A bit of foolishness

Foolishness is not typically considered beneficial to businesses, except possibly a few minutes of lighthearted fun to relieve the tedium of the workday.

Stanford Business School professor emeritus James G. March thinks, however, that foolishness is an important component of businesses, especially innovative ones. Harvard Business Review interviewed Dr. March in the current issue. And among the many topics he touches on is the need for foolishness.

To March, foolishness is messing around with ideas, trying things out, doing things that aren't rational. Intuition may be a big part of it, or as March says, "a value system that adapts very much to context.") Here's a quote from the interview:

Part of foolishness, or what looks like foolishness, is stealing ideas from a different domain. Someone in economics, for example, may borrow ideas from evolutionary biology, imagining that the ideas might be relevant to evolutionary economics. A scholar who does so will often get the ideas wrong; he may twist and strain them in applying them to his own discipline. But this kind of cross-disciplinary stealing can be very rich and productive. It’s a tricky thing, because foolishness is usually that—foolishness. It can push you to be very creative, but uselessly creative. The chance that someone who knows no physics will be usefully creative in physics must be so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from it. Yet big jumps are likely to come in the form of foolishness that, against long odds, turns out to be valuable.

[Disclaimer: this post itself is a bit of foolishness. I was unable to get access to March's original paper, so I'm relying on the couple of paragraphs in the HBR interview for all my information on this topic. Meaning that I'm investing that brief bit of material with all sorts of my own interpretations, contexts, etc., and in so doing certainly twisting and possibly corrupting March's ideas. I think he'd be pleased.]

So, then, how to apply foolishness to your everyday work? Try something different. Present a tough business problem to your spouse and listen--really listen--to the response. Make a deliberate mistake. Pretend you're the CEO--what would you do differently? Go to the museum and stare at art for a while.

Most likely you'll just be wasting time. But there's a chance that you may stumble on something utterly new.

innovation, strategy

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Using Google AdWords: a live experiment

Today we experiment on ourselves, like those doctors of old who swallowed harmful bacteria to test their own antibiotic creations. The topic is Google advertising. It can be a very cost-effective and productive part of a business' marketing mix. Or a waste of money. We'll see.

The first step was signing up for Google AdWords. Why Google and not Yahoo? We used both in my last company and consistently found that 65%+ of our hits were via Google. So if you want one online ad partner, Google is it.

The signup, including account creation, keyword selection, account verification and billing setup, took about twenty minutes. I chose about thirty keywords. Google has a nice tool that recommends keywords based on initial terms you enter. You want keywords that are as specific as you can create, and you can use multiple-word keywords (such as "MVNO startup").

My campaign focused around MVNOs. MVNO-related work is perfect for Google because the acronym is very specific and limited. Therefore, the competition for positioning isn't nearly as severe as it is for keywords like "personal injury," "insurance" or "mortgage."

You want keywords as specific as you can get them, so that only the people who might need your service will see your ad. Google ranks ads based on budget, so if you have limited-interest keywords, your ad will be positioned higher, cost less, and be more likely to result in a quality clickthrough (i.e., someone who's really interested in your service).

Then I picked a budget. I started with $30 per month. I can monitor the results in real-time, on Google's Ad Campaign web page.

To compare that expenditure with other marketing-related expenses, consider these statistics:

One year of Google AdWords: $360.
One trade show attendance: $1000-$3000.
Local chamber of commerce membership: $250.

Finally, I decided on some metrics. We'll look at them weekly. They are:

# of impressions (or times the ad is viewed)
# of clickthroughs (or times the ad is clicked on, bringing the user to my website)
# of customer contacts (times people fill in the "contact us" form on the website)
# of opportunities resulting from those contacts
# of sales related to the contacts--the bottom line result we want

The first two metrics come from Google. The third comes from my website. The last two I will track on my pipeline report.

So, the experiment starts now. We'll look at the first set of results next Monday. See you then if not before.

marketing, advertising, Google

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The board of directors - a fatally-flawed structure?

James Surowiecki, the author of the great business book "The Wisdom of Crowds," and financial columnist for the New Yorker, takes up the HP leak scandal in his latest column, but provides a different take on the matter.

Rather than focusing on the dunder-headed leak investigation, Surowiecki looks at the damage a leaking board can do to a company. But in providing a solution to improve board performance, he comes dangerously close to paradox.

