Defining the competition

There are two schools of thought on how an organization should think about its competition - for customers, market share, talent, brand awareness, etc.

One approach is to study your competitors closely, monitor their strategies, actions and decisions, and devote a lot of resources and energy to roles like competitive intelligence gathering, market analysis, and the development of specific playbooks focused on your main competitors to prepare your salespeople for what they are likely to encounter in the field. I'd say that in enterprise tech, HR tech for sure, this is the approach that most medium-to-large providers take.

The alternate approach is to largely ignore specific competitors and spend the vast majority of your time working on product, message, and lots of internal and specific capabilities like implementation, service, support and the like. This is often the approach startup tech companies take as they likely have to spend most of their time trying to define their own message, communicate their unique value proposition, and if they are truly innovating in the market their competition may not even actually exist. Or said differently, they often are competing against 'doing nothing' and not against a competing product or service. 

And truly most companies probably exist somewhere in between these two extremes - thinking about the competition some, and other times taking a more internal focus. And this focus usually skews towards former as the company grows, enters new markets, or begins to attract new competitors (success breeds competition). 

I thought about this 'competition continuum' when I caught this piece on Venture Beat - Amazon's name pops up on 10% of U.S. earnings conference calls, a nod to the retail/tech/distribution giant's outsize reach in the US economy right now.

From the VB piece:

Almost 700 U.S. companies have reported quarterly results so far this earnings season, and the e-commerce titan’s name has popped up on roughly one of every 10 earnings conference calls so far. And the retailers whose lunch has long been eaten by Amazon.com Inc haven’t even reported yet.

In all, Amazon has been raised either in passing or with some urgency on 75 calls hosted by corporate chieftains in the past several weeks, according to a Reuters analysis of call transcripts from components of the S&P 1500. That’s well more than twice as many mentions as Google or its parent Alphabet Inc and over three times as many as Apple Inc.

Everyone from traditional retailers to 'big tech' companies like Microsoft and IBM all the way to Dow Jones stalwarts like 3M and Johnson & Johnson all have at least one eye on what Amazon is doing.

It is kind of incredible to think that Amazon is now a real (or imagined) competitive threat across such a wide range of industries and companies.

But here's what at least I thought was the really interesting thing about the piece, and the reason for the post in the first place.

Most organizations spend lots and lots of time, (maybe too much time), thinking about the competition. I get the feeling that truly amazing, game changing companies like Amazon don't spend all that much time doing that. No, they focus on doing the things that make others worry about them instead.

And that is a much, much better place to be.

Postscript - I am totally obsessed with the Amazon Echo and really annoyed at every other piece of technology I own that will not yet respond to voice commands. I think this is going to be a really big deal in workplace tech and sooner than we think.

The Progressive Service and re-imagining the organization

There are lots of fantastic aspects of being a college student - the parties, the football games, the almost complete lack of real responsibility when compared to what often comes next - the corporate world, the 9-to-5 grind, and trying reasonably hard not to screw up, (after all, all that fun in college came with a price tag, probably in the form of tens of thousands of student loans to pay off).

But besides all the obvious fun and cool elements of student life, there is at least one other - the chance to work on projects, develop ideas, and present provocative concepts all safe in the knowledge that these ideas will usually be evaluated mostly on their creativity and inspiration, and not out in the real world where at most organizations they are likely to be met with 'That's not how we do things here' or 'That will never work' or 'Who are you again?'

And out in the real world massive, transformational organizational re-designs almost never actually happen (and work). There is so much legacy baggage, locked-in contracts and structures, and often a substantial level of resistance to change that the change that anyone tries to make to an entrenched institution is usually incremental and small in nature.  All change is hard. Big change is just about impossible to pull off.

With all that in mind, I recommend taking a look at a student project that focuses on the kind of massive change that is normally only talked about in the detached, theoretical setting of academia. The below presentation is titled United States Postal Service Thesis, and was created by Tom Calabrese for a Masters program. The deck, which presents some ideas and kind of radical concepts for the US Postal Service of the future, is below, and I'll have a quick comment/challenge after the break.

United States Postal Service Thesis from Tom Calabrese

Did you click through the deck? What did you think?

A couple of things stood out to me. One, that providing, for a price, the ability to refine and tailor your own mail delivery preferences is an idea worth pursuing. And two, the more radical idea about somehow connecting the Postal Service social graph to other, more higher value add services and products.

