Books

Self improvement (or the continued delusions of Ian Waring, 2020 edition)

ianwaring Books, Management, Microsoft, Politicians, Software

My Christmas holiday reading ranged from MindF*ck by Christopher Wylie to a Satya Nadella recommendation: Mindset by Dr Carol S Dweck. Wylie’s book is A1, and all the lessons of December 12th (the latest UK General Election) are there. The antidotes are much more wide ranging.

The latter one was one of those books where I think the pieces I need to remember will fit on less than a sheet of A4.

Most of the book was contrasting the difference between “Fixed Mindset” and “Growth Mindset”. However, look under the surface, the main points are:

  • Blame is for losers
  • Prima Donnas “anyone’s fault but mine” are an example of this, not good for team cohesion
  • People with a growth mindset appear to be relentlessly curious and ask questions to understand patterns, not just learn by rote memory
  • A repeat of the old Arnold Palmer Golf Adage; “the more I practice, the luckier I get”
  • Be humble
  • “A managers pick A employees, B managers pick C employees”.
  • Also struck in my past that the best managers don’t issue edicts, but ask lots of questions – and trust the skills of their employees – instead

I recall one 23-year old VP at British Telecom; whenever confronted with a new service, the immediate question was “What is the business model?” and he was straight under the surface to understand how things work.

The other was a personal experience in May 1983, when none other than Bill Gates visited Digital Equipment (where I worked) to show us a new system Microsoft were building called “Windows”. There were 14 of us sitting around a conference table waiting for the senior folks to escape a board meeting – and Gates sitting there with a Compaq+ PC and a two button mouse. Curiousity got the better of me, so I said “Tell me. The Apple Lisa has a one button mouse, and Visi-On (a Windowing system being developed by the authors of Visicalc) has three. I notice your mouse has two buttons. Why?”.

He duly went off for a good few minutes describing how all the competitor products interacted with different third party applications, and the problems each resulted in. Very deep, really thoroughly thought through. The senior folks duly arrived, and frustrated him with a lack of commitment to using MS-DOS on our PCs, Windows or not.

I was told afterwards that he told the salesguy who brought him in: “There was only one guy in the room who knew what he was talking about. Hire him”. I interviewed with Scott Oki (VP International at Microsoft at the time) and David Fraser (UK MD), but elected not to take the role. Many years later, I took Paul Maritz – then CEO of VMware, but previously VP of Windows at Microsoft) to see my CEO (Mike Norris of Computacenter; while waiting for our slot, I asked him where Scott Oki was these days. Answer – he owns several golf courses on the West Coast of the USA 🙂

The main thing I always reflect on is in situations when i’m interviewing job role applicants. There’s always this situation at the end when the candidate is asked “Do you have any other questions for me/us?”. While there are a few attitude qualification questions – plus some evidence that they set their own performance standards – that final question is almost always the most important qualifier of all. Demonstrate humility and curiosity, then you’re the one I want to work with, and improve together.

Quality Journalism – UK Oxymoron?

ianwaring Books, Future Trends, Journalism, Metrics, Newspapers, Politicians

I’m writing this the day that John McCain died in the USA – and the most compelling eulogy came from Barack Obama. It’s a rare day right now when people can disagree fervently with each others views, but still hold each other in greatest respect.

In reading “The Secret Barrister”, you come away with a data filled summary of the comparatively and continued poor state of Westminster politics. Of successive abuses to a system of justice by politicians of all colours. To prioritise “PR” on everything to mask poor financial choices with sound bites, while quietly robbing us all blind of values we hold dear. And i’m sure Chris Grayling will receive few Christmas Cards from members of the judiciary based on their experience of him documented in this books pages.

Politics is but only half the story in this. I often muse to wonder where quality journalism disappeared to? There are good pockets in the London Review of Books, and with the work on the Panama Papers by ICIJ – but where else are the catalogue of abuses systematically documented in a data based, consumable way? Where is the media with the same bite as “World in Action” back on the day? It appears completely AWOL.

