When projects don’t stack: the fine art of understanding mistakes

By Mark Di Somma

When a project doesn’t meet expectations, I’m fascinated by what gets asked, who does the asking and what, if anything, emerges as the key learning. My view is that we should treat projects that don’t go to plan not so much as wreckages but rather as breakages: they occur when the picture we have in our minds of what will occur shatters, splits or simply falls a different way than we had led ourselves to expect. That can mean something as elemental as having the wrong picture in the first place – or it can come down to developments that pulled things out of alignment.

Faced with picking up the pieces, here are 22 questions I use to try and get to the truth, and to move on:

1. What exactly went wrong? (What did not happen?)

2. How “wrong” was it – in the sense that how much did it differ from what we had told ourselves would happen?

3. How realistic was our prediction in the first place? (How did we arrive at that prediction?)

4. What did we do right throughout the project?

5. When did the quality change and what was the impact of that?

6. Even though we did things right, what didn’t happen that we expected to happen?

7. What did we base that expectation on? Was that reasonable?

8. Where did the biggest miscalculations occur? What did happen that took us by surprise?

9. Why were we not ready for that?

10. Who was most taken by surprise when things didn’t go to plan – and why?

11. What did we prompt people to do (or not do) that led to that occurring?

12. How did we seek to prompt customers to respond?

13. How quickly did we want them to respond? Why was that timeframe important?

14. If they did respond well and as expected, why did the initiative fail?

15. If they didn’t respond, why didn’t they do what we asked them to do? Because they didn’t want to do it, or because we didn’t provide enough incentive for them to do it quickly enough?

16. Who did we not reach that we should have?

17. Why were they not where we thought they would be? Or did we ignore them?

18. What did that cost us?

19. How did we react when we were taken by surprise?

20. Are we still working under the same miscalculations that saw this project fail?

21. Is everyone truly aware of what part their actions played in the project not hitting its targets? (Has everyone been told the truth about how much of the responsibility lies with them? None, some, a little, more …?)

22. How have we rewarded the people who took part so that they will feel motivated to do their best by the next project?

Acknowledgements
Photo of “Crazy hills of San Francisco” by Hakan Dahlstrom, sourced from Flickr

Brand management: The dangers of yes, no and clothing the Emperor.

By Mark Di Somma

People buy brands, not managers. And yet think about the number of managers who make judgment calls, sometimes very big judgment calls, based on their own opinions and experiences? They feel comfortable because they are expressing views and making decisions that fit with their worldview. But that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing the brand justice, particularly if their viewpoints compromise the personality of the brand itself.

Hands up if you’ve ever been to this meeting:

“I like orange.”

Or “Don’t make it orange.”

“Use short words.”

Or “People don’t read.”

“We need to be on TV.”

And/or “We need to export.”

Brands thrive when they are based on meaning, trust, relevance and delight – but of course they must deliver that meaning, trust, relevance and delight to the buyer, not the seller. Otherwise they risk narcissism.

Every brand must pursue a life of its own – not affirm the life of a manager. And to me, that integral sense of being an asset in its own right hangs on ten things. A brand must have:

Its own name (obviously)
Its own purpose
Its own values
Its own viewpoints
Its own story
Its own language – verbal and visual
Its own structure
Its own pricing
Its own style of marketing
Its own experiences

Without distinctive brand attributes, companies are left to market the Emperor’s new clothes. And yet at the same time as a brand’s attributes must evolve to remain distinctive, they must remain recognisable to consumers.

Brand evolution is not about yes or no. It’s about on-brand or not. Personal opinion is a dangerous decision maker because it seems so reasonable to the person with the opinion. Unless managers can put distance between what they believe and what the brand believes, unless they can plan not just for difference but for distinctly and consistently branded difference at every point, a brand can quickly fall victim to compromise, distraction and sector and personal bias.

As Ron Johnson, the ex-CEO at JC Penney, has discovered to his cost, what feels so “yes” to a decision maker can be worlds apart from what the people making the buying decisions want. While his replacement, Myron Ullman, is quoted in this NY Times article as saying, “Nobody ever wins by going back in retail because the customers’ expectations change all the time”, it’s equally true that the way forward must align with what people expect for the brand as well.

