The American Marketing Association Chicago Chapter held its Power Lunch round tables, 23 February 2006 in Chicago. I hosted Technology and Strategy tables, where marketing leaders from Fortune 1000 companies, startups and service providers exchanged impressions about emerging marketing trends and techniques. Here are my notes from the discussion.
Where For Art Thou, Technology?..
… On the adoption curve, that is ,^). The main topic of the Technology round table was repositioning. Several people wanted to expand their customer bases without sacrificing their traditional market segments. Others had been through several gyrations of the technology market maturation, reinventing themselves several times. Key topics were: 1) expanding a packaged software professional services solution to other professional services; 2) selling technology solutions to business buyers rather than technology executives.
Of course, each of these highlighted business and marketing strategy. Everyone benefits from asking themselves, “What business am I in and why?” During the Internet boom, we associated this phenomenon with “Internet time,” which passed 4x to 6x faster than “normal” time. Although few people talk about this with a straight face these days, it’s far more relevant now than it was then. The “information on demand” supernova, delivered by standards-based technology, was born then, and its results are magnified today. We became aware of how much information we had, and that information made every aspect of business more volatile: competitors could learn very quickly about our emerging offers; customers could learn of our lackluster service by reading message boards (blogs, today); our business plan could be across the world in less than a second.
This means that we need to ask ourselves what business we’re in far more often, not to mention reading Geoff Moore (Crossing the Chasm et al). Many “technology” firms find that their technology focus of yesteryear needs serious revisiting, as many solutions are not relevant unless they have an ironclad business value prop. This is forcing many technology firms to change their focus significantly by ramping up their domain knowledge. Even more challenging, they need to change their complete approach and value proposition and let technology take a back seat to business. Cough.
E tu, Strategy?
At the Strategy round table, most people had been frustrated by how strategy was approached by their firms, past and present. Too many people had experienced it as a sporadic undertaking whose assured deliverable was the proverbial shelfware binder. The good news was that people were determined to integrate strategy into their activities, to make it vital.
We discussed business strategy as context before turning to marketing strategy. Some of the best practices were: 1) getting executive sponsorship; 2) addressing strategic, bet-the-business issues by getting distance from the day-to-day tactics that people spend most of their attention on; 3) raising colleagues’ strategy awareness, as many people don’t get out of tactical mode, and this makes it much more difficult to implement strategies; 4) make strategy relevant by tying it to execution in an actionable manner.
Our discussion was very reminiscent of Larry Keeley’s discussion on innovation which is characterized by the corporate tendency to lean on formal process to force decisions, which carries the side effect of stifling creativity. Strategy is often practiced so seldom and by so few people that it is simply not relevant to most people in the organization. A large part of the problem is that, in large organizations, strategic decisions are, well, strategic 😉 because they impact many parts of the organization, and this drastically reduces the efficacy of decision making. If we decide to emphasize A, B’s organization will have a reduced role, and B doesn’t want that, so she lobbies others to assist her in defeating the strategy’s agenda, producing the well known organizational sclerosis.
I believe that this is another symptom of enterprises’ being too large and tightly coupled. If companies were comprised of loosely coupled groups that purposely encapsulated the complexity within, decisions could be made without threatening the other groups as much. In this vision, each “group” probably serves various other groups, within and outside the enterprise, as many will have outsourcing relationships with the enterprise. This makes the organization more flexible and can make innovation more practical because it diminishes “group think.” A quick disclaimer is in order, however: this future vision for outsourcing partners is vastly different from the current reality: too many outsourcing contracts today are imbued with tightly coupled principles and approaches and are not good examples. They don’t allow encapsulation by the “group” and seek to control how providers perform their processes.
It’s 1588, and galleons are looking positively ponderous. Methinks small maneuverable craft might do better in these waters.
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