One of the really curious things about Westminster is that MPs are required to align to the terms of the “The Code of Conduct for Members of Parliament“. If you go down to item 6, it reads “Members have a general duty to act in the interests of the nation as a whole; and a special duty to their constituents”. Now, tell me how the Whip system works there. On the face of it, it is profoundly against the very code in which our democracy is enshrined.

There appears to be no data source published on the number of votes taken, and whether they were “free” votes or directed to be 1, 2 or 3 line instructions from each whips office. Fundamentally, how many votes taken were allowed to rest on the conscious obligations to be exercised by MPs freely, or to what extent were they compelled like sheep through the abattoir voting booths there?

My gut suggests our current government are probably inflicting more divisive whips more often than any UK government in our history, not least as the future interests of our country appear to being driven by a very small proportion of representatives there. The bare complexion of this should be easily apparent from the numbers and some simple comparative graphs – so, who’s keeping count?

Democracy this isn’t. And the lack of quality journalism in the UK is heavily complicit in it’s disappearance.

WTF – Tim O’Reilly – Lightbulbs On!

ianwaring Amazon, Books, Enterprise IT, Facebook, Future Trends, Google, Intellectual Property, Internet, Journalism, Maker Movement, Management, Marketing, Metrics, Money, Patents, Politicians, Privacy, Robots, Shares, Software, Twitter, VCs Leave a comment

What's the Future - Tim O'Reilly

Best Read of the Year, not just for high technology, but for a reasoned meaning behind political events over the last two years, both in the UK and the USA. I can relate it straight back to some of the prescient statements made by Jeff Bezos about Amazon “Day 1” disciplines: the best defence against an organisations path to oblivion being:

  1. customer obsession
  2. a skeptical view of proxies
  3. the eager adoption of external trends, and
  4. high-velocity decision making

Things go off course when interests divide in a zero-sum way between different customer groups that you serve, and where proxies indicating “success” diverge from a clearly defined “desired outcome”.

The normal path is to start with your “customer” and give an analogue of what indicates “success” for them in what you do; a clear understanding of the desired outcome. Then the measures to track progress toward that goal, the path you follow to get there (adjusting as you go), and a frequent review that steps still serve the intended objective. 

Fake News on Social Media, Finance Industry Meltdowns, unfettered slavery to “the market” and to “shareholder value” have all been central to recent political events in both the UK and the USA. Politicians of all colours were complicit in letting proxies for “success” dissociate fair balance of both wealth and future prospects from a vast majority of the customers they were elected to serve. In the face of that, the electorate in the UK bit back – as they did for Trump in the US too.

Part 3 of the book, entitled “A World Ruled by Algorithms” – pages 153-252 – is brilliant writing on our current state and injustices. Part 4 (pages 255-350) entitled “It’s up to us” maps a path to brighter times for us and our descendants.

Tim says:

The barriers to fresh thinking are even higher in politics than in business. The Overton Window, a term introduced by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy,  says that an ideas political viability falls within a window framing a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion. There are ideas that a politician simply cannot recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.

In the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump didn’t just  push the Overton Window far too to right, he shattered it, making statement after statement that would have been disqualifying for any previous candidate. Fortunately, once the window has come unstuck, it is possible to move it radically new directions.

He then says that when such things happen, as they did at the time of the Great Depression, the scene is set to do radical things to change course for the ultimate greater good. So, things may well get better the other side of Trumps outrageous pandering to the excesses of the right, and indeed after we see the result of our electorates division over BRexit played out in the next 18 months.

One final thing that struck me was how one political “hot potato” issue involving Uber in Taiwan got very divided and extreme opinions split 50/50 – but nevertheless got reconciled to everyone’s satisfaction in the end. This using a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and a piece of software called “Pol.is”. This allows folks to publish assertions, vote and see how the filter bubbles evolve through many iterations over a 4 week period. “I think Passenger Liability Insurance should be mandatory for riders on UberX private vehicles” (heavy split votes, 33% both ends of the spectrum) evolved to 95% agreeing with “The Government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to improve their management and quality control system, so that drivers and riders would enjoy the same quality service as Uber”. The licensing authority in Taipei duly followed up for the citizens and all sides of that industry. 

