Am I the right guy for this job?

February 5, 2010
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What’s your ‘sweet spot’ as an individual performer? 

 

Of all the struggles we have in our lives and our careers, one of the biggest is settling on a role that marries what we do best with what the company we work for values most out of us. 

 

Given the financial pressures, inequities in compensation and pride/ego we associate with our own performance and positions, nearly all of us at some point choose to try to ‘climb the ladder’.  That is, get as big a role as you can with the most prestige, money, authority and yes, compensation and then try to milk it for as long as you can. 

 

What do you do though when you get there and hate it? 

 

The statistics of the number of people who are unhappy with their jobs is staggering. Surprisingly, this carries forward into the CEO and SMB owner’s office.  Far too often, we find completely miserable people in these roles doing a frankly lousy job.  Most just keep doing what they are doing day in and day out and hope for a break.  Some share the pain by passing it down liberally to everyone they meet who touches their company.  Should we really be all that surprised that 9 out of 10 SMB’s fail with this as their leadership perspective. 

 

A select few have begun asking us the question … am I the right guy (or girl) for this job? 

 

This is obviously a very ‘situational’ and ‘sensitive’ issue where no one answer or set of criterion is a precise predictor of the right outcome.  But, we have learned in our practice that there are some pretty common characteristics of people who can handle the leadership role … and those who can’t.  Fundamentally, it relates to how they work:    

 

You are the right guy (or girl) if: 

  1. You love the business you are in. 
  2. You constantly look for ways to improve what you do for customers. 
  3. You are open, collaborative and transparent in your management style. 
  4. You like and are a good judge of people.  . 
  5. You enjoy and work through systems to operate.   
  6. You are not afraid to make decisions. 
  7. You have no stress about your role. 

 

You are the wrong guy (or girl) if:

  1. You spend your time dreaming or researching new areas. 
  2. You hate change. 
  3. You don’t like people to challenge you. 
  4. You trust your own instincts above all else. 
  5. You’d rather not be held accountable for anything. 
  6. You prefer the safest path forward. 
  7. You are more concerned about your lifestyle than the business. 

 

These are the defining moments for leaders of business.  The days of making the easy buck are gone … forever.  I had a leader in my office who remarked about one of our companies this week that “don’t tell me how well you did in 2005 when any idiot with a shingle out could make money … tell me how you did in the last twelve months when only the strong survived.” 

 

Summary

 

Today more than ever, leadership is at a premium.  One of my greatest learning’s in my career was a realization that you never really know people until you see them under pressure.  Today’s environment for business is the ultimate pressure cooker.  Being honest in your assessment about how well you fit, how well you can serve and who you really want to be when you grow up is an authenticity foundation that will actually enhance your career.  The first step though might be to get off the crazy carousel.   If it doesn’t come natural to you, leave it. 

 

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What are you the ‘best in the world’ at?

October 15, 2009
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You’ll never be in the ‘sweet spot’ if you chase significance through your competitors. 

 

I’ve been doing lots of consulting work lately with companies on the brink.  Businesses that had established enough value to get off the ground but never really hit it big.  They ask a simple question of us … ‘how can we make as much money in this market as some of the people you write about in your books did?’  We usually tell them some version of the following. 

 

At some point, in some way, you have to center yourself and your business around something that is uniquely yours.  Something only you can own.  Something you do so extraordinarily well that people enjoy paying you money to see you do it.  Something you might even become known someday as being the ‘best in the world at’.  

 

About 10 years ago, I participated in a branding session led by Al Ries, author of Positioning and dozens of other best-selling marketing books.  I remember the room breaking out in an argument over the defining vision for the business with two distinct camps:  

  1. We know what it is we do and we need to stick to it. 
  2. We agree but it’s not significant enough.  We need to strive for something bigger. 

These are the defining moments for leaders.  I remember Al letting this go on for quite some time and then when the room grew quiet saying simply … “it doesn’t matter whether it’s significant yet.  If it’s yours, you can make it so.  If it’s not, you’ll never succeed at it anyway.” 