As Bill Campbell pointed out in an interview in Wired recently, “Johnson was tone-deaf to the issues … Whatever you need to do, you have to keep the current business going while you are experimenting with your new one. He didn’t do that. What he did was put a bullet hole in his current business and went about trying to create a new one.”

It may even sound like I think brand managers’ opinions don’t count. Of course they do. No-one is closer to a brand and has more direct impact on its future direction than those who guide it and who are responsible for it every day. Just be very clear what sorts of opinions hold value. And which represent trouble.

Know the customers’ agenda. Pursue the customers’ agenda.
(Not what you think it is. And not what you’d like it to be.)

Acknowledgement
Photo of “Coat hangers” by Matt Callow, sourced from Flickr

Don’t plan to be a start-up. Plan to be an upstart.

By Mark Di Somma

You should never start a business unless you are deliberately planning for others in the industry to be dismayed, surprised, outraged or alarmed by what you are doing.

“Start-up” has become a synonym for starting-out. It implies not just being at the beginning, but needing to catch up to someone more established in order to prove oneself.

Launching an upstart on the other hand is all about putting a business in play that really challenges what everyone else has accepted as the rules.

That’s because a start-up focuses on getting a product or an idea to market, whereas an upstart focuses on an “enemy” (be it an attitude or a standardised approach) and looks to a product or service to change that.

Without a business model trained on defying and disrupting the status quo, you are destined to be another player trying to get a footing in another overplayed market. A feature, no matter how beneficial, is not a disruption. If all that stands between you and your competitors is a product improvement, a customer service change, a change in your distribution plan or a new pricing model, you can bank on it being copied, commoditised or counter-attacked at the first sign of sustained success. Then what?

The equation is stark. Rock the boat, and keep rocking the boat – or risk ending up in the same boat as everyone else.

Acknowledgements
Photo of “Row boat” taken by PAVDW (Paul VanDerWerf), sourced from Flickr

The future myth

By Mark Di Somma

Transformation isn’t about plotting a meeting point for your brand with the predicted future. It’s not about getting to where the puck will be, to paraphrase Wayne Gretsky. Because depending on the arrival of the next big thing or that breaking wave, that hot new trend, the long-awaited demographic or anything else for that matter is conjecture. Banking on it is simply speculation.

To evolve successfully, brands must grow out of what they have into what they need to be. They cannot shape the future. They can only shape their future.

That is what they have control of. That is what they are responsible for. The customers they take with them into the future. The actions they drive in the future. The products they will make. The culture they build for the future.

All strategists and decision makers can and should read out of the macro-trends, and even the supposedly “specific” future trends for that matter, are the broad indicators of the change that’s coming and perhaps a sense of where it might be coming from. Nothing more – certainly not the exact nature and timing of that change.

But what brands can do, indeed must do, is use what they’re hearing and what their data is telling them to quantify what must be dealt with today: the instability of the present; the intensity of the competition; the changes in the world that they want to take charge of; and the degree to which they may be able to build on, or reject, what they have as they push forward. Being aware of those things will help quantify receptivity for what they have planned.

Deal with what you know, but look beyond what you have.

Acknowledgements
Photo of Barometer by Matt Wharton (electricinca), sourced from Flickr

The global challenge of doing business openly

By Mark Di Somma

Congratulations to All Good Organics, the first New Zealand company to make the prestigious Ethisphere Institute’s World’s Most Ethical (WME) companies list. All Good may be tiny but this ranking puts them in some great company – one of just 145 companies, chosen from more than 5000 entries. Judge for yourself.

In the light of this win, interesting to read Raz Godelnik’s take on the difference that CSR actually makes for companies in this post on TriplePundit:

A MIT Sloan Management Review and BCG survey showed 40% of executives polled believed the greatest benefit to an organisation in addressing sustainability was “improved brand reputation”.

Godelnik goes on to cite evidence that CSR initiatives help companies retain stock value when facing corporate governance scandals and product recalls, and that firms viewed as having weak CSR suffered stock declines twice the size of firms viewed as having strong CSR after riots surrounding 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle.

While consumers might not be willing to pay higher prices for greener products, he says, they will more likely purchase goods from firms that are more socially responsible. However, consumers are often not aware of a firm’s CSR activities and that in turn limits the extent to which CSR reputation actually makes a difference in customers’ decisions.

