Do you have a corporate slapper?

Back when I was working for one of the world's more bureaucratic organizations, there was a certain manager who was a walking bad attitude, obstacle to any progress other than her own, and certainly a candidate for a good slapping.

HR policy being what it is, she remained somewhat confidently insulated and managed a good deal of swagger up until the day she was finally ousted from her position as the team's resident paterfamilias. What we needed was Malcolm.



Malcolm Fry - the corporate slapper. Here's a video to explain exactly how this works.

Just how important is a smart healthcare IT executive?

Not many issues approach the universal concern over the healthcare situation (crisis?) in this country.  The changing role of the CIO at a hospital or other health service provider seemed like a great topic for a few questions.  

So I asked Patrick Moroney, who is among the best authorities out there in this area, for his candid opinions.  Here's the interview with Patrick that came out in TechRepublic today.  (Add your comment and/or vote if you like it.)

Thanks!

Have IBM and Google noticed the $20B ERP market?

If you haven't seen it already, I hope you'll take a look at my interview with Jeffrey Carr on ERP in TechRepublic.  If you like it, be sure to click on the "worthwhile?" voting button at the top right.  It's also portable in a free PDF download (link right below the intro).

* Speaking of free downloads, you can get a free sample of Starbucks new Via instant right here.  Not in time for this month's survey, but give it a try.  (thanks Jon -)

Detroit in the crosshairs at the auto show

Japanese steel was a different story than its car manufacturers. Under the Marshall plan after the second world war, the allies (mainly the US) rebuilt Japan's steel plants with the result that our own aging mills couldn't compete. 

In the auto industry on the other hand, Detroit started by ignoring Deming, then ignored Japan (and Korea), and now is looking for tax dollars to finance the effects.  With their very existence in the balance, looking only slightly more viable than Joaquin Phoenix's rap music career, you might expect they would emphasize a good showing in the annual auto show circuit, like the one going on in Chicago right now.  Not necessarily that they would make a record financial investment, but a smart one.

You might expect to see Saturn distance itself a bit from parent GM and its $30B request to the US taxpayer this month.  You might expect to see some vision for hybrids or electrics that trumps the competition.  Most importantly, you might expect a different presentation of new ideas and products than you could find on the internet ("this vehicle has six cylinders and has sunroof, leather and automatic transmission options").  No.  None of the above.

An expo is not a giant television ad. TV is more or less a scripted visual storytelling for the masses, punctuated by zero-interaction advertising that is increasingly blaring and increasingly ignored - or tivoed out entirely.  The internet makes a huge leap by providing more interaction, customization and selective content.  If you enter the right keywords, you can find it.  But a live event offers dialog and personal experience and should highlight the strongest presentation points you have to offer.  A car I can see in the parking lot outside the show is not extraordinary enough to be in the auto show.  Seeing a vehicle from behind a ropeline is not necessarily extraordinary either.  A display of a vehicle where you can't sit behind the wheel, or where the sales reps can only repeat the factory specs might as well be online.

There were a couple automakers with impressive concept cars you won't see on the street and reps who could compare different vehicles and knew enough about cars in general enough to ask you questions back, but they weren't from Detroit.  VW and Acura were the standouts in my book.  Saab's replacement of the Aero-X with a beautiful concept convertible was a show-stopper, and the rep had a wonderful Scandanavian accent while most of the reps were clearly hired guns.

I still enjoyed the auto show of course.  I'd just like to see the automakers, especially the ones in Detroit, make better use of our tax dollars with their marketing.  Only two companies asked for my e-mail address.  Auto marketers should be at least as good as the US Army's impressive display at the same show.  They did an outstanding job by comparison.

note: If you plan to make it to this year's show in Chicago, be sure to stop by a Shell station to fill up on your way and get their half-price tickets for admission.  If you have a couple people with you, it will pay for your parking.

Mark Cuban's Open Source Funding Rules

Feeling Mavericky?  This week's offer by broadcast.com billionaire Mark Cuban to provide stimulus funding for entrepreneurs offers a few guidelines that the public sector might do well to imitate.  

As the federal job-creation stimulus package rolls out with $30 million taxpayer dollars earmarked for Nancy Pelosi's favorite kind of mouse, Cuban's open source funding offer lays out a few ground rules worth noting:

- Your plan must be posted publicly - transparent and imitable

- 60 days to break-even

- 90 days to show a profit

- Flat organizational structure

- No guarantees of continuation

- Cash flow is monitored

- No Multi-level marketing

- (best of all) Any agreement with Mark will be published openly

Want to take a shot at the cash (no minimum and no maximum) for your current or startup business? You can see the full details of Cuban's offer posted in his blog here.