But the real reason why I decided to post about this was not any of the specific proposals for the USPS, but rather as it was a great reminder that we almost never spend any time thinking about re-imagining our own organizations in a similar manner. Now certainly most of our organizations don't face the same number and type of daunting problems the USPS faces, but it's also certain that we underestimate the problems, (maybe ones that have not yet even manifested), that face our organizations.

So the challenge is this - what if you could (or had to), completely re-imagine your workplace?

What if you were to start from a blank sheet, or close to it, and start over?

What would you keep? What would you let go? What are you doing simply because of inertia and tradition and internal resistance to change?

What would the 'new' organization look like?

Have a great week all!

Is it a business strategy or a talent strategy?

Last year when the annual 'Culture Eats Strategy' discussion flared up, (Reminder: You are supposed to repeat the phrase 'Culture eats Strategy' for variously breakfast/lunch/dinner/the 3:00AM run to Taco Bell over and over again, even if you don't actually know what it means and have no real way of proving it), I offered a slightly alternative take - that 'Talent', or better and less jargony, 'People' might trump both Cullture and Strategy.

After all, 'people', (remember them?), formulate the business strategy, and shape the culture with their behaviors, actions, interactions, etc. Last year I sort of felt that the silly debate about whether culture was more important that strategy mostly missed the point - without a really dialed-in people or talent pipeline (or factory), it really would not matter how great the culture was/is or how on-point the business strategy seemed on paper.Rue de Banlieue, Maurice Utrillo

But it's more fun, especially in blogs and in social media to keep on talking about culture, I get that. So rather than try and make the 'talent' argument again, I wanted to point out (another) recent example of how all things talent - recruiting, development, succession, even something as HR wonkish as the company dress code, are all coming into play as an entire industy, in this case Financial Services, attempts to reinvent itself in the modern age.

Check this excerpt from a recent piece from Business Insider (via Reuters), Banks are Hiring a Bunch of IT Experts, And It's Going to Reshape Wall Street on how the business strategy (moving to a lot more custom-developed IT products and services) is and has to be shaped by a series of HR/Talent programs:

The investment banking industry is heading into a digital revolution that could redraw not only its business model but also the traditional image of its staff.

Stuck with dwindling profits in an era of poor returns and heavy regulation, the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and HSBC are battling to hire the best software programmers, systems engineers and data analysts, to help them get ahead via new technology and cost-cutting.

With IT expertise now a must for the boardroom, banks' conservative workplaces are likely to undergo cultural change as they welcome ambitious, differently-minded people. "Traditionally, banks have been a lot more narrow in their (hiring) focus. Now collectively they have realized the need to be more creative," said Jeffrey Wallis, managing partner at SunGard Consulting Services, specializing in financial firms.

But the latest wave of technology hires has come about because banks are aiming more specifically to grow revenues by developing tailor-made products and mobile applications based on clients' trading patterns. To do that, they need to attract the top quantitative analysts and software developers - which may mean allowing some of them to work in shorts and tee-shirts from Palo Alto, California, rather than in suit and tie from a skyscraper in London's Canary Wharf.

There's more of the same in the piece, particularly on how some recent and high-profile external executive hires into the financial services industry have what are best described as 'traditional' IT backgrounds, rather than a twenty year career in banking or finance. Addtionally, the financial services firms need to 'seek out' this new kind of talent is highlighted - and how it is even driving decisions around company office locations - with Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, and Singapore just some of the tech centers where they are opening up shop to chase tech talent.

The point of all this, and dredging up the tiresome Culture v. Strategy meme?

It's that the culture argument continually neglects the role that talent plays in organizational success - in executing the business strategy and then in turn creating the type of culture that will attact and allow the right talent to achieve that success.  The story about how the financial services industry is attempting to move laterally to embrace new technology and the types of people that can create these technologies is only partially one about culture. 

It is mostly about identifying the talent needed to execute on the strategy, and developing HR/Talent strategies to deliver that talent.

The three questions to ask when you're thinking of creating something

These notes, taken by Blake Masters from Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel's Computer Science class on startups, are completely worth reading - whether you work in a startup, are thinking of joining a startup, are thinking of creating your own startup, or just thinking.