Godelnik’s conclusions? “In all, it looks like studies support the notion that CSR can impact companies’ reputation positively, helping them improve their reputation with stakeholders and be more resilient in times of crisis. Still, companies need to work hard to make sure stakeholders are aware of their efforts and that these efforts are sincere.”

Two questions. In the light of Godelnik’s findings, is CSR more than just a marketing exercise for many companies? And is his conclusion specific to CSR – or could one just as easily replace CSR with the word “actions” and the statement work just as well? That’s not intended as any belittlement of what the writer is saying – simply an observation that I think the conversation that’s been centred around CSR has been too narrow. The discussion can in fact be broadened to include the ramifications of actions (and reputation) generally, and from there to a closer inspection of the radically different way in which business is being done now.

To me, CSR is the symptom, not the subject. We are in the middle of a wider and much more radical transition than the move to ethical. I have stated on a number of occasions that to me, the key issue is one of responsibility. But the broader adaption I think is about how brands adapt to a world of unparalleled openness. It’s about the fundamental challenge to closed trading that the internet introduced and now encourages – and the questions that openness generates. How do you continue to make money when everyone can see more and more of what you’re doing? Companies are still struggling in my view to find a path through what feels like the conflicting pulls of ethical behaviour and competitive behaviour.

A truly social business world is do-able – but it’s far from done. In her excellent e-book “11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era”, Nilofer Merchant makes this salient point, “Things we once considered opposing forces – doing right by people and delivering results, collaborating and keeping focus, having a social purpose and making money – are really not in opposition … But we need a more sophisticated approach to understand business models where making a profit doesn’t mean losing purpose, community, and connection.”

I think those business models are still very much in development. Some, like All Good and those on the Ethisphere list, are addressing that by, quite literally, competing ethically – and inviting the world to watch and emulate. Contrast for example Godelnik’s analysis of what companies are looking to get out of CSR (a reputational insurance policy in a world of insatiable scrutiny) with All Good owner Chris Morrison’s view, quoted in an article on Stuff, of why they are in business: “”All Good believes we can’t ignore the consequences, humane or environmental, of growing the food we eat and enjoy, even though it may happen a long way from New Zealand.”

It’s one thing to incorporate CSR initiatives into a traditionally strategised business in a bid to win ethical brownie points. It’s quite another to view responsible behaviours as part and parcel of a broader and longer term transit to a globally competitive environment based on no harm and no secrets.

The capitalism of yesterday thrived on winning. The capitalism of today (with its need to work in a socially connected world) thrives on sharing. But the capitalism of tomorrow will need to succeed by giving. Thanks to ethical companies like All Good we have started to see the capacity for brands in the future to actually give more by trading more. Cradle-to-cradle thinking might even suggest that, going forward, new competitive models may pivot on that greater generosity, so that the more people trade, the more poverty is reduced, the cleaner the environment becomes and the better off the whole world is.

I’m excited to see where that might lead.

Whose buying – and whose purchasing?

By Mark Di Somma

At first the question appears nonsensical. But only if you assume that buying and purchasing are synonyms. Most financial systems treat them as exactly that because, from their perspective, the result is the same. Income. But there is a difference – and being able to define and quantify that difference is important.

Semantics doesn’t just split hairs. It splits customers. It isolates loyalties and behaviours. And in so doing, it potentially defines different actions. But it only does so for those prepared to look for the nuances.

As big data hands marketers and decision makers more and more detail, the ability to read between the lines and find the nuances of behaviour in the numbers will be more important than ever.

In this case, being able to tell the difference between your buyers (“the people who actively choose to buy from us”) and your purchasers (“the people who happen to have bought from us”) reveals two very different parties in terms of inclination.

The first will be back. The second may not.

Things become a little more complicated when trying to read between the lines of more abstract decisions. Here, nuance offers opportunities to isolate and granularise priorities that, just like the numbers, can easily be swept up in generalisations.

Which would you rather have?

A workforce. Or staff.
Reasons. Or purpose.
Suppliers. Or providers.
Obligations. Or responsibilities.
Story. Or history.
Social media. Or social interaction.
Conversations. Or dialogue.

What do you have right now? And more particularly, can you tell or have you never asked?

