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Hewitt

Tag: strategy

  • Friday 5 — 5.9.2014

    Friday 5 — 5.9.2014

    Email in bed

    1. You likely don’t need a set of graphics and stark statistics to remind you how much work email has encroached on our personal lives. Also: thoughtful essay on how excessive corporate email promotes burnout rather than productivity.
    2. Email marketing is a staple of corporate and nonprofit outreach, but how do you get those overloaded recipients to open it? See these five tips for email subject line that attract readers.
    3. Here’s a comprehensive rundown on LinkedIn strategy for evolving from a resumé parking lot to an online newspaper. Growth plans include investments in mobile, international expansion, and “delivering massively personalized experiences.”
    4. WordPress.com parent Automattic closed $160M in funding on a $1.16B valuation. Known for its robust developer community and emphasis on clean user interface, WordPress now powers an astonishing 22% of 10 million websites today. The investment’s a strong bet on WordPress to continue its growth beyond niche blogging to become the best publishing platform in the world.
    5. Smartphones, smart watches, smart toothbrushes are now all available to contribute to our families’ personal data exhaust streams. These data streams are loyalty cards on steroids, providing a live feed of behaviors which when aggregated are a potential goldmine for retailers. Prediction: myriad law suits to emerge over parents’ use of their children’s personal data in return for discounting.

    Weekend fun: Perhaps amusing only for soccer fans, Arsenal players respond to mean tweets. Extra credit for gratuitous Vorsprung door Technik joke.

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • The promise and reality of collaborative culture

    The promise and reality of collaborative culture

    The promise of computer-led collaboration long pre-dates the late 1990s commercial internet. Earlier that decade, the potential for enterprise efficiency and growth through content sharing among expanded internal networks led to the creation of knowledge management initiatives. The principles behind the initiatives were laudable — improve access to expertise across silos, facilitate innovation, and reduce product development cycles. Unfortunately in most enterprise organizations, the reality was just the opposite. Too often, knowledge hoarding rewarded employees far more than knowledge sharing, and business units did not perceive enough benefit to promote collaborative behaviors. As the saying goes, culture eats strategy for lunch — despite the new technological tools, organizational culture reinforced status quo behaviors.

    It’s hard to create effective top-down initiatives that promote collaboration. Similarly bottoms-up collaborative production efforts can run into roadblocks, like falling victim to the tragedy of the commons, wherein everyone pulls from a common resource without contributing back. Prominent exceptions like Wikipedia exist, but struggle to attract and retain a wide pool of contributors.

    lyft carAnd yet, a robust collaborative economy is emerging. This can’t be attributed to a sudden spike in altruism, although the millennials may be more conscious of consumption than other generations at the quarter-century mark. Rather, technology has for the first time allowed for services to spring up that promote sharing of resources with financial benefit to the sharer. Think of what Airbnb has done to disrupt the hotel industry (which is starting to feel the impact) and how UberX and Lyft have transformed getting a ride. Collaborative behaviors are solving real problems by disintermediating established product and service providers that acted as middlemen in transactions. While the new services continue to experience growing pains, disruptive models are clearly emerging.

    As Zachary Karabell observes, the rise of the collaborative economy is disrupting existing industries and laws. Many established businesses are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, alongside governments struggling to keep up with policy. But there’s no going back — whether it’s ride sharing or lodging or learning, collaboration fueled by an exchange of value is here to stay.The promise of unlimited internet-driven collaboration was a Utopian ideal, and many important projects like Wikipedia and open source software reflect that early promise. But the relatively recent ability for a peer-to-peer value exchange is creating a broad, collaborative economy of differently-mediated services. Smart corporations from the traditional economy are launching rapid experiments, alongside their consumers, to re-imagine their businesses for this new, collaborative normal.

    Photo credit: Via Tsuji

  • Cloud factory

    Cloud factory

    banff mountainsThanks to the team at The Cloud Factory in Canada for putting together a great event on the state of cloud technology — and its digital economy and innovation impact. Stunning backdrops, great ideas, and good debates about everything from pricing wars to cloud commoditization to flavors of Open Stack.

    Below are the slides I presented on  innovation made possible by the cloud for the theme of “democratizing the enterprise.” Now that we’ve moved beyond the first step for creating a web initiative being “write a million dollar check for some servers,” we’re seeing products and services that can focus more time to delivering value and iterating fast, rather than developing datacenter protocols.

