tools and the mechanical portion of data analysis and modeling can be taught, but it takes special people to have critical thoughts.
I always say that an analysts job is not to report on the data, but to find the money. The analyst that can take a dataset, find actionable insight and are able to articulate the findings are worth their weight in greenbacks.
Very cool article from a great thinker.
The Myth of Steve Jobs Constant Breakthroughs
For every great leap forward Apple ever made, it accomplished at least as much through small steps that made its products easier, faster, thinner, lighter, more polished and/or more useful. Apple’s most important products may have been the game-changers, but its best products, always, have been those that benefited from smart, evolutionary improvements. And as far as I remember, Jobs never seemed guilty about the profits they brought.
Super article. Why does everyone want to put a fork into Apple and call them done? The product they put out on Friday is so superior to every smart phone out there. Incremental or not, they are still innovating.
The items in our new iPhone 5s' are the foundation for their next jumps. The M7 processor is the beta test for a wearable technology. The 64-bit A7 chip is the baseline to take over TV and move the low end laptop computer world into the modern era.
Remember, the time between the iPod and the iPhone was 6 years. The iPod led the way to develop the iPhone. Without the iPod, there probably never would have been an iPhone. You can argue the iPad was an incremental improvement on the iPhone.
So Apple is ready for their next disruption, we just have to realize we are already using it. When the next disruption comes out, you can bet it has many of the technologies in the current phones.
How the U.S. Airline Industry Found Its Edge or Demise?
So what happened? The turnaround can’t be attributed to a bold, Da Vinci-esque initiative such as new carbon fiber aircraft, the pioneering of new markets or even low-cost innovation. Rather, it was the result of something far more modest: the slicing of airlines’ base offerings into customizable “options and extras.” The most famous of these options was checked-bag fees, but most of the recent innovations have focused on “upselling” passengers into an improved experience (e.g., selling fast-track boarding, lounge-access, extra leg room and others).
This is one of the most interesting articles I have read from Harvard Business Review. For one, I can't disagree more with the premise. The premise of the article is that charging fees is a good thing for businesses. Like many businesses in the "what have you done for me lately" quarterly earnings craze, the airlines have gone with the strategy of making bad profit.
What's bad profit do you ask? It's profit that erodes the long term profitability of the business. Not all profit is created equal. The airlines have sacrificed customer satisfaction and loyalty for short term profit. The article argues it saved the industry and these are innovative. I argue there is nothing innovative about this strategy. It is lazy.
As part of this shift, airlines realized that some people didn’t need everything that was included in the sale of a standard ticket; this opened the door to unbundling the “one size fits all” offer — and led to the introduction of fees for checked bags. Many business travelers never check a bag but historically subsidized the substantial cost for leisure travelers who did. Today, those who need the option pay for it. Many passengers grumbled, but the impact has been undeniably positive for the industry. Last year bag fees alone generated $3.6 billion in revenue in the U.S. Imagine where the industry would be without this?
What? Unbundling? They didn't unbundle, they added on fees. If they were truly unbundling, that business traveler referenced above would start paying less for their ticket. Instead, they kept prices the same or even raised them and tacked on these fees. I can't comprehend this thought process.
What really has saved the airline business? From the outside looking in it seems they have become smarter about their routes. They have cancelled many unnecessary flights, because most flights I go on are completely full. That wasn't the case before, and it's not because the customers are excited about paying for baggage fees.
The airlines seem to have become better at yielding their prices. I don't know if it was a big practice in the past, but the airlines seem to be much more strategic about their pricing model.
Articles like these make me wonder what we are learning about customer service. These strategies allow for an upstart competitor to come in and take major share, think Southwest. Southwest is growing faster than ever and that is because they don't nickel and dime their customers. Maybe the other airlines should find their "true innovation".
Marketing Automation with Neolane
Building a capture program is something that usually is untouchable with most marketing automation tools. We built ours in 3 days with Neolane. Very complex offers built dynamically based on previous behavior of redemption or no redemption. Yet another tool I am becoming quite a big fan of.
Tree Maps and Tableau
I'm beginning to become a big fan of the tree map. It is very useful to see where business is coming from. One of the cool features in Tableau is the user can bring dates to a row and then the tree maps also act as a bar chart comparing where the business is coming from YOY.
Sample Tree Map from Tableau
As you can see above I can tell 2007 was my best total sales year with declining sales throughout the years. The decline was primarily driven by Office Machines as the size of that box never returned to its largest total in 2007.
I can see myself using this for many different dashboards and analysis in the future. Maybe I may even use bubbles.
The Falling Man - Tom Junod - 9/11 Suicide Photograph
Powerful article. Sad.
Apple Innovation from January 2004
Very interesting article from January 2004 and why Apple can't succeed as an innovator. It's so easy to bash in hindsight. I think I had the same opinion of the company back then also.
Is Twitter the ‘end of the civilized world’
I love sensational headlines. Of course it's not the "end of the civilized world". I believe it is a changing of the way we consume news and information. People who are in control of those industries are scared, not because of Twitter can do to the world, but because of what Twitter can do to their livelihoods.