Of the many interesting nuggets and insights in the notes, (the difference and difficulty of taking a brand new idea from 0 to 1, versus taking an idea from 1 to n - with n being infinity and the different stages of technological progress and advancement), I wanted to call out from Masters' notes Peter Thiel's three questions you need to ask when evaluating your idea.Hélio Oiticica, Metaesquema No. 348, 1958

Here is Thiel's take:

The path from 0 to 1 might start with asking and answering three questions.

First, what is valuable? Second, what can I do? And third, what is nobody else doing?

The questions themselves are straightforward. Question one illustrates the difference between business and academia; in academia, the number one sin is plagiarism, not triviality. So much of the innovation is esoteric and not at all useful. No one cares about a firm’s eccentric, non-valuable output. The second question ensures that you can actually execute on a problem; if not, talk is just that. Finally, and often overlooked, is the importance of being novel. Forget that and we’re just copying.

 The intellectual rephrasing of these questions is: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

The business version is: What valuable company is nobody building?

Earlier in the week I posted about the proliferation of tablet devices that are primarily designed for and used to consume content, rather than create content and the implications of this growth for career management. In a world where people want to consume and consume and consume, I argued, that to have real lasting and sustainable value and advantage that you want to be a creator, not just a consumer. I still believe that, and I also believe it can be really hard for lots of folks to actually create things - blog posts, presentations, podcasts, videos - whatever.

And after reading the notes from Thiel's talk, I think these same three questions about startup formation and practicality of an idea can even be applied to more mundane, or day-to-day scenarios like content creation.

What is valuable?

What can I do?

What is nobody else doing?

Try thinking really hard about those question and you have a start at least or a guide to moving from consumer to creator. And the good thing is for most of us the 'right' answers to those questions can be drawn from a much narrower context than Thiel was probably thinking about (the entire world). 

You can probably get by with just finding what is valuable, achievable, and novel in your own company, or city, or industry, or even your group of friends for that matter. 

You can be a content creator, and I think, you and definitely your kids, need to become creators too.

Big Oil and BYOD as a recruiting strategy

This short article, 'Shell plans to move 135,000 staff to BYOD' about the internal IT strategy at the giant Shell Oil company in about 300 words manages to highlight probably the two most significant trends driving big enterprise IT today.

Trend #1 - The Cloud (and it is kind of past calling this a 'trend' anymore, it's now just reality.

  From the Shell piece:

Two years ago, the firm adopted a cloud-first policy, which means that any new applications have to be in the cloud unless there is a business case for them to be on-premise.

Trend #2 - BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) - the tendency of employees wanting to use their device of choice to accomplish their work, rather than being forced into some kind of corporate device standard that often is inferior to the technology they prefer to use in their 'real' lives.  Again Shell's take on BYOD:

Shell is undertaking a huge bring your own device (BYOD) project which will see it supporting around 135,000 devices picked by users rather than dictated by the IT department. The BYOD scheme is a major undertaking. Shell has 90,000 permanent employees, and an additional 60,000 on a contract basis so the company is managing 150,000 clients, from desktops to portables to tablets. 

Part of the decision for the BYOD drive is around recruitment and staffing. “In about five to 10 years, 50 percent of our staff worldwide will retire,” (Shell's) Mann explained.“We’re going to have a lot of people turning over, and we want to be able to attract and retain talented and young staff. They don’t want to come into a locked corporate environment.

Neither of these decisions by Shell is really all that newsworthy excepting for the fact that these same IT strategies and philosophies were until fairly recently only undertaken by smaller firms and start-ups. When massive, entrenched, and hierarchical industrial titans like Shell start sounding like 15-person tech start-ups, you know that there really is no turning back. Big companies might not hold sway over how a technology achieves popularity in the macro-sense, but their signing on to a given IT approach tends to validate what the market is saying on a smaller scale.

Also, I don't know for sure if the recruiting angle to the BYOD strategy at Shell  is really that important or not - while I tend to agree that people don't want to use inferior equipment in the workplace, I don't think that point of view is limited to 'young' people. (Anyone reading this that is doing at least some of their 'work' email in Gmail because their corporate Outlook mailbox keeps going over capacity will be nodding in agreement right now). And while using lousy technology at work does kind of stink, I also think lots of people want to keep their personal technology, well, personal. 

Not everyone wants to be reading work email on their iPad when they are chilling on the sofa at night.

Right?