Random Connections

The annual Gazelles Growth Summit began today in Las Vegas with a host of interesting speakes. Robert Bloom was first at the podium to discuss his new book Inside Advantage. It is a good read and I will write a separate post on it soon. Bloom is full of real life examples from his long career at several ad agencies including CEO of Publis Group.

Using real life examples including Sothwest Airlines, Zales Jewelers, Juicy Juice () and Curves, Bloom describes his process for creating and defending a sustainable market position. In short define your customer as one individual person, create an uncommon offering for this person, describe how you will define your uncommon offering to your customer and then Own It through a series of Imaginative Acts.

Geoffrey Moore followed with a discussion of some new models for defining where shareholder value can best be improved. Moore began with a discussion of Net Free Cash Flow and suggested the best way for early stage companies to increase valuation is to improve the long term prospects by focusing on increasing “Power” where you can get the biggest bang for the buck.

Moore talked about five types of Power and described how these match to marketing activities as shown in this table:

He went on to suggest small companies should focus on Product Marketing which leads to Offer Power.

Then we were employed to maximize the ethical influencial power afforded us through the laws of human nature as studied and described by Robert Cialdini. He outlined six primary areas that afford us influence:
Reciprocation - I scratch your back; you scratch mine
Consensus - What everyone else is doing
Authority - Trusted, knowledgable source

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A panel of software providers (SixApart, NewsGator, SocialText and SpikeSource) listed the same issues around security, compliance and control confronting Enterprise 2.0 implementations seen in the past. Even so, a few companies are beginning to move forward with implementations and some have found creative ways to use these tools.

Adoption is driven less from personal passion and more from significant corporate pain points. Others are looking to provide internal tools for employees that provide the means of communication found in the student/consumer markets.

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Stowe Boyd, author of /Message, presenting today at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference identified a model for designing Web 2.0 applications. Build for the individual first, then for groups of like minded people and then focus on the money making activity for a “market”.

Stowe claims the Internet is increasingly becoming the Third Space, our primary place for discovery and third behind home and work for our favorite place to go. There we find people which is a means to help us find ourselves “at the still point of the turning world”.

The biggest issue for providers raised in the session was building the need for users to create content for enterprise purposes. Using social networking for business connections provides an easy to use profile creator, while generating little if any valuable information beyond the profile. Incorporating the content creation from the normal business activity is critical to succes with these tools.

Stowe is an early and continuing user of Basecamp. He describes it as a very good web app, while not necessarily a good Web 2.0 application. The inability to aggregate projects under one user name limits it’s use as a networking tool. Tying the id to a project is a poor design principle.

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Even though the most likely outcome for a successful technology company is via an acquisition, I have never liked the idea of planning for it.  Plans and actions then often go away from what will help our customers and help us succeed in the market to what would ABC Inc. like to see in an acquisition target.  Rarely do the two line up and even then the focus goes away from key items required to build long term sustainable value.

Guest blogger Will Price offered a sound plan for building value in a post on Ask The VC.  Responding to a question regarding how to prepare for an acquisition exit, Will provided details around these three items.

1) Plan for Independence

“The company’s operating plan, technology road map, and executive team should not focus on unnatural acts, in the hopes of attracting a buyer, but rather on building a company with the potential for independence. Companies built to “flip” often flop.”

2) Be prepared for acquisition

“…acquirers tend to believe that successful partners make the best acquisition targets. “

3) Keep the house in order

“good record keeping makes for good diligence and good diligence makes for expedited outcomes.”

Maximize your “best alternative to a negotiated agreement” (BATNA) and your will be well on your way to delivering value to all your stakeholders.

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Want to spend a few joyful moments playing around with an eye-popping online toy.  Head over to dtoy_vs_byokal  and let your creative juices flow. Maybe I will find a way to place a dtoy widget on this site.

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Ran across a few places to have some fun late one night last week and thought others would find some joy in this as well.

Pikipimp is a good place to start and this may get your attention.

Another example is Dave Cohen who was the target of 5280Angel.

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Why is it so hard to change, even when the evidence for doing so is overwhelming? This article from Scientific American, answers the question Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes, yet there are only 24 hours in a day?

It is interesting, if not surprising, that these measurements were passed down from other uses and definitions that date to the earliest points in civilization. Pardon the pun… Time and time again we’ve had the opportunity to change the system to one which would be much more comfortable, that is to use a decimal system.

And of course we could ask the same about the US sticking to our short history of the English measurement system when our British brethren were able to kick that habit quite easily.

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Are our schools prepared for the challenges our kids will face this century?  This decade?  Alvin Toffler suggest our schools were built to prepare the rural American child for the industrial revolution.  Get to work on time, enjoy repetitive tasks and essentially fall in line.  Agree?  Perhaps we have advanced somewhat since the late 1800’s and this seems all too familar to much of the work I recall from oh so many years ago.

Today, when I see our dedicated, hardworking teachers struggle to escape from the bonds of top down driven curriculm, I think there must be a better way.   Here is one alternative.
Future School
You’re talking about customizing the educational experience.

“Exactly. Any form of diversity that we can introduce into the schools is a plus. Today, we have a big controversy about all the charter schools that are springing up. The school system people hate them because they’re taking money from them. I say we should radically multiply charter schools, because they begin to provide a degree of diversity in the system that has not been present. Diversify the system.

In our book Revolutionary Wealth, we play a game. We say, imagine that you’re a policeman, and you’ve got a radar gun, and you’re measuring the speed of cars going by. Each car represents an American institution. The first one car is going by at 100 miles an hour. It’s called business. Businesses have to change at 100 miles an hour because if they don’t, they die. Competition just puts them out of the game. So they’re traveling very, very fast. Then comes another car. And it’s going at 10 miles an hour. That’s the public education system. Schools are supposed to be preparing kids for the business world of tomorrow, to take jobs, to make our economy functional. The schools are changing, if anything, at 10 miles an hour. So, how do you match an economy that requires 100 miles an hour with an institution like public education? A system that changes, if at all, at 10 miles an hour?”

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5 Satellites To Launch On One Rocket
The first camp holds that the substorms are triggered about 50,000 miles above Earth’s equator, about a sixth of the way to the moon, when electromagnetic turbulence disrupts the flow of intense space currents.

The other theory is that the substorms start about 100,000 miles above the equator with the spontaneous conversion of magnetic energy into heat. Particle acceleration then triggers the substorm energy.

To test each theory, two satellites will be lined up a sixth of the way to the moon, and two others will placed respectively about a third and halfway to the moon. The fifth satellite will be on hand “to replace a brother or sister if they get into trouble,” said Angelopoulos.

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