I wonder what the BRexit “demand on parliament” would have looked like if we’d followed that process, and if indeed any of our politicians could have encapsulated the benefits to us all on either side of that question. I suspect we’d have a much clearer picture than we do right now.

In summary, a superb book. Highly recommended.

Crossing the Chasm on One Page of A4 … and Wardley Maps

ianwaring Blind Alleys, Books, Enterprise IT, Future Trends, Management, Marketing, Software, Wardley Maps Leave a comment

Crossing the Chasm Diagram

Crossing the Chasm – on one sheet of A4

The core essence of most management books I read can be boiled down to occupy a sheet of A4. There have also been a few big mistakes along the way, such as what were considered at the time to be seminal works, like Tom Peter’s “In Search of Excellence” — that in retrospect was an example summarised as “even the most successful companies possess DNA that also breed the seeds of their own destruction”.

I have much simpler business dynamics mapped out that I can explain to fast track employees — and demonstrate — inside an hour; there are usually four graphs that, once drawn, will betray the dynamics (or points of failure) afflicting any business. A very useful lesson I learnt from Microsoft when I used to distribute their software. But I digress.

Among my many Business books, I thought the insights in Geoffrey Moores Book “Crossing the Chasm” were brilliant — and useful for helping grow some of the product businesses i’ve run. The only gotcha is that I found myself keeping on cross referencing different parts of the book when trying to build a go-to-market plan for DEC Alpha AXP Servers (my first use of his work) back in the mid-1990’s — the time I worked for one of DEC’s Distributors.

So, suitably bored when my wife was watching J.R. Ewing being mischievous in the first UK run of “Dallas” on TV, I sat on the living room floor and penned this one page summary of the books major points. Just click it to download the PDF with my compliments. Or watch the author himself describe the model in under 14 minutes at an O’Reilly Strata Conference here. Or alternatively, go buy the latest edition of his book: Crossing the Chasm

My PA (when I ran Marketing Services at Demon Internet) redrew my hand-drawn sheet of A4 into the Microsoft Publisher document that output the one page PDF, and that i’ve referred to ever since. If you want a copy of the source file, please let me know — drop a request to: [email protected].

That said, i’ve been far more inspired by the recent work of Simon Wardley. He effectively breaks a service into its individual components and positions each on a 2D map;  x-axis dictates the stage of the components evolution as it does through a Chasm-style lifecycle; the y-axis symbolises the value chain from raw materials to end user experience. You then place all the individual components and their linkages as part of an end-to-end service on the result. Having seen the landscape in this map form, then to assess how each component evolves/moves from custom build to commodity status over time. Even newest components evolve from chaotic genesis (where standards are not defined and/or features incomplete) to becoming well understood utilities in time.

The result highlights which service components need Agile, fast iterating discovery and which are becoming industrialised, six-sigma commodities. And once you see your map, you can focus teams and their measures on the important changes needed without breeding any contradictory or conflict-ridden behaviours. You end up with a well understood map and – once you overlay competitive offerings – can also assess the positions of other organisations that you may be competing with.

The only gotcha in all of this approach is that Simon hasn’t written the book yet. However, I notice he’s just provided a summary of his work on his Bits n Pieces Blog yesterday. See: Wardley Maps – set of useful Posts. That will keep anyone out of mischief for a very long time, but the end result is a well articulated, compelling strategy and the basis for a well thought out, go to market plan.

In the meantime, the basics on what is and isn’t working, and sussing out the important things to focus on, are core skills I can bring to bear for any software, channel-based or internet related business. I’m also technically literate enough to drag the supporting data out of IT systems for you where needed. Whether your business is an Internet-based startup or an established B2C or B2B Enterprise focussed IT business, i’d be delighted to assist.

Ians Brain goes all Economics on him

ianwaring Books, Budgets, Future Trends, Journalism, Newspapers, Politicians, Tax Leave a comment

A couple of unconnected events in the last week. One was an article by Scott Adams of Dilbert Fame, with some observations about how Silicon Valley was really one big Psychological Experiment (see his blog post: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_pivot/).

