Silent night before a prosperous tomorrow

Many B2B organizations traditionally grow quiet this time of year. They seem to lose momentum and slip into a kind of holidaze, but it’s different this time around. This year, many organizations are as though on deep autopilot, their thinned and furloughed staffs made even leaner by a need for home and hibernation.

It’s been such a tough year. And what next?
We wonder, as we huddle with our families and hang with care our hopes for a better year.

Having been so eager to say goodbye to 2009, CEOs will look back on this year’s seasonal retreat as exceptionally important. Religious or not, it will have been a time when we kept the faith in ourselves and in our collective capabilities to grow, knowing that we had only begun to achieve our full potential in business and in life.

JB

Ready to engage on a clear mission?

I am not a Trekkie, though I suspect my wife of 32 years is one, because on these cold Chicago evenings I find myself on the couch with her, watching reruns of first season Star Trek TNG. That’s “The Next Generation”, not to be confused with subsequent lesser editions, or so my wife claims. These early episodes of TNG we’re watching are not good yet, she tells me. They lack story development and the production quality is uneven. I understand her complaint, but am more interested in how this eventually renowned series evolved so quickly to find its identity by the end of the first season.

My wife is watching a space adventure. I’m watching a lesson in organizational change.

The characters are stereotypically rendered in the beginning, but within a span of weeks, the roles and relationships become distinctive, and when the team gather’s on the starship’s bridge at the end of every episode, captain Jean-Luc Picard clearly is the respected leader of this Enterprise. Internally aligned by an understanding of core capabilities, communicated values and a challenging mission statement, this is a company ready to “engage” the future.

Talk about building brand identity.
These guys did it to a factor of warp 10.

JB

20/20 leadership vision

In a better economy, the absence of 20/20 leadership vision may not be so apparent to an organization, but you can sure tell during times like these. If your company’s vision needs tweaking, someone might suggest using the most basic sort of eye chart, one that has two simple reference points. But first, just exactly whose vision are we talking about here?

In business, it’s the owner’s vision that counts. Even if you work in a publicly held company, someone acts as the “owner”. This is almost always the CEO, but if you are not sure, find the one or two people in your organization who actually owns the problem of whether the company will exist in a year. If you are fortunate, this leader sees clearly the first reference point: the sources of your organization’s value, its core capabilities – not your products and services, but the distinctive wherewithal that brought about these outcomes in the first place.

But what if an owner’s vision is not 20/20? It’s probably because the second reference point has not come into focus. The second reference point being your customer’s own top-level vision for what they can become and what they would become, were they to discover within your company a like-minded vision and mission for what can be collaboratively achieved.

JB

Don’t leave creativity to “creatives”

Don’t mean to knock “creatives” and the ad agencies that feed and house them, but in our firm we are adverse to the “creatives” stereotype for a couple reasons: 1) many people in your organization will contribute important ideas when they deeply understand your customer’s circumstances, and 2) useful ideas flow from a process of discovery and strategy, not from random or impromptu acts of creative genius.

Coming up with big ideas to market your new product or to find a way to grow your market share is not easy, but the process is not so mysterious. The most useful ideas come from deep (we’re talking bedrock) insights into a customer segment’s motivations and circumstances. Without this specific knowledge, what can make any agency’s solution “creative” is that they are artfully guessing. But when your organization and agency are aligned by an understanding of customer and your related capabilities, the solutions (big ideas) will always present themselves.

If more B2B marketers were to align their organizations around this truth, they would soon discover the greater creative potential of their own people – and how profoundly more valuable their agencies could be.

JB

Why startups may not be so startling

My business partner and I met with our accounting firm recently for our six-month checkup and the prognosis was abnormal. Most startups, we were told, should be having a harder time of it than we are, especially one presumptuous enough to launch during a recession.

But wait. Upon further review, how unusual are we? I’ve read that about half of the 2008 Fortune 500 and Inc. 500 started up during a recession. So what might be going on here? Could it be that the very act of becoming a successful startup requires breaking away, an act of separation that brings new value to the marketplace? And could it be that for any company to establish momentum, it must continue to behave as a startup while cultivating its own distinctive identity? That, after all, is an observation we can make regarding our own B2B clients, that innovation must flow from an articulated knowledge of core capabilities, aligned with the often unarticulated needs of customer segments. It’s a communication problem ultimately, to establish internal reality before it can become external reality.

That said, there’s a lot of advice out there for CEOs and other business leaders who are looking for ways to grow their companies. As for us, if we are fortunate and careful, we will be a startup for decades to come.