Category Archives: rants

Are You Relevant?

Before you answer, think about it.

Carefully.

Because you’re probably not.

That’s right, there’s a good chance that you’re not relevant.

And the worst part? Most likely, it’s not your fault.

The business landscape is changing, the old normal is coming back, and it’s no longer about better, faster, cheaper (or lean and six sigma) or closed systems. As noted in this HBR post about “The New Paradigm of Advantage”, we’re returning to a time where innovation and creativity rule, and where only the relevant companies are going to succeed.

Given that most companies are still struggling, with more going bankrupt every day, it’s pretty obvious that most companies are still not offering relevant products and services. So even though they did well in the last upturn — and let’s face it, it’s hard to fail when money is flowing like the reservoir will never empty — it’s pretty obvious that it wasn’t because they were relevant, but that their success was just a side effect of the overall buoyancy in the market.

Since only a few companies are succeeding right now, relatively speaking, it’s obvious that most companies are not relevant. And these companies are dragging you down with them.

So what can you do?

Get creative. Get innovative. And show your company what they should be doing. As per my recent post on the talent innovation imperative, these companies are not succeeding because they’re wasting their resources — namely, they’re wasting your talents. And there’s no need for it. So get busy and show them what you got. And if they don’t listen, join the majority of your colleagues who are already looking for new opportunities with relevant companies. Because YOU deserve to be relevant!

I Want To Find a Twit-Free Location … Is There an App for That?

Twitter recently turned on the ability to add location information with your tweets, as described on the “How To Tweet With Your Location” page and rolled out the feature to its users. With the new feature, if a user clicks on location information in a location-aware tweet, a small Google map will be displayed showing the location of origin.

As of now, as per this LA Times Blog Post, there is no easy way to find all followers within a specific distance around a user’s current point. Which is unfortunate, because until we can identify the location of every twit within a certain radius, we won’t be able to identify those locations which are twit free, which, frankly, are the only places I want to be.

Playscripts? PLAYSCRIPTS? Are we going back to Kindergarten?!?

I was a little annoyed with the chosen focus of a recent article by Mr. Michael G. Jacobides and very annoyed with the terminology chosen in “Strategy Tools for a Shifting Landscape” (subscription required), a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. While I agree that some companies need to reinvent the way they develop strategy, I’m not sure that strategy should be “defined” by narrative plots, subplots, and characters and definitely convinced that the last thing we want defining corporate strategy is a “playscript”.

Business is, well, business. Not playtime. And while it shouldn’t be duller than necessary, it shouldn’t be all fun and games either. Businesses exist to benefit shareholders. And unless you’re a production house generating content for web, TV, and Movie studios, writing scripts is not going to benefit your shareholders in any way. And while I agree that plots, subplots, and characters might be the best way to describe your strategy to all of the members of your organization, who might otherwise speak different languages (mechanical, programmatic, sales, etc.), a strategy should still be backed up by some research, which is typically expressed in the “maps, graphs, and numbers” the author is telling us to avoid.

And while I also agree that the typical frameworks used by industry analysts (five forces and maps) and blue ocean thinking (value maps and value curves) are better at managing the strategy process than enabling the creative and critical thinking required for success, the last thing we want to do is replace one insufficient framework with another, less sufficient framework. While a story might make a great vision, you can’t execute a story. You can only execute a plan, and that requires more than plots and subplots — it requires processes, steps, and success metrics, captured in traditional maps, graphs, and number formats. So while anything that encourages creativity is great, if all we do is focus on the production of play scripts (instead of including them as another tool in our creativity toolbox to get people brainstorming), our strategies will never progress beyond the imaginative vision of a kindergartener.

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