It’s a further extension on a comment I once read by Max Schireson, CEO of MongoDB, reflecting on how Salespeoples compensation works – very much like paying in lottery tickets: http://maxschireson.com/2013/02/02/sales-compensation-and-lottery-tickets/.

The main connection being that Salespeople tend to get paid in lottery tickets in Max’s case, whereas Scott thinks the same is an industry-wide phenomenon – for hundreds of startup companies in one part of California just south of San Francisco. Both hence disputing a central ethos of the American Dream – that he who works hard gets the (financial) spoils.

Today, there was a piece on BBC Radio 2 about books that people never get to finish reading. This was based on some analysis of progress of many people reading Kindle books; this being useful because researchers can see where people stop reading as they progress through each book. By far the worst case example turned out to be “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty, where people tended to stop around Page 26 of a 700-page book.

The executive summary of this book was in fact quite pithy; it predicts that the (asset) rich will continue to get richer, to the expense of the rest of the population whose survival depends on receiving an income flow. Full review here. And that it didn’t happen last century due to two world wars and the 1930’s depression, something we’ve not experienced this century. So far. The book just went into great detail, chapter by chapter, to demonstrate the connections leading to the authors thesis, and people abandoned the book early en mass.

However, it sounds plausible to me; assets tend to hold their relative “value”, whereas money is typically deflationary (inflation of monetary values and devaluation through printing money, no longer anchored to a specific value of gold assets). Even the UK Government factor the devaluation in when calculating their future debt repayment commitments. Just hoping this doesn’t send us too far to repeat what happened to Rome a couple of thousand years ago or so (as cited in one of my previous blog posts here).

Stand back – intellectual deep thought follows:

The place where my brain shorted out was the thought that, if that trend continued, that at some point our tax regime would need to switch from being based monetary income flows to being based on assets owned instead. The implications of this would be very far reaching.

That’ll be a tough sell – at least until everyone thinks we’ve returned to a feudal system and the crowds with pitchforks appear on the scene.

For Enterprise Sales, nothing sells itself…

ianwaring Books, Budgets, Enterprise IT, Future Trends, Management, Purchasing, Selling, Software Leave a comment

Trusted Advisor

I saw a great blog post published on the Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) web site asking why Software as a Service offerings didn’t sell themselves here. A lot of it stems from a misunderstanding what a good salesperson does (and i’ve been blessed to work alongside many good ones throughout my career).

The most successful ones i’ve worked with tend to work there way into an organisation and to suss the challenges that the key executives are driving as key business priorities. To understand how all the levers get pulled from top to bottom of the org chart, and to put themselves in a position of “trusted advisor”. To be able to communicate ideas that align with the strategic intent, to suggest approaches that may assist, and to have references ready that demonstrate how the company the salesperson represents have solved similar challenges for other organisations. At all times, to know who the customer references and respects across their own industry.

Above all, to have a thorough and detailed execution plan (or set of checklists) that they follow to understand the people, their processes and their aspirations. That with enough situational awareness that they know who or what could positively – and negatively – affect the propensity of the customer to spend money. Not least to avoid the biggest competitor of all – an impression that “no decision” or a project stall will leave them in a more comfortable position than enacting a needed change.

When someone reaches board level, then their reference points tend to be folks in the same position at other companies. Knowing the people networks both inside and outside the company are key.

Folks who I regard as the best salespeople i’ve ever worked with tend to be straight forward, honest, well organised, articulate, planned, respectful of competitors and adept at working an org chart. And they also know when to bring in the technical people and senior management to help their engagements along.

The antithesis are the “wham bam thankyou mam”, competitors killed at all costs and incessant quoters of speeds and feeds. For those, i’d recommend reading a copy of “The Trusted Advisor” by Maister, Green and Galford.

Trust is a prize asset, and the book describes well how it is obtained and maintained in an Enterprise selling environment. Also useful to folks like me who tend to work behind the scenes to ensure salespeople succeed; it gives some excellent insight into the sort of material that your sales teams can carry into their customers and which is valued by the folks they engage with.