He defines two types of conflict typical of workgroups. Says Surowiecki,

Social scientists like to say that good decision-making groups engage in “task conflict,” fighting over the best solutions to particular problems, while bad ones engage in “relationship conflict,” interpreting differences of opinion as differences of character.

Workgroups typically suffer from both types of conflict, but the best overcome it with trust and belief in others' integrity. Surowiecki goes on:

They found that groups whose members trusted one another’s competence and integrity were more likely to engage in task conflict without succumbing to relationship conflict. Paradoxically, the more people trust one another, the more willing they are to fight with each other.

OK, so let's bring that back to boards of directors. In order to be truly effective, board members need to trust one another's competence and integrity. But independent boards are made up of people who don't have lots of history together (i.e., they're independent). They are also typically financially well-off, have large egos, balance lots of priorities and meet only occasionally.

I frankly don't see how this type of board could work in the way Surowiecki envisions. In fact, "rubber-stamp" boards, which have members with tight ties to the company and long tenures, have a better probability in my mind of engaging in productive "task conflict" than independent boards.

The best workgroups I have belonged to met Surowiecki's criteria for trust, integrity and fighting with each other--over ideas, not personality. But those groups worked together forty+ hours a week and shared a mission. And we had to make it work, because we needed our jobs.

strategy, governance, teamwork, New Yorker

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Building a good user interface... why don't more companies do it?

We can all agree on something, can't we? User interfaces are important.

Both Google and Apple have dominated their respective markets for search and mobile music largely because of the innovation in their user interfaces (note that innovation in UIs usually corresponds with simplicity).

And products with poor interfaces endure repeated tongue-lashings from product reviewers--here is David Pogue on the Motorola Q phone: "Unfortunately, this software's designers must believe that you bill by the hour; getting anything done on this phone requires more steps than the Empire State Building." And here is Jerry Garrett of the New York Times on BMW's iDrive: "It does have some useful features, if you can twist, click and beat on it accurately enough to navigate its labyrinth of menus — while driving 80 m.p.h."--never mind the eternal irritation of those unfortunate enough to have to use the product.

So, the only remaining question is: why aren't there more good ones?

I've been thinking about that question since reading Matt Barthelemy's terrific article on user interface design in the most recent PDMA Visions magazine.

I can give you a personal perspective. I spent ten years developing technology products. I can tell you that I knew so deeply the beauty and intricacy of the inner product (e.g., a LAN network management product, wireless fraud detection system, telecom mediation platform) that its external interface was almost irrelevant. (It was only when I went into marketing--and got a lot dumber about the innards of my products--did I come to understand that a poor user interface is a serious, possibly fatal, flaw.)

I worked with some human-factors professionals on the network management product. But neither I nor the other developers paid their recommendations much heed. If it took a long time to figure out how to use the product, so be it. It was a complex product. Look at all it did!

Now as dumb as that approach was when applied to the small, niche products I was working with, imagine if the same logic were applied to consumer products. Appreciate the inner beauty... if you're not smart enough to figure out how to use this, maybe you don't deserve this product.

Well, you'd probably wind up with something like iDrive.

innovation, design, user interface

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If you want to innovate, get some rest

The macho sleep-deprivation culture of global business is dangerous to companies, states Dr. Charles A. Czeisler in an interview from the October issue of Harvard Business Review. Dr. Czeisler, an expert in sleep studies at Harvard Medical School, goes beyond the standard refrain of "we should sleep more" and states categorically that lack of sleep is harming workers, managers and business. (The abstract to the article is here. Of course, HBR gives nothing away--the entire article will cost you $6.00.)

One of many provocative quotes from Dr. Czeisler: "It amazes me that contemporary work and social culture glorifies sleeplessness in the way we once glorified people who could hold their liquor." He goes on to say that a week of sleeping five hours a night makes you perform as if you had a 0.1% blood-alcohol level.

What does this mean for innovation? A lot. The 80-hour-per-week culture simply cannot innovate. At some point, you get so tired that simply taking the next step in a task seems all you could possibly do. There's a term borrowed from warfare for that phase of a software-development project where everyone is overworking: the "death march." And my experience was that, while we met some deadlines, we made mistakes during death marches that we had to repair, at great cost, months and years later.

For innovation you need clear thinking, a quiet mind and reflection. And more than these, you need to make good decisions. Says Dr. Czeisler: "The analogy to drunkenness is real because, like a drunk, a person who is sleep-deprived has no idea how functionally impaired he or she truly is."