 

Wow.  What simple, practical advice for us to follow.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you do it better than anyone else in your world. 

  1. When Chase Danielson started ZipCar, the rental car market hadn’t seen anything new in 50 years … the idea for a subscription service for city dwellers seemed nutty.  
  2. When Tom Watson started IBM, the market for computers was estimated to be four! 
  3. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page started their little search business, they were told there was no more room for yet another search engine.  They would have to sell to portals. 
  4. Even the great Steve Jobs encountered skepticism when Apple entered the phone market pretty late with the iPhone.  Didn’t everyone already own a Blackberry? 
  5. When Starbuck’s started, Folgers had dominated the coffee market for two decades. 
  6. Does it surprise you that an online environment for sharing student information invented by a college freshman could turn into the hub of the social media world? 

Hindsight is 20/20 but the point really is that starting out, none of these investments looked very smart or safe.  What these successful entrepreneurs learned has been repeated time and again in every market in every decade.  It’s not the size of the market that mattered, it’s the quality of the deliverable. 

 

When we did our research for the ‘Tuned In’ book, I found it fascinating to listen to people tell their success stories.  It amazed me that they almost all had a largely similar tale to tell.  It went something like this: 

 

Q.  How did you create such a breakout success? 

 

A.  I don’t know really.  We didn’t set out to. We just saw this problem that people were having doing ….  and we thought we could help so we started to build a company that solved that problem better than it had ever been solved before.  One thing led to another and the next thing I knew, we woke up one day and had 1000 employees.  I never, ever thought it would get this big.  

 

Summary

 

Creating success in any market environment requires a focus on that ‘one thing’ that defines you.  The really sad stories to us are from the leaders and businesses who abandoned a purpose too soon. The sweet spot may not start out being big but with your focus, you can make it large enough to support your business.  And, maybe, just maybe, find a cause that grows on its own with you at the forefront. 


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Simple is Smart

September 3, 2009
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Why is it that so many businesses avoid the single biggest strategy that will allow them to find their sweet spot?

Three years ago, I wrote an e-book with my colleagues at Pragmatic Marketing called The Secrets of Tuned In Leaders.  It outlined the seven positive character traits of leaders of winning businesses.  Secret number 3 was ‘Simple is Smart’.  Here’s a quick excerpt.

Most products and communications are hard to understand, hard to use and worst of all, completely out of context with the total customer experience. The best companies create solutions that are narrow and deep. They organize around a single market problem and solve it completely with a solution that to the buyer seems simple, obvious and most importantly handles all the related tasks in one easy step. Often, this means specializing in a single vertical market or industry. Customer communications programs are not one size fits all either. Instead, tailor to the context of each market or industry you serve.

Times were good back then and while this premise was embraced, I’m not sure most folks got the point.  Today though, there is no way to avoid it.  This is no longer an interesting premise or a nice to have philosophy, it is essential to business success.

Only the simple will survive!

When I look around at the types of things we offer to customers in the market today, I shake my head at how many of them completely miss the mark and wonder … ‘how did they come up with that?’  Consider some recent examples:

Are you kidding me?

  • US Airways just increased their per bag fee and add a requirement for registering online for their service.  I guess the overwhelmingly positive response to their initial program gave them the courage to make it even more onerous.
  • The Obama administration is pushing for the quick adoption of a trillion dollar health care reform package that has five different versions each thousands of pages long and creates a complete overhaul of the system.  And they are surprised by the public backlash and think it’s all a big Republican conspiracy?
  • With the newest release of the Blackberry Tour, I now count 22 versions of the product for largely the same buyer target.  Many people have said the handwriting is on the wall for RIMM with the iPhone but are they helping their cause by thrashing with too many new versions?

Alternatively, some companies and programs know how to get it right:

Hey, I think I’ll take some of that!