Being trusted and a source of unique, valuable insights is a very strong position for your salespeople to find themselves in. You owe it to them to be a great source of insights and ideas, either from your own work or curated from other sources – and to keep customers informed and happy at all costs. Simplicity sells.

Recommended Bedtime Reading, and signing off for a bit…

ianwaring Amazon, Apple, Books, Google Leave a comment

I’ve never really been a big fiction fan. About the only author i’ve read extensively (outside high technology and business stuff – don’t yawn) was by Michael Crichton. At least the books that have yet to be turned into films. Well, all except “Disclosure”, where Demi Moore sexually harasses Michael Douglas and then throws the company’s political establishment against him when he refuses to succumb to her charms. But I digress.

There’s been a lot of comment on the blogs and twitter feeds I follow on the West Coast of the USA that keep on citing a new book by Andy Weir called “The Martian”. I tried to buy it on my last trip abroad, thinking i’d go buy the voiced version on Audible to listen to, but baulked at it’s then £20+ price tag. However, it appeared on an Amazon email last week for under £10 in hardback form, so I bought it.

Finished it today (like many of the USA folks, completely immersed in it for two days between work bursts). I’m completely with them; it is a fantastic book, and would make a great film. A modern day Robinson Crusoe, but one accidentally left behind on Mars. At least Crusoe had to worry more about Cannibals than continuously working around all the life support systems, and food, to last long enough to be rescued. If indeed NASA didn’t just leave him behind to eat his poison pills. Thoroughly recommended, and superbly written throughout.

Tomorrow, i’m off to Cornwall for a short break before I start my next assignment, which will start on June 2nd. Really looking forward to it. As such, the frequency of my blog posts are, with effect from today, going to drop to one per week. I think my daily posts have now caught up with my brain nuances, and the newsflow in High Technology has started to slow. At least until Apple have their Worldwide Developers Conference at the start of June, and Google do their matching I/O conference a week or two later.

In the three months or so i’ve been writing this blog, a few articles keep on getting lots of page views well after their posting data. The Crossing the Chasm one got reposted on LinkedIn by the original author of the book i’d summarised, and I started to get warnings from WordPress that I appeared to have an incoming tidal wave for 3 days running.

For some reason, my mention of Chromecast working on the Tesco Hudl tablet gets regular traffic, nominally by hoards of people querying Google to see if Tesco sell Chromecast in the UK.

Surprisingly few look at my tips for spotting the 4 key trends to look at with any business, in order to suss out what dimensions are and are not working. Or the other post about how to conduct yourself in a price war (there are only two things you focus on, and all paths to action stem from there).

I’m gone for a week, and to see how adept my 2 year old granddaughter has got on her iPad Mini we bought her (a necessity, as when she visits us, I never could get it back until she leaves again). She is impressively native on it with photos and with YouTube. Even tries to swipe “Skip Ad” on ITV on the telly.

So, signing off until May 30th. See you once i’m back.

At long last: Thorough journalism meets MH370

ianwaring Books, Demon Internet, Journalism Leave a comment

The Mystery of Malaysia Airways Flight 370 Book Artwork

A long time ago, Microsoft turned up at several ISPs doors with a distribution of their latest browser, Internet Explorer 6. Around a week later, CDs of a completely customised version of Demon’s trial experience landed on over 180,000 customers desks. The speed at which every team executed was phenomenal (even leading to complaints from BT that we must have been given an unfair advantage; we hadn’t). A key part of this execution being the web team then led by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley.

Since the time we both worked there, she’s learnt to fly, runs her “Fear of Landing” blog and has written another book (Why Planes Crash: 2001) that catalogued several air accidents.