To Lead is to Decide
To Lead Is To Decide. Making change decisions is a cognitively and emotionally taxing activity that the average person will go to great lengths to avoid.
How true. It is so easy to add on another initiative, but it is very hard to take one away. In this day and age where so many companies are trying to make every dollar they can, it takes amazing restraint and leadership to forego money on the table for a strategy that is more sound for the long run.
But the one thing they all seem to have in common — the one thing that distinguishes them from ordinary people — is their willingness to decide when others could not.
Innovation...
Companies covered by larger numbers of analysts generate fewer patents, and the patents they produce have lower impact than those from other firms, according to an analysis by Jie (Jack) He of the University of Georgia and Xuan Tian of Indiana University. The findings suggest that analysts exert so much pressure on managers to meet short-term financial goals that they impede companies’ investment in long-term projects, the researchers say.
Hmmm. Just what I said in my last post.
Why Apple needs to innovate faster
ZDNet’s most recent Great Debate raised the question whether Apple needs to innovate more rapidly. The answer is a definite “yes” and here’s why.
I love when writers and analysts talk about other peoples businesses and come up with blanket statements like this. What's even more amazing is to use the stock prices of two companies as your argument.
Wall Street is the killer of innovation. Innovation happens over time, you can't rush it. It happens through iterations. If Apple were to have hurried their innovation in the past they would have released the iPad first, which would have been a flop because it would have cost much more than it did when they introduced it. Instead, they took their time and iterated and introduced the iPhone first, which allowed them to build up more buying leverage to reduce prices for the iPad.
Apple will show us what their next innovation is and analysts and tech writers won't be the ones dictating the timetable.
Is Data Visualization Actionable?
Although data visualization has produced some of the most captivating artistic displays in recent memory, some of which have found their way into exhibits at the New York Museum of Modern Art and countless art installations around the world, business leaders are asking: is data visualization actionable?
I believe for the most part, the answer is yes. Data visualization tells a compelling story which allows the consumer of the data to see patterns that are missed in analyzing the numbers. Even when visualization cannot tell the whole story, they are able to point you in a direction that will save countless hours as they give a great starting point.
The other side effect of visualization is it engages executives. Executives love pretty pictures and stories without having to dig through multiple pages or large spreadsheets of numbers. Dashboards are all the rage, but the visualization tells a story that executives can appreciate.
IBM Watson, the Ultimate Marketeer?
When a computer can figure out whether a movie trailer is going to positively affect an audience or not – it makes you wonder how close we are to computer generated predictions on everything else in life.
Computers make our lives as marketeers so much easier in the past, however with social media and instant access to data, our jobs become much tougher to stay ahead of the curve. IBM's Watson could be the way we all look at marketing in the future
Predict new trends and shifting tastes
Watson is a voracious consumer of data, and it doesn’t forget anything. You can feed it data from credit cards, sales databases, social networks, location data, web pages and it can compile and categorize that information to make high probability predictions.
IBM Watson is the ultimate in big data. The ability to analyze sentiment and understand how tastes are changing in the marketplace is invaluable. Most marketers don't know this until well after the shift takes place.
Analyze social conversations – generate leads
Most social listening solutions on the market today do an adequate job of giving the marketer signals and reports about their industry, competitors, partners and current customers. But it’s up to the marketer to analyze the information and take action.
What if someone could tell you what to do, not just tell you something happened? In this age of social media it takes teams of people to keep up on the never-ending conversations happening about the brand. Taking complexity out of tasks is what technology should do and this sounds like the perfect use of Watson.
Computer calculated and automated growth hacking
If you’re a marketer and not familiar with growth hacking, please study up fast. Growth hackers focus on innovative A/B testing techniques to maximize conversions on emails, websites, social media, online content or just about any digital media available to them. It’s a low cost but more effective alternative to traditional media.
A/B testing is nothing compared to what Watson can do. Imagine A/B testing on steroids, using predictive analytics and much more information than just clicks on a webpage. The ultimate in design and the right offer/message to the right person at the right time.
Running Corporations as Autonomous Business Units?
Lampert runs Sears like a hedge fund portfolio, with dozens of autonomous businesses competing for his attention and money. An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.
It amazes me there are not more companies copying what Apple has done from an organizational structure. Apple doesn't let each business unit run as an individual business, in fact they don't even own their own P&L. This allows them to move resources and work more autonomously as a team, rather than infighting and creating different tribes within the organization.
The divisions turned against each other—and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources…. [one former executive said it created a] “warring tribes” culture. “If you were in a different business unit, we were in two competing companies,” he says. “Cooperation and collaboration aren’t there.”
This doesn't surprise me at all. I've seen it many times in my career in smaller organizations, watching all the tribes compete with each other. The battle is outside of the organization, not within.
Yasiel Puig, The Next Bo Jackson?
I have heard comparisons of the Dodgers new phenom, Yasiel Puig, to the great Bo Jackson. While they both look similar, I believe Yasiel will surpass anything Bo ever did in baseball. He has all the tools that Bo had, but he is a much better natural hitter. He can hit to all fields, he can fight off pitches where he is fooled and makes better contact in general.
He sure is fun to watch.