Acknowledgements

Photograph of “Mystery Shopper” by John Goode, sourced from Flickr

CSR has failed. Now what?

By Mark Di Somma

That’s the question being asked by Wayne Visser in this thoughtful and searching paper that raises significant concerns about how companies pursue responsible ideas. But, alongside those areas that he has identified as needing to be addressed, Visser proposes his vision of CSR 2.0. I was keen to explore what some of the ideas mooted here might mean for brand behaviours going forward.

First – a brief recap of Visser’s argument. If you define CSR as “an integrated, systemic approach by business that builds, rather than erodes or destroys, economic, social, human and natural capital”, then we have no choice, says Visser, than to mark CSR as a fail because communities and ecosystems are getting worse. While at the micro level there have been improvements, at the macro level, social, environmental and ethical health is in decline. And that’s because most sustainability and corporate responsibility programs are really about being less bad in pockets than actively good across the board.

CSR, he says, transits through five Ages:

1. Greed – limited corporate sustainability and responsibility practices are initiated but only if and when it protects shareholder value

2. Philanthropy – companies support various social and environmental causes through donations and sponsorships, but that’s the limit of their involvement

3. Marketing – the ‘greenwash’ phase, when CSR is looked upon as a public relations opportunity to enhance brand, image and reputation

4. Management – CSR activities are aligned to core business in some way, and undertaken through adherence to CSR codes and systems. (Watch the Dame Anita Roddick video referenced below for the Body Shop founder’s withering take on how management and accounting firms have fostered this in order to make huge amounts of money.)

5. Responsibility – activities actively focus on identifying and tackling the root causes of unsustainability and irresponsibility, through business models, disruptive processes and offerings, and lobbying for changes to national and international policies that benefit the wider community.

The first four phases doom CSR to failure, says Visser. But Responsibility is a step-change. Brands in the Responsibility Age of CSR in other words are actively looking to change the world rather than simply engaging in change processes that suit them.

Three pointers then, based on Visser’s thinking, on how brands might choose to pursue responsibility in the years ahead.

1. Purposeful creativity: Brands will need to focus on creatively solving truly pressing needs through a social business model. That of course means that brands will need to identify those globally-based needs, develop market-attractive products that address those needs and monitor how effective change really is. As part of that, they will need to candidly appraise, at least internally, whether the models they use are part of the solution or part of the problem.

These ideas align directly with my own ideas of the “opinionated brand”, the pending changes in disclosure (“what have you done to truly change the world?”) and the need for brands to pursue a true purpose not just the paperwork of vision and mission.

2. Scaled sustainability: Brands will need to make the same commitment to scaled sustainability that they have made to scaled growth. CSR solutions that cannot match that scale and urgency, says Visser, “are red herrings at best and evil diversions at worst.” He dismisses the organic and Fairtrade movements essentially as tinkering and cites Wal-Mart’s supply chain decisions as a true example of 2.0-level scalability.

Based on this, real change needs to be vast to be effective – and therefore will probably need to happen at the distribution level. To deliver that scale and attract significant momentum, global and regionally scaled brands will need to convert their sustainability and responsibility initiatives into meaningful B2B conversations and pack them with repercussions for failure.

3. Accessible fairness: Ethical must democratise if it is to be adapted at scale. In other words, consumers shouldn’t have to choose between the right thing to do and the right price to pay. “CSR will no longer manifest as luxury products and services (as with current green and Fairtrade options), but as affordable solutions for those who most need quality of life improvements.” The Prius, says Visser, is laudable but largely unaffordable. As such it can never be more than an incremental answer.

Brands must open up responsible actions to everyone not just those who can afford them. The tensions in this suggestion are obvious. I wonder if this is an opportunity for VJ Govandarajin’s concept of “reverse innovation” – products that are affordable and that, through their affordability, help everyone participate in changing the world for the better?

I have argued for some time now that CSR gives out the wrong messages and that the term itself needs to be simplified in order to be clarified.

We need to lose the “corporate” in CSR in my view because it implies a big business approach and therefore reputation-focused activities associated with Greed, Philanthropy, Marketing and Management.

We probably need to lose the “social” because the issues that organisations are grappling with, and the answers they will need to find in response, reach far beyond the purely social arena.