Ironic Choices

There's a certain irony in offering silly choices.  Does anyone press the "No, I don't want a receipt" button at the gas pump, or press 9 when they want to hang up the phone?

Then there's the irony of offering a choice that doesn't really exist.  A proud union member is issued his obligatory bumper sticker "Union - Yes" with a picture of a check box.  Of course "Yes" is the only vote there is.  If you want the job, you're in the union.

This kind of irony has left Detroit in a bad way these days.  The UAW, in its upward-ratcheting need for self-perpetuation, call the shots like Rod Effen Blagojevich's wife screaming vulgarities in the background of his now famous phone calls.  "Labor demands" are not balanced with any "labor accountability" for performance.  The CEO's are up in front of Congress, but the shrewish-wife union bosses are in the wings telling them why they can't make those concessions.  

This situation is aggravated by a poor economy, but the latest reviews of the big three show a continuing lack of competitiveness.  Depending on blind patriotic loyalty from your customers more than competitive excellence in a free market is rather unpatriotic.  

So is pretending there's a choice where there isn't.

Caribou Bumps The Brand Owner

Americans drink more coffee than any other country in the world.

So it's a big deal when the current brand owner (here's a little word association - coffee: ______ ) shows up as an also-ran. At least one reason Starbucks is closing stores and locking up for an afternoon of re-training is Caribou, a little company out of Minneapolis with stores in 16 states.

The atmosphere at every Caribou I've ever been to is great, and wi-fi is free, vs. a charge of about $4 for two hours at Starbucks, down from the old $10 rate. But those are the perks (ha!) - the core product is still the coffee right? While I've always thought Caribou's product was competitive, I'm no connoisseur, so take the results of the March Consumer Reports coffee survey. Caribou's Columbia Timana comes in second only to Eight O'Clock's 100% Columbian for flavor, and for you coffee-achievers, it's highest among the top four for caffeine content at 195 mg/cup. (Starbucks top brew comes in at #4, but that puts it in the "good" category, down a notch from the "very good.")

For the long haul, build your brand on a quality product and customer service (and a little caffeine helps too).

SEO Expertise

If you need some technical advice on optimizing search and making it work for you (and who doesn't?), Kelly Jones is an SEO specialist at Plexus Web who is remarkably good at what she does. I'll bet you won't be able to ask something she can't help you with.

Will "complications" with outsourcing serve to stem the tide of domestic job cuts?

Companies that are immune to the latest labor cuts don't seem to fall into any particular categories. Even stalwarts like Caterpillar, Sprint and Home Depot added to the more than 40,000 layoffs announced this week. There's some hidden pain in these numbers as well. Cuts in overtime hours and part-time or temporary workers don't show up.

Apropos hidden numbers, what if companies were required to state how many of their layoffs are domestic vis-a-vis offshored positions as a percentage of the total? Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of the free market, but only when minimum standards for business practices are met. Somalian pirates do not qualify, for example. Nor does Satyam Computer Services, where State Farm is cutting 400 jobs because of fraud, which has also complicated things for PriceWaterhouseCoopers as two of its auditors responsible for Satyam's books were arrested in India over the weekend. Early last year, Moira Herbst was prescient in pointing out other risks and conflicts of reckless outsourcing in her Business Week article about the then half-million H1B-visa workers.

It may be wishful thinking, but the numbers of outsourced jobs being cut could actually become a statistic companies would be pleased to have splashed across the FOX News business page. My friend George Moraetes is a displaced State Farm consultant who would like to see that.

Ten Questions on Risk and Compliance with Joe Degidio

Got risk?

If you're a small (or large) business looking for new ideas and some prognostication on risk and compliance over the next few years, here's an interview I did with compliance expert Joe Degidio in TechRepublic today.

You can post a comment or add a question below the article. (FYI - they are going to ask you to do a one-time registration to make a comment, but this is a great publication and you should be registered anyway.) Thanks!

Synchronicity 2.0 (mashups)

Is it CNN or is it Facebook?  To quote the inimitable Bo Jackson, "Both."  

