Those damn kids! Since ancient times, it’s been fashionable for people of a certain age to complain their era’s youth. Some things never change.
When I was born in the era of the Summer of Love, hippies were creating the counterculture. My generation of latchkey kids then became “slackers.” Today, the Millennials have caused so much confusion that they have inspired an entire cottage industry of consultants to instruct executives on how to deal with them.
Yet each successive generation also advances technology and business practice. The hippies spawned the computer revolution and Generation X will be forever associated with rise of the Web. The Millennials, most probably, will be remembered as the generation that widely embraced the Hacker Way. Their contribution will likely be the greatest of all.
In 1972, the future seemed bleak. The Club of Rome released their report on the limits to growth and it warned that our planet was faced with overpopulation, which would result in economic and societal collapse. Fortunately, just the opposite happened.
Today, 40 years later, although the global population has indeed doubled, poverty, hunger and war have all plummeted. The Green Revolution has enabled us to feed more people using fewer resources and created a multibillion-dollar market at the same time.
Now, faced with the prospect of global warming, there is a new energy revolution brewing. However, the transformation is not solely, or even primarily, driven by concern about carbon, but represents a shift from resource driven energy to that which is derived from technology and will, like digital innovation, unleash the economics of accelerating returns.
People like to say that life is random. We accept that, even embrace it, because we like some variation in our lives; a chance meeting at the supermarket, running into an old friend at a party and so on. Those little collisions make life more interesting.
Yet it is that same variability that drives us crazy in our professional lives. When we launch a product, we want to know how it will sell. When we invest our savings, we want to have some idea what the return will be.
A lot of smart, practical people have sought to solve the problem. Clever math models and statistical techniques are employed to calculate the likelihood of positive ROI with the aim of creating more certainty. The problem is that fate has a way of thwarting our best laid plans. In truth, it is the whimsical mathematics of chaos that rules our destiny.
Bob Hoffman is an old media curmudgeon. He still believes in TV and earns his living making ads. He rails against newfangled media like Facebook and Twitter, while he taunts social media advocates.
In many ways, Bob is very much one those dinosaurs we hear so much about: committed to traditional media, suspicious of new technology and unwavering in his faith that great ads build great businesses. The irony is that he is also a true social media superstar.
He has a lively Facebook fan page, over 7000 followers on Twitter and his Ad Contrarian blog is one of the most popular, informative and entertaining in the industry. He recently addressed this paradox in a post and, more than any social media guru ever could, he outlined the true value social media along with it’s very real problems.
Nobody likes the status quo. It’s boring. The companies that we admire are radical. They have the courage, smarts and verve to do something truly different.
The problem is that radical innovation is rarely a prudent course. It not only disrupts competitors, but also your value network: customers, suppliers, partners and even employees. It’s one thing to lead the charge, quite another to get anyone to follow.
So what to do? If you stand still you’ll get run over, but if you go chasing every half-baked idea that makes its way onto TechCrunch, you’ll lose focus on your core business and decrease competitiveness. Some firms, however, have learned how to harness disruptive technologies not by being first movers, but by learning how to follow intelligently.
I think that part of the problem stems from the fact that other professions have qualifications. Doctors go to medical school, engineers build things, financiers make money and even lawyers need to get admitted to the bar. Meanwhile, any jackass off the street can call himself a marketer. What we need are concrete principles. Here are seven.
“Greed…is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” That was the ‘80’s Gecko mantra.
It was based on something high-flying financier Ivan Boesky said shortly before he was exposed as a fraud and sent to prison. Nevertheless, we bought into it then and the sentiment resonates even now. George Bush, after all, encouraged us to shop in the face of adversity.
But is greed really good? Does it capture the “essence of the evolutionary spirit? Is Geckoism a hardheaded, pragmatic approach or utter nonsense? These were serious questions a generation ago, but they have long been answered. The truth is that while greed might work in the movies, in the real world it’s simply naive.
The ancient Chinese phrase “may you live in interesting times” was meant as a curse. Unexpected events, for most of history, have been unwelcome. They inevitably brought war, famine and poverty.
Today, we have our problems and some of them are pretty bad, like terrorism, global warming and hunger. The big difference is that we have learned how to innovate our way out of trouble. When you start looking at what’s coming up, you can’t help but be optimistic.
The power of information technology is that it advances at an exponential pace. Once scarce commodities like storage and processing power are now abundant and that is making possible novel solutions to old problems. New industries like nanotech, robotics and genomics are creating things that would have been science fiction a decade ago.
People like to say, “keep it simple, stupid.” It’s a down-home remedy for our overly complex, technology infused modern life. Like much good advice, it is often given, but rarely followed.
The problem is that simplicity is not so simple. We live in a complex universe where much that happens is beyond our control. Merely wishing things to be simpler does not make it so. In fact, making facile assumptions often leads to disaster.
How we deal with complexity determines how we innovate, build organizations that can compete effectively and navigate an increasingly technological marketplace. We need to take it seriously, not gloss over it. Fortunately, this has been an area of intense study since the beginning of the digital age and there are some basic principles that can guide us.
Over the past decade, marketing has become increasingly ROI focused. Generally, that’s been an enormously positive thing, but as I’ve noted before, there has been some reason for concern.
One of the chief problems is that metrics often obscure value. Business success occurs in the marketplace, not in Excel or in Powerpoint. It’s easy to get so caught up with key performance indicators that you forget about performance in the real world.
Managing a business is different than managing a budget. The outcome of an investment is not solely, or even primarily, a function of efficiency. It matters where you invest. Resources allocated to a good business will work harder than those that are put towards a bad one. That’s why it’s crucial to rightsize investment. Here’s a quick guide.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