But we should retain “Responsibility” because to me that is the focus: the onus on organisations and the individuals within organisations to be responsible and take responsibility. It’s clear. It’s far-reaching. It requires everyone to take a position (and that position is active). And it sets a clear benchmark for every brand in every sector going forward.

“How responsible are we being?”

What do you think?

Acknowledgements
Image of “News Paper Origami Dragon Monster” by epSos.de, sourced from Flickr

Further

Connecting your brand and your social responsibility policies

Video of Dame Anita Roddick on why CSR has failed in her view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sHbOcd8HTI

CorporateWatch on the arguments against CSR

What have you never questioned?

By Mark Di Somma

Every business has loops. Some are driven by fear, some by tradition, some by distraction, some by lack of awareness or industry convention.

Everyone says they’re looking for “competitive difference” – but then, in the race to get it right, they copy each other’s ideas, they mimic each other’s thinking, they catch up with each other’s formulas, they pile onto Facebook alongside everyone else. Sometime later they wonder why their sector seems so much more competitive. Why wouldn’t it be? As conformity grinds down diversity, there are more and more companies in every sector but less and less real choices for customers.

The irony of loops is that the more people behave in the same way, the more assured they feel and the less distinctive they become.

People too get used to thinking certain ways, doing certain things. And slowly, inevitably, workplaces get into loops as cultures become set in their ways. They talk themselves into believing that the best way to make their loop competitive is to leave it as is but to make it go faster – to outpace the other loops. They bind conformity into their language. They do more of the same, more quickly, and congratulate themselves on their productivity.

Same applies to customers. People get used to things, very used to things, and then bored with things. All the way through the first 2/3 of that cycle they want more of the same, and more, and more … And then they want to move on. Blackberry went from customer hero to technological hermit in no time flat. The Palm went from the pocket to the bin as novelty faded and new options beckoned.

It’s human nature to loop because loops are driven by two powerful centrifugal forces: habit; and comfort.

Loops get companies stuck. Think of any company that’s gone under recently. Chances are it was killed by a loop. Think of brands that are fighting to stay relevant. What they’re really fighting against oftentimes is their loops, their own logic, as they shed value with every turn. Think of brands that have commoditised. Loops again.

Here are six sure signs that you are in a loop:

• You have a “stable” business. (Stability is a dangerous state for any brand, because so often it signals complacency.)
• Sales are arcing down or at least they have plateau-ed but no-one seems worried. It’s explained away as a cyclical blip or as a symptom of the economy.
• “But we have a better product/better people” is used to explain away almost any adverse result.
• There’s a lot of talk about history and tradition. The internal mentality is one of preservation rather than pre-emption.
• Concern about looming or converging competition is dismissed as “scaremongering”.
• The customer pool is shrinking. Everyone’s too busy to notice.

But how do you find and correct something that is so much a part of your day, so much a part of how you think and work, so much a part of what you expect?

Actually, you start right there. By asking: what have we never questioned?

It’s an idea I call The Feynman principle, based on the workings of scientist Richard Feynman. The principle: always question what you do know before you enquire about what you don’t know. Feynman saw assumption as the greatest enemy of inquiry, but instead of limiting his focus to how assumption might jeopardise new fields, he continued to question the levels of in-built assumption in what was accepted as known.

So much “innovation” focuses on creating new things in order to move forward. Loop-breaking is about honestly questioning those things that, through force of habit and comfort, have gone un-litigated. Start small. Start with what feels so familiar, too familiar. Start by putting  the question out to everyone who works on the brand. And don’t ask once. Pin the question where everyone can see it. Ask every day.

Acknowledgements

Photo “Merry-Go-Round VII” by isapisa (Isabell Schultz), sourced from Flickr

Seeing past the problem

By Mark Di Somma

Every transformation programme I have ever worked on has been set in motion by a problem. And in every case the issue that has galvinised action and that everyone is so focused on answering is not the real problem at all.

As Simon Sinek has observed, people intuitively deal with what they know before they deal with the things they don’t know or feel less comfortable dealing with. The easiest question, and the place most people start is “what?” They deal first with the symptoms they can see and quantify. And often they address them with a “how” that is equally familiar – the methodology they always use.