It looks like she’s just repeated the same scale of feat as the one she pulled off at Demon, writing a book about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the whole book written in 4 weeks. I know she was interviewed by Russian Television about MH370 long before she’d written the book, given some of her excellent work pulling together some of the threads of the investigation. As she recounted on her Facebook feed:

So, yes, I wrote a book in a month. To be fair, I became obsessed with it the month before, so a lot of the research was already done. I wrote like CRAZY. I also kept spreadsheets to track *everything* so that I would be able to share stats. Here you go:

Idea conceived: 1st of April
First word written: 2nd of April
First draft done: 19th of April
Book launched: 27th of April
Spreadsheets created for random tracking: 12
Days where I wondered if I was crazy: 26
Total words: 46,173
Words per day high score: 6,095
Max words per hour: 820
Most played song on iTunes: Red Lights
Best arbitrary reward for hitting wordcount goals: Wonka Nerds imported from US
Packets of Nerds eaten: 6
Gym visits: 4
Pounds gained: 6
Vows to go to gym every single day if I can just get this goddamn book done: 37
Days that my loving boyfriend left town because I was unbearable to live with: 10
Naps taken: 30
Baths needed: 27
Baths taken: 4
Victory dances around the living room when I achieved a round number on my wordcount: 7
Conversations dominated by MH370: all of them

I’ve forwarded this news (of the book that is!) to various people in the USA who have been left practically crawling up the wall with the many hours of otherwise content-free coverage of MH370 on CNN. I hope this will provide them with some much needed escape from that monotony!

So, to leave you with the summary:

In this age of constant surveillance, it shouldn’t be possible to lose a Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers. It’s inconceivable that the aircraft flew for seven hours without anyone noticing that it was up there, completely off track. Yet, that’s exactly what happened. Sylvia Wrigley, pilot and aviation expert, explores the possibilities in the pages of The Mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Wrigley is a pilot and aviation writer who has been obsessing about aviation safety for ten years.

Understand every aspect of the mystery

  • Flying with Malaysia Airlines
  • MH370 Disappears
  • Popular Theories
  • A Deep Sea Search
  • The Aftermath

You can buy your copy of the book (as I have) from several places via Sylvia’s own link here.

 

Becoming More Efficient; Moonshot scale ideas available

ianwaring Amazon, Books, Future Trends, Google, Management Leave a comment

 

Efficiency Straight Ahead

The statistics below are from an unashamed promotion of a new book, but I thought this was well articulated. The authors cite some statistics to think about:

Examples of Energy Inefficiency

  • The average car spends more than 95 percent of its time …. doing nothing.
  • Less than 40 percent of electrical transmission capacity is in use at any given time.
  • A calorie of beef requires 160 times more energy to produce than one of corn—and as the world grows richer, more people eat beef.
  • The cost of bringing an oil well online has more than tripled over the last decade.
  • A Motorway operating at peak throughput is less than 10 percent covered with cars.
  • Phnom Penh has a lower water leakage rate than London.

There used to be a very small detached house just inside Pamber Forest which I used to pass daily, and often wondered whether I could live quite happily in such a small place. Not quite as extreme as the Capsule Hotels you find in some areas of Japan, but a step in that direction nonetheless. This would probably mean quite a ruthless clean of the miscellaneous stuff we have all over the current house, but i’m sure there would be impressive efficiencies if we knuckled down to it.

The good thing about looking at stats like this is to start having thoughts of what Larry Page (CEO of Google) terms “Moonshots“. What could be done to improve things 10x, 100x or 1000x better than is considered normal by the rest of us, and what changes will that lead us to.

The authors feel that there’s a lot of waste in the status quo, and thus a great chance to produce and use resources much more effectively. But they don’t think it means that the sky is falling, and that our grandchildren are fated to inherit a poisoned, angry, gloomy, planet. That is also the argument of their new book, Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century
by McKinsey’s Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers.

My brain starts to wander at this point, and I still have this nagging feeling that all the books in my bookcase could be summarised down to 1-2pages each of people really tried – or less than 30 if examples are cited. One of the neat things about Kindle Books is that Amazon actually allow you to produce and sell stuff at that length; the The Bitcoin Primer: Risks, Opportunities, And Possibilities book
I purchased was an excellent 27 page read.

In terms of manufacturing (I guess they must be manufacturing consultants by day), they suggest looking at five areas: substitution (replacing costly, clunky, or scarce materials with cheaper, better ones); optimization (using IT to improve the production and use of resources – to order rather than into stock?); virtualization (which must really mean sweating otherwise idle assets?); circularity (finding value in products after their initial use) and waste elimination.