So, remember that advice your mentor gave you when you were faced with a difficult decision--"Why don't you sleep on it?" It turns out he was more right than he knew.

innovation, sleep

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Everybody needs a jolt of Dan Gilbert once in a while

Thanks to the wonderful TED blog for featuring great MP3's and videos of their TEDTalks speakers. Last week they featured the psychologist Dan Gilbert, a frequent contributor to the New York Times and whose articles inspired several posts in this blog (here and here).

Dr. Gilbert specializes in the limitations of our ability to know ourselves, and how that affects our interactions with others. If you are a marketer, or salesperson, or are involved in any kind of negotiations, you must make yourself familiar with his work.

Check out the TEDBlog post for the video.

marketing, sales, psychology

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Are we suffering from breakthrough devaluation?

When you read about innovation in the press, your eye glides over the term breakthrough. It's used so often that it passes without notice. But yet, our subconscious sees that word and confers value on whatever is described as such. If it's called a breakthrough, then it must be one.

Then one reads an article like the Wall Street Journal's Portals column from last Wednesday's paper (link here courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Author Lee Gomes cites statistics from Factiva Research indicating over 8,400 uses of the word breakthrough in press releases. Says Gomes,

To what extent are we experiencing "breakthrough inflation," in which the work that an engineer would consider simply a good day in the lab becomes, in the hands of the PR department, an advance worthy of being shouted about from the rooftops?

I prefer the term "breakthrough devaluation," because if everything is a breakthrough, then nothing is. And if you think about breakthrough--it connotes a very significant barrier, which is "broken through" via very hard work and ingenuity. A high standard indeed. Here is a list of dubious breakthroughs--you decide if the term has lost some of its value:

The first Canon PIXMA printers to earn the Pro designation, both the PIXMA Pro9500 printer - which utilizes long-lasting, pigment-based inks - and the PIXMA Pro9000 printer - which uses long-lasting, dye-based inks - produce brilliant, gallery quality prints up to 13 x 19 inches on a variety of specialty media and fine art papers. "These printers are a breakthrough not simply for Canon but for the industry," stated Yukiaki Hashimoto, senior vice president and general manager of the consumer imaging group at Canon U.S.A., Inc. "We have not simply reformulated inks, we have re-examined the selection of inks needed to create some of the finest, long-lasting prints possible."

Jenzabar, Inc., the pioneer of Total Campus Management (TCM), announced that the Software Information Industry Association has honored its Jenzabar Internet Campus Solution (JICS) with a 2006 CODiE Award as the "Best Postsecondary Educational Portal Solution."... "This award recognizes Jenzabar as leading the way in community building and constituent relationship management solutions for higher education," said Robert A. Maginn, Jenzabar's Chairman and CEO. "This announcement, along with the accolades we've received from clients using the enhanced functionality we recently released, positions JICS as a breakthrough platform for building and extending the campus community via the Internet...."

Skyworks Achieves Performance Breakthrough with New Line of Active Mixers; Broad Frequency Range Powers Infrastructure, Medical, Scientific and Industrial Applications. WOBURN, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 20, 2006--Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:SWKS), an industry leader in radio solutions and precision analog semiconductors, today unveiled the market's highest dynamic range active mixers for mobile radio systems targeted at infrastructure, medical, scientific and industrial applications. These new broad frequency range solutions, which are part of Skyworks' rapidly growing Linear Products' portfolio, have achieved unprecedented linearity performance via a higher level of RF integration which secondarily improves both form factor and cost through the elimination of a negative power supply and additional amplifiers.

Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation (Pink Sheets:VTSS) today unveiled its latest high-speed crosspoint switches featuring breakthrough capacity and advanced Signal Integrity technology. Featuring a per-port speed of up to 6.5 Gbps and low-latency switching capabilities, the 72x72 VSC3172 and 144x144 VSC3144 asynchronous crosspoints deliver near-terabit aggregate bandwidth capacity. These crosspoints enable new cost and performance breakpoints for blade server, video and network equipment designs used in core, metro and enterprise environments. The new product additions underscore Vitesse's leadership and continued investment in Signal Integrity and Crosspoint solutions along with record product line business growth.

The listings go on for page after page after page. Breakthrough antiviral drugs, breakthrough formal verification of intellectual property solution, even a breakthrough employee benefits E-portal!

What happens when there's a real breakthrough? What will we call it then?

innovation, marketing, public relations

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