  • Friday 5 — 4.4.2014

    Friday 5 — 4.4.2014

    1. social-networking-over-timeA Pew report on older adults and technology use finds that more seniors are online. Today, 59% of 65+ adults are connected, compared with 53% in 2012 and only 35% back in 2008. And they’re more social: more than half of women 65+ use social networking sites, validating my theory that grandchildren photos are a critical driver for Facebook adoption. Seniors still lag notably in smartphone adoption, with only 18% penetration compared to 55% of the general population.
    2. On-demand car service Lyft raised 250 M, putting them in a fundraising league with Uber as the two compete for marketshare. How big will these “collaborative economy” or sharing services grow as a generation less invested in owning enters its prime earning years?
    3. Hard to believe that Gmail is already 10 years old. The service launched on April 1, 2004, via a mere 1,000 initial invitations. Gmail changed the way we think about searchable email, and turned up the pressure for ease-of-use and storage for IT departments struggling to keep up with heightened employee expectations. Fun fact: Gmail was a skunkworks project, and launched in beta on 300 old Pentium III computers nobody else at Google wanted.
    4. Amazon, Google, and now Microsoft are engaging in price wars over their cloud offerings. Thankfully, gone are the days when the first thing you did when you build a website was, “First, write a million dollar check to Sun for some servers…”
    5. Lots of people have great ideas for social products and services — but many of those products depends on critical mass of users. How do you grow enough to get the metrics to understand where to improve and scale? Andrew Chen lists some solid approaches to solving for the dreaded cold start problem.

    Weekend fun: Lots of people are already sick of watching this video of an ecstatic two-legged puppy romping on the beach. I am not one of those people.

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • The skinny on startup accelerators

    The skinny on startup accelerators

    RDV sketch
    Speakers looking pensive, only mildly upstaged by Brent Grinna’s pants

    If you have a startup that’s launched but needs to grow, how do you choose, apply to, and make the most of a tech accelerator experience? Monday’s Rough Draft Ventures Sketch brought together four accelerator alumni and professionals to demystify the accelerator process — the pain and the perks.

    Several themes emerged:

    • Accelerators are competitive, and can afford to be choosy. Have your startup pitch down cold. Make your one-minute video clear and focused on business value. Know who your CEO is, and how decisions will be made.
    • Accelerators can unlock a broad network, so if you’re lucky enough to be accepted, make the most of the resources made available to you.
    • Every member of the founding team should show they are actively learning. Share new ideas and lessons learned — even when those lessons are “we chose the wrong direction, and here’s why.”
    • Speaking of the founding team, having a strong technical co-founder matters. A lot.
    • Be serious about your startup. Applicants who are merely in love with the glamorous idea of start-up life will swiftly be weeded out via a five-year grueling process of starting a business.
    • Don’t rule out incubators. While they don’t offer investment, they provide space, enable connections to business services, and valuable introductions to mentors. And you don’t give up 6%.
    • Women apply at much lower rates than men — for example, given odds that only 20% of applicants are accepted, many women will choose not to apply. In contrast, men will apply even when their likelihood of success is roughly a snowball’s change in hell. There’s an opportunity for women to step up and stand out in the accelerator applicant pool.

    Thanks to Natalie Bartlett who ran the show for Rough Draft Ventures, and to speakers Brent Grinna, Merrill Lutsky, Karen Murphy, and Katie Rae for sharing insights and ideas — and staying late to connect with the students.

     

  • Why kitchen cabinets trump corner offices

    Why kitchen cabinets trump corner offices

    node network chartWhen I started my career at a blue chip publisher, furniture mattered. Your career progression was reflected through office floorplans and desk hues: you migrated from low cubicle to high cubicle to office, and the final destination was a corner office replete with faux mahogany. Dream big, kids, the story went: at the end of all those 60-hour work weeks there may be a credenza in your future.

    The internet broke all that, and thank God. While a full-on holacracy remains hard to achieve, access to information and ideas has led organizations to become flatter, and companies large and small strive to seek out the best ideas from anywhere. Organizations like General Electric, LEGO, and NASA have open innovation programs to crowdsource solutions to hard problems internally and externally. When good ideas flow up and down and across an organization, career paths are less regimented, and roles more fluid.

    So if furniture is no longer a unifying principle for career progression, what is? Here’s one immutable truth: the importance of building your team. I don’t mean this in the narrow sense of “these are the people I will hire into my organization to get the job done.” I’m referring to the smart people who share your professional passions, whose counsel you can seek about the big stuff.

    This is a small kitchen cabinet or brain trust — it’s not your LinkedIn contacts, which can quickly skyrocket too far beyond Dunbar’s number to be meaningful. These are the people you call with an intractable problem or professional dilemma, and the strength of this group will be vital to a successful career. Why? Because in an era where hierarchies have flattened, good ideas can come from anywhere, and seniority does not automatically equate to advancement, a strong kitchen cabinet can provide feedback and insight to help you remain competitive.