However, then then start citing “having to deal with more complex supply chains”, while integrating “big data” (hmmm – fad alert!) and finding diverse talent with new skills in areas like software- and system-integration (while I thought those were pretty well established!).

They conclude, “any bet that we will succumb to a global economic crisis is a bet against human ingenuity. No such bet has ever paid off.”

Looks an interesting book nonetheless, and i’m sure some good nuggets to pick at. Duly added to my Wish List.

Avoiding the strangling of your best future prospects

ianwaring Books, Budgets, Enterprise IT, Future Trends, Management, Marketing, Metrics Leave a comment

Escape Velocity Book Cover

I’m a big fan of the work of Geoffrey Moore, whose seminal work “Crossing the Chasm” i’ve cited before (in fact, the one page version is the #1 download from this blog). However, one of his other books is excellent if you’re faced with a very common issue in High Technology companies; having successful, large product line(s) thats suck all the life out of new, emerging businesses in the same enterprise. The book is “Escape Velocity”:

Unlike Crossing the Chasm, i’ve not yet summarised it on one sheet of A4, but have outlined the major steps on 14 slides. It sort of works like this:

The main revenue/profit engines in most organisations occur between the early and late majority consumers of the product or services; that can last a long time, denoted by the Elastic Middle:

Product Lifecycle

That said, there are normally products that sales will focus on to drive the current years Revenue and Profit targets; these routinely consume a majority of the resources available. Given a fair crack of the whip, there are normally emergent products that while not material in size today, are showing good signs of growth, and which may generate significant revenue and profits in the 1 to 3 year future. There are also likely to be some longer term punts which have yet to show promise, but which may do so in a 3 to 6 year timeframe:

3 Horizons

The chief way to categorise products/services against the relevant Product Horizon is to graph a scatter plot of revenue or profit for each line on one axis, against growth on the other (10% growth is a typical divider between the High and Low growth Quadrants):

3 Horizons to Category Power

Any products or services on Horizon 0 needs to be shielded from core resources and to be optimised to be cash generative while it lasts. The other product/service horizons are segregated and typically have a different go-to-market team (with appropriate Key Performance Indicators) assigned to each:

Focus Areas

The development pattern for Horizon 2 products are typical of the transition from “Chasm” into the “Tornado” stage on the normal Chasm lifecycle diagram. It’s a relentless learning experience, ruthlessly designing out custom services to form a standard offering for the market segments you target:

Free Resources to Context

As you execute through the various sales teams and move between financial years, there’s a lot of introspection to ensure that the focus on likely winners continues is appropriately ruthless:

Action

The sales teams driving Horizon 2 offerings should be seeking to aim high in customer organisations and drive strategies to establish a beachhead, then dominate, specific focus segments. In doing so, be mindful that a small supporting community tends to cross reference each other. Good salespeople get to know the people networks that do so, and work diligently to connect across them with their colleagues.

Trusted Advisor

The positioning of your Horizon 2 offers tend to vary depending on price and benefit; this in turn looks about like the findings from another seminal work, “The Discipline of Market Leaders”. That book suggested that really successful companies put their relentless effort into only one of three possible core competences; to be the Product Innovator, to be Customer Intimate or to be Operationally Excellent:

Benefit Sensitivity

Once you have the positioning, the Horizon 2 sales team relentlessly focus on the key people or organisations that make up their target market segment(s):

Drive to Share of Segment

The number of organisations they engage differ markedly between Enterprise (Complex) and Consumer (Volume) markets:

Target Customers

So the engagement checklist needs to address all these areas:

Target Market Initiatives

The sales team need to be able to articulate “What makes their offer different”:

Differentials

Then pick their targets:

Growing Horizon 2

Above all, be conscious who your competitors are and where you’re positioned against them:

From Whom

That’s largely it. Just a process to keep assessing the source of future revenue and profits, and ensuring you segment your sales teams to drive both this years business, and separately working on the green shoots that will provide your future. And avoiding what often happens, which is that the existing high revenue or high profit lines demand so much resources that they suffocate your future.

You can probably name a few companies that have done exactly that. Yours doesn’t need to be the next one now!