  • Southwest Airlines is the antithesis of all the other major airlines. Low prices, flexible services and NO nickel and dime costs like paying for bags.  Is it any wonder they’ve gone from a small regional Texas airline to the most profitable, successful of all airlines?
  • Cash for Clunkers was a government program people understood.  I buy a new car, get rid of my old one and you incent me to do it with a government rebate.  Don’t know why the government was surprised that it worked … maybe because they aren’t used to simple?
  • Microsoft’s Bing is advertising a simple value to doing business with them. Use their serach and you get ‘cash back’.  When you are trying to break a juggernaut like Google, the simpler the attack, the better.

Why is it so easy for some to get it while others over-think?  All of this has got me to thinking … are we complicating our lives and trying to do too much at exactly the wrong time?

Why Simple Works

Simple has always been smart.

Too many of us fail to embrace a fundamental principle … nobody cares about your business like you do.  The amount of time buyers spend on considering you once they become aware of your value maybe being of interest to them is measured in seconds, not minutes, hours, days or months. As a result, the idea of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) wins market share every time.

It also wins higher marks in customer satisfaction.

The real hidden benefit in being simple is that you actually increase the quality and value of your solution in the process.  Because the focus is so narrow, the provider ends up putting all of their energy and service dollars into making this not only easy to understand but easy to buy.  You deal with well informed employees who are there to help vs. a stressed out crew not knowing what’s going to hit them next.

Summary

Are you making this harder than it has to be?  If you want to find your sweet spot in any market, simple is smart.  Time and time again, the company that has taken the time to be laser focused in what they do and how they build value for their customers has won the market.  With the amount of noise and risk associated with today’s market, it’s even smarter to be simple.

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About Three Bricks Shy of the Load

August 3, 2009
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I got a new Kindle this month. I’ve known they were available since their initial release. As an avid reader and author, I’ve even been familiar with all the benefits of bringing the world of book reading online. I also knew of course what it was designed to be a breakthrough for Amazon … an iPod, only for books. And I owned an iPod and loved it.

But, for some reason, it wasn’t until the last couple of months that my demand matured enough to act.

Now I have it and I love it. I’ve downloaded a set of favorites, a few new ones I’ve been meaning to go purchase and I’m set for my frequent travels. Just got back from a trip and have to report that I’m a happy camper. I got the big form factor and was excited with how easy it was to embrace … it really did feel just like reading a book. Best of all though, it fit easily into my travel portfolio and lightened my load.

This thing is in the sweet. What took it so long to be embraced?

I’m reminded of the law of Release 3 with new innovations and amazed at how subtly I’ve been a part of this. Microsoft is famous for this but in truth it really does seem that most new products take some time to be relevant. All of this got me to thinking about whether or not this is typical when I ran across one of my favorite books from the past and realized that it’s universal.

The book: About Three Bricks Shy of the Load by Myron Cope. It’s a story about the 1974 Pittsburgh Steelers that tracks them through their breakout season. Turns out it was two years before they went on to win the first of four Super Bowls. The point that jumped out at me was the central premise of the book. The team it turns out was young and talented but lost in the first round of the playoffs and did in fact have ‘three’ bricks to its foundation missing … commitment, balance and confidence.

It strikes me that businesses and products have the same issues.

First Brick: Are you committed to solving this problem?

New products come and go and most offer some interesting capabilities when they are first launched. Only a select few go ‘narrow and deep’ and really take on all aspects of solving a market problem. Often this means much more than a simple product innovation itself, it involves lots of service areas around it.

The iPod for example connected not only because of the elegance of the device, it connected because Apple solved both the relationship problem (with the music industry to authorize distribution) and the download problem (through iTunes ability to provide an easy to access central repository). It seems to me that the Kindle is now at the same place … connecting publishers and an easy download service to the device. Amazon is telling me they’re committed by addressing the full scope of the issue.

Second Brick: Does the solution balance simple with powerful?