It's a cool mashup of CNN's video coverage of the inauguration with all your friends' simaltaneous discussion in a live forum. Apparently the idea went over fairly well as the site was maxed out on user-spots shortly before the ceremony started.  It's been unmashed again now, but bookmark the link for the next memorable event that comes up.

It was a good day for Twitter too.  The growing deluge of the world's most transient blog posts had about five times the normal amount of "tweets per second" during the ceremonies.  Of course, depending on who's in your "following" list, these might be anything from, "I just ate a bagel" to "Watch my new life-coaching video."  But here's a new twist on it - again with an interesting mashup.  Yahoo! has gotten together with the folks at Twitter to create "Tweetnews," which matches up the latest headlines and their sources with the related "tweets." This adds a bit of authenticity to the frivolity (and immediacy) of newsflashes on Twitter with a measure of mainstream corroboration.

Remember when the future was in plastics?  Now it's in mashups.

The Great Accelerator

A lot of people are in a hurry to break with the past, leave Q4 and 2008 behind and get on with their tabula rasa using the new social media tools, web 2.0, 3G, etc.  OK, so did your new year's resolutions have to do with doing things better, or just faster?  

Hopefully your marketing was structured and personal before and is going to get even better - and not just faster.  In itself, the internet only makes things faster.  It is excruciatingly ambivalent to good or bad and serves to accelerate the effects of either one.  If your communication is powerful and relevant, it will get to more people faster.  If you make mistakes and underestimations, the web will also syndicate those errors faster.  

It's amazing how powerful good marketing is - even when it's not new; not flashy, just effective communication, as in the great communicator.  See how long it takes you to figure out how old this thirty-second video is.  

Effective presentations, web sites and podcasts still require, like the new nation, people who distinguish good from bad, technically and otherwise.  It is wholly unsuited to any other, just much faster. 

Wait - he's taking my money?

Not long ago, I had a very smart (PhD) C-level executive tell me, "One thing we don't need on our home page is a bookmark button. I think people already know how to bookmark something." 

He could only have thought this by disbelieving or ignoring the advantage of custom bookmarks/feeds to your reader and the widespread use of bookmarking icons across the footers of literally thousands of web sites.  He let the relative simplicity of the tool's sophistication obscure the fact that for most people it has a high level of everyday usefulness.

The truth is we're all myopic in some way or another. It's dangerous to insulate yourself with your success (or degree/or title). A political heiress may need someone to tell her she's not cut out for the job. A governor may need someone to tell him that an FBI wiretap is probably not capricious. A pastor may need someone to point out that the huge slide about "Calvanism" should actually be spelled "Calvinism" (at least by the time the third service rolls around). 

Faithful are the wounds of a friend - even if she might not invite you to her Martha's Vineyard bash this New Year's Eve.

A very happy and safe new year to all of you, and all the best in 2009.  If you're a praying person, say one for me - I'll return the favor.

Do you have a mystique?

Every business needs a defining quality, call it a mystique or whatever you like. It's not your purpose statement or your elevator pitch, although it's probably included in those. It's that attribute your competition just can't duplicate - the thing you go to the trouble to do better than anyone else.

I attended a briefing this week at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago and was impressed with one of their employees in particular. He's the head parking valet and his name is Kofi Boasiako. Kofi did his job so well, I honestly don't think anyone else could replace him. He took his work seriously, put things on a personal level and went the extra mile when there was a complication. I'm not easily impressed and I'm more than glad to mention it when I am.

As it turns out, Kofi works at the Ritz-Carlton for a reason. He's part of the mystique. That same afternoon, someone asked me if I had seen this article (I had not mentioned anything about the R-C in the conversation). If you can imitate this kind of attitude, you will stand out from the competition.

Whether it's your business or your own personal brand, what will ensure your success in tough times? Mystique (and your commitment to it).

Thanksgiving

In doing business of course, there's a bonus for being thankful to your customers.  They'll be less likely to think about going somewhere else.

 

But a more spontaneous general attitude of gratefulness is a mark of decency. When children aren't appropriately thankful, they ought to find themselves up in their rooms thinking about it. True thankfulness, whether it's to your host, your parents or your Creator is like wearing shoes, eating with a fork and other good manners - it civilizes you.

Even more importantly than its effect on others, being thankful gives you a heart attitude that will keep you from a prideful death-spiral that ultimately seeks to be beholden to nothing and no one.  To the contrary, a heart of real thankfulness is one that evokes generosity, as it did with Edward Winslow in his description of the first Thanksgiving in 1621, "...and although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."