    So, how do you think about building and nurturing this inner circle? You may start with a mentor or two from the beginning of your career, add early colleagues you bond with, and in time find protégés who will, with any luck, match or outstrip you. You’ll come up with your own filters, but here are five lenses to consider when building your team:

    1. Find those with the same values. Jobs and skills change over time, but it’s hard for values to change. It’s helpful to have some core shared beliefs about business practices and work-life balance. Also, that guy with that killer exit who tipped 10 bucks on a $200 check for a four-top? You may not want to bet long-term on that one.
    2. Embrace team members who share your passions. Your team should include people who will stay up late to solve a problem alongside you. Not because “they owe you,” but because they are as determined and obsessive as you are to get to the bottom of it.
    3. Resist the strong pull of homophily. It’s easy to slide into a comfortable groove with someone with a lot of similar life experience. Someone who also went to prep school, or also lives in Chicago, or also was a monster coder in junior high. Those people can be comfortable, but won’t always bring alternative approaches that challenge your assumptions. Remember that there all kinds of uniforms, and the culture of the hoodie can at times be as constraining as that of the three-piece suit.
    4. Practice discrimination. Some ideas are better than others. Some people are smarter than others. This team is not everyone in your professional network whom you respect, and would be willing to do a solid for. Filter for those whose smarts and rigor challenge you, and who can be engaged with your most important problems — and you’ll care enough to dive into theirs.
    5. Bet on those who will call you on your bullshit. If you’re young and promising, or have built a decent career, it’s easy to find people who will blow smoke. Find the ones who will point out your bad ideas, narcissistic excesses, or lack of intellectual rigor. It can be hard to hear even constructive criticism, but you want your team to be thoughtful allies, not unapologetic supporters.

    A lot has changed about how people think about and manage their careers today. Job tenures are shorter, organizational lines separating employee, consultant, and customer more porous, and boundaries between professional and personal ever-shifting. One thing will never change: the need to build the right team. So don’t get caught up climbing the ladder of desks, when you’ll reap greater rewards from assembling and investing in a trusted kitchen cabinet.

    Originally published at the Experiment Fund, a Cambridge-based fund investing in world-changing startups.

     

  • Digital in the enterprise

    Digital in the enterprise

    Hewitt graphicThanks to Vala Afshar and Michael Krigsman for inviting me to participate in a CXO Talk: Conversations About Innovation in the Enterprise.

    Vala wrote up our conversation about digital transformation and teams, content strategy, and the (erstwhile?) role of a CDO over on the Huffington Post.

  • Digital in the DNA matters

    Digital in the DNA matters

    More and more, it’s becoming apparent that digital publishing is its own thing, not an additional platform for established news companies. They can buy their way into it, but their historical advantages are often offset by legacy costs and bureaucracy. In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man. … How something is made and published is often as important as what is made.

    — David Carr, writing in the New York Times about the vital role of digital in the DNA for creating great media

     

  • If engineering managers should code 30% time, what’s a digital leader to do?

    If engineering managers should code 30% time, what’s a digital leader to do?

    Should engineering managers responsible for teams and deliverables still continue to code 30% of their time? Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of Mongo DB, published a persuasive argument for bucking the accepted path of coder –> dev lead –> non-coding manager.

    Why? Horowitz points out that a manager who still codes will be more skilled in ensuring accurate estimates (in my experience, highly capable development team are prone to deliver overly optimistic estimates), able to make informed decisions regarding technical debt, and have improved credibility with their teams. There are, of course, obstacles — primarily allocating the time and solving for the plague of meetings that can accompany management.

    using socialWhat does this mean for leaders responsible for digital teams, many of whom occupy a CMO or similar role? In the 1990s when mainstream digital emerged there was a complete disconnect between the entire C-suite and digital practices. Executives had little or no exposure to the day-to-day operation of the internet. Websites in large companies were the domain of someone called a Webmaster, who sat in the IT department. Marketing was busy trying to keep those ugly and irrelevant URLs out of their paid media and far from their pristine collateral.

    [tweetable]Today there is an opportunity to bridge the gap between executive experience and operational digital strategy.[/tweetable] Many still believe that promotion to manager and then director and then executive necessitate a complete remove from hands-on digital practices. While a leadership role must reflect disciplined, offline focus, something is lost when your administrative assistant is updating your LinkedIn profile. A marketing leader in 1995 could be relatively certain that best practices in existence since 1955 — brand, advertising, direct, outdoor, media relations — were not constantly being rewritten. Executives today have no such luxury.

    How can leaders responsible for digital strategy and large teams keep up? Many successful marketing and media executives allocate time to work hands-on digital into their schedules: through hacks for managing their information diet, participating in structured social channels, and setting realistic goals for C-level engagement.

    Ultimately, which will be more expensive: the time spent mastering and connecting through digital channels, or the risk of failure stemming from a knowledge gap between digital strategy and execution? Given the high value and fast pace of best-in-class digital, the cost of a personal disconnect from digital comes at a higher price for both the individual and the organization.

    Photo credit: joeshoe

  • Digital reality and updated strategy

    What are the digital, social, and mobile norms today, and what’s on the horizon? A quick overview of current state and strategy:

    See more upcoming presentations on the Speaking page.