But while a particular problem may have set off the trip-wire, in reality that problem is probably a symptom of what’s really happened rather than the real cause.

It’s the prompt.

And just having a way to address that problem does not guarantee any quality of answer. It simply provides a process for everyone to map to.

Do you know the lovely story of Abraham Wald? His reasoning shows why what you think you see can be so misleading. The mathematician was called in to determine how to make bombers safer during the Second World War. Everyone agreed they needed more armour. But where? Armour is heavy. If you put it everywhere, the bombers would never get off the ground. The answer seemed obvious. Put the armour where the planes were being shot the most. So Wald went to work and sketched all the places where bombers returning from their runs were most shot up.

But then, in his analysis of the situation, Wald turned everything on its head. The areas of most apparent damage were not the problem, he concluded, because they appeared on planes that made it back. The real areas of vulnerability on a bomber were those areas that weren’t marked – because planes shot there were the ones that never made it home.

Wald’s wonderful insight was to resist the temptation to ask “what am I looking at?” and to ask instead “why can I see this?” It’s a reminder to all of us. As are the words of the philosopher Karl Popper who said, “Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”

Here’s what I got out of both men’s approaches. The next time you’re grappling with a marketing issue, don’t focus on the symptom or the approach, focus on the situation. And don’t veer towards what you understand. Set a course for what truly isn’t making sense.

Acknowledgements

Photo of man looking at us by Bryan Gosline, sourced from Flickr.

More reading

The strategy of radical beauty
Crunching on cacti
The contradictions of eyelashes and data

If there’s a transformation issue I can help you with, please contact me.

Pricing the ecosystem

Take a look at the diagram below courtesy of Ryan Jones (thanks for the point Marc Abraham). It shows how Apple spans its offerings over a surprisingly wide range of price points.

By introducing new lines, retaining older lines at degraded prices and through the use of provider subsidies, Apple delivers an impressive range of ‘step-in’ opportunities for customers to join its ecosystem.

I’m intrigued by this because, from a brand point of view, these arrangements provide a powerful alternative to traditional “up-sell” approaches and to the discounting that brands so often use to make high-end products more available.

Apple’s approach enables the brand to retain its all-important brand equity whilst providing consumers with the means to address any price barrier in the way they feel most comfortable with. They can enter the Apple world uncommitted or very committed in terms of contracts, with a spec’d up or spec’d down product (which they will then be encouraged to upgrade/add to). Until I saw Ryan’s analysis, I hadn’t realised the sophistication and range of this strategy.

Some learnings:

Choice is not the same as access. In Ryan’s graph, Apple has used product, price, capacity and configuration to turn 3 lines into 25 different ways to buy. The choices shown here are simple: iPhone; iPod; and/or iPad. The technical features offer scope to pay more or less for each product without cannibalising the opportunity to invest in the other members of the family (where more choices are available). There’s always a way to buy what consumers want – and there’s always more to buy.

Consumers are buying the brand, but they are deciding on the user experience they want by how they buy. Apple and its service providers have carefully calibrated the user experience (in terms of things like speed) so that, day to day, consumers either pay for what they get or get what they pay for. Regardless, they do so without any compromise to the Apple brand integrity.

Price isn’t about price. It’s about quantifying commitment. Most brands ask for the sale. Apple, it seems to me, goes one step further, and uses price options to actually ask for the commitment on two levels. First of all, they ask consumers to commit to the product without any obligations and pay upfront for that freedom, or commit over time with obligations and defer the cost of doing so. Secondly, and more importantly, they want consumers to commit to more and more of Apple. The Apple ecosystem exists to make this happen. So they’re not just pricing each range so that it is versatile and defendable, they are using their full ecosystem (including all the products not mentioned here such as laptops and desktops) to actively enable one point or multi-point commitment.

People commit to what they enjoy – and the more enjoyment they get, the more likely they are to continue to commit. With apologies to Hotel California, people can step in any way they like, because Apple’s intention is to then make sure they never leave.

More reading:
How to make sure your company’s next strategy succeeds
Why innovation needs to engage, not just impress
Strategy: 11 ways to purposefully achieve growth
Know thy enemy
You can’t lead as a brand if you follow another brand

Further perspectives
Take A Lesson from Apple: A Strategy to Keep Customers in Your Ecosystem (forbes.com)