In tough economic times, you'll see more businesses opting for the default behavior (Walgreen's), which makes the few in the second category (Lands End), stand out all the more.  Taking your customers for granted (defining your competition differently than your customers do) will only put you in line for a government bailout.

Delegating the details

In the new era of transparency, do you still have an assistant writing your letters and then adding your electronic signature from a generic, or worse, a do-not-reply e-mail address? You might as well just start deleting people from your distribution list, rather than end up in their auto-archive filter.

How about research? Are you like Tim Conway's classic executive calling Missis-a-Whiggins on the intercom every time you need a reference source? Have you ever gotten this amusing link sent back to you? (Probably not unless your admin is in the habit of testing your sense of humor.) Hyper-delegation often has a way of making you look unprepared and hollow when there's a follow-up question.

What should your admin be doing? Well, particularly if you're sending out e-mails to thousands of customers, prospects or employees, there's a great value in getting a critical review. The CEO who "announced" an acquisition that took place two years earlier could have surely used a second pair of eyes before it went out to all of the acquired company's employees, as well as the (literally) thousands of others. The school principal who makes routine spelling errors in his updates surely amuses some sharp-eyed students, but not necessarily the members of the PTO.

Just a reminder to take your communications seriously - and make them real - if you expect people to read them that way.

The New Realities BSM Interview with Casey Kindiger

A couple years ago, the top-returned item in a google search of "BSM" was the "British School of Motoring." So it's a great leap forward already just to get to the clarification that it generally refers to "Business Service Management" (at least stateside).

Now for the next question, when a company says they do "business service management," what does that mean exactly? The entry in Wikipedia describes it as a "methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business perspective" including both process and software. What it really amounts to is one of Peter Drucker's new realities of how you view and use technology to make your business work better every day.

If anyone knows what's at the heart of BSM, it's the CEO of IBM's top-ranked Tivoli partner and service management software reseller, Casey Kindiger. Here's an interview that just came out in TechRepublic where I sat down with Casey to ask ten questions about what is really at the heart of this new way of looking at the purpose of technology in business, as well as the three types of BSM players out there today.

It stands to reason

If you're working for a monolithic, impersonal, quota-driven organization in these tough economic times, you're aware of the extra scrutiny people doing the "real selling" give to those applying the "marketing spin."  Being under the loop makes it all the more important to stay above the fray, far from the madding crowd and be the voice of discreet but genuine candidness.

Seth Godin (All Marketers Are Liars) does this on a regular basis. So does fellow New Yorker and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Krauthammer, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person recently.  No matter which candidate you're voting for next week, Charles has a knack for saying it like it is.  He does it again in last Friday's Washington Post. 

The FOX News Legacy

Our family just got back from a whirlwind trip to Washington, DC over the weekend where we got to appreciate some of the uniqueness of the nation's capitol. After living in Berlin and San Francisco and Chicago and visiting some other incredibly beautiful cities like Zurich and Paris, it's always fascinating to notice the contrast in different urban settings.

The primary reason for our trip was to visit my oldest son Axel, who is interning at the only news show mentioned in the presidential debates and the gem of Rupert Murdoch's crown, FOX News.  The team at the station was very gracious and gave us a fantastic tour and even let us sit in on a live panel show covering the "generated crisis" with Bret Baier.  Here are a few FOX facts I found intriguing and highly encouraging:

- The FOX News Channel is twelve years old this month.

- Since January of 2002, FOX has ranked first overall in total day and prime time audience.

- Just last month, FOX had its second-highest rated month ever (the top month was April of 2003)

- Since 1997, FOX has grown from a 3% share of the total day cable news market to its current 39%.

- Special Report with Brit Hume, who came from ABC News in 1997, is the #1 cable news program in the nation.

Another tidbit every baseball fan is aware of this week is that FOX has the exclusive coverage of the World Series, where they've carried 10 of the last 12 matchups.

Moving Toward 1:1 Marketing

How important is your customer relationship management solution to you? Do your customers know that you know them and are working to make their experience as personally relevant as possible? I've gotten two invitations in the last week that were addressed to "Dear Lynda" and "FirstName." Here's an interview I did in TechRepublic today with CRM expert Jon Cline that covers some great insights about the future of CRM. 

Thanks Jon!