The two hallmarks of hitting the sweet spot are solutions that balance ease of use with capabilities that are rich and powerful. A well designed product or service invariably has both characteristics. It appeals to the masses who find the learning curve is small and to the sophisticated who like doing something that’s never been done before better.

The Kindle strikes this balance extraordinarily well. The form factor really does give me the same feel as reading a book with simple page up and down capabilities. The menu structure provides one click access to range of services. But the ability to take notes, bookmark and transmit turns it into a platform. Good for both markets.

Third Brick: Can I be confident that there a network of support around it?

Regardless of how good (or cool) a new offering is, never underestimate the power of the status quo. Buyers tend not to make decisions that require ANY changes in behavior until it is obvious that doing so safe. Geoff Moore did a great job of characterizing this behavior in Crossing the Chasm. More than 80% of buyers just prefer to ‘wait’ until all the kinks are out.

Release 3 of the Kindle has that broad support base. I counted more than 250,000 books, newspapers and even blogs now available for download (and even continuous updates). There’s a good history now of successful support and usage. And new authors are even designing ahead of time now to optimize delivery.

Summary

I don’t suppose any of this is breakthrough thinking but for those of you out there like me who lack the quality of ‘patience’, a good reminder is always a good thing. Don’t set your expectations high when launching a new offering … the market will repel you until you’ve achieved the level of maturity needed for success.

And for those of you engineering your new offering to hit the ‘sweet spot’, take stock of the three bricks. You may not be able to get them all on day one but if you design for them appropriately and upgrade efficiently, your breakthrough may only be a couple of release levels away.

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Dreams of Green

June 27, 2009
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The market with the best opportunity to create a new sweet spot for entrepreneurs is all things ‘green’. It has a series of inexorable trends working in its favor from energy independence to government sponsorship to environmental awareness. Three years ago when I first looked in earnest at this space, I thought it was too embryonic and too soon to invest time and energy. Now, I think the opposite.

Exciting advances are springing up all around us. Alternative technologies in solar, wind and nuclear enable new sources for energy. Green algae provides a reusable source. Innovations for clean air and water abound. Electronically powered automobiles are being moved into bigger production lines. And companies by the hundreds are starting up to serve niches in all of these markets. Investment capital is flowing and big bets are being made. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered a big problem in talking to people in the space.

Irrational exuberance is back!

Over the past six months, as we’ve looked at dozens of green businesses, they all have some unique aspects to them but also share one common trait … a maniacal zeal for the innovation and a dismissive nature for the business. Here’s what we hear.

Green is a movement … profits will come.

Big mistake. Too many of these bets are being made however on things that have very little relevance to the buyers they hope to secure. I’m afraid to say it, but I’ve seen this act before. For those of us who lived through the .com era in technology, the lessons were hard to learn. Turned out it really wasn’t about ‘disruptive innovation’ or ‘creating new business models’, it ultimately came down to turning eyeballs into profits. Those that could survived, those that couldn’t had interesting stories about how the world had wronged them in their youth.

Fundamentals to Green Value

Every new innovation has an adoption curve that company leaders really need to acknowledge and plan around. At the end of the day, a buyers criterion are simple … is you’re innovation an easier, faster, cheaper solution to the problem I have than the one I’m using today and will adopting it come with little to no switching cost. Yes means you get to pass go. No means some time in the penalty box.

When we look at businesses in exciting new areas, we look at five things:

  • Does the owner/leadership team share an authentic purpose?
  • Is there a long-term relevant solution upgrade that increases value?
  • Will the business model be simple and flexible enough for buyers to embrace?
  • Can the innovation be produced, marketed, sold and services at healthy margins?
  • Is this a business venture or a science project?

History is a simple teacher on this front. Entrepreneurs who are building value for the customers and creating a business around it find their sweet spot faster than those who believe a great market will carry their innovation.

Don’t allow your business to fall into the irrational exuberance zone. It’s a slippery slope from there to survival to ‘out of business’.

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