Nonlinear Thinking

Eluding the Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist: [tsīt’gīst’, zīt’gīst’] n. The spirit or genius which marks the thought or feeling of a period or age.

The bandwagoneers that comprise and embrace much of the Silicon Valley monoculture have increasingly not been among the vanguard of enterprises that are delivering real change and innovation within and across traditional value chains and business models.  Perhaps that is the result of a zeitgeist that manifests in the Valley on a regular basis in which the thinking goes that if one successful business launch makes sense, then several dozen more incremental versions of said business make even more sense.  Paypal founder Peter Thiel has even commented: "There is so much incrementalism now."  Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Labs, discussed the problem in a Harvard Business Review article back in 2008, lamenting that “… the malaise is deep and systemic. Many of you may disagree – but I’m vastly disappointed in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of today’s crop of venture investors and so-called revolutionaries.”

In a zeitgeist market, the number of new entrants is usually high, the ability to create differentiated offerings with unique value propositions (the strongest predictor of new product success) is more difficult to achieve, and new forms of business model innovation are required for success (e.g., service and solution innovation rather than product and process innovation; experiential innovation; legal rights and bundling innovation; privacy rights innovation; agency innovation, where businesses act on behalf of customers).

There are reasons for this creeping incrementalism and much can be blamed on the democratizing nature of the Internet as the ultimate platform for idea sharing.  Additionally, the ability to rapidly access formidable compute capacity, other technology infrastructure and agile development tools via the cloud allows today’s garage startups to create stepwise iterations of already buzz-worthy offerings in record time.  The “sharing” economy dynamic has already become over-saturated with new enterprises springing up to compete with the innovators that broke trail in the space – uber, lyft, airbnb, Getaround, Zipcar, Homeaway, TaskRabbit, Liquid, Dog Vacay, Fon – you get the idea.

Innovation Zeitgeist, a book by entrepreneur/author Alistair Davidson, drilled deeply into this dynamic several years ago. 

What I have observed is in the rush to make individual companies and product successful, managers have missed a larger trend - a Zeitgeist influence on what is getting developed and launched. Simply put, there are more entrepreneurs launching similar products than ever before. And because of the Internet, these product leak into other markets quickly.

Far more companies in Silicon Valley think they are creating viable business models and services that deliver real economic and societal value than those that truly are creating something both lasting and impactful.  Eluding the zeitgeist and focusing on addressing real issues, problems and opportunities is the challenge that needs to be met.

Diverse thinking is critical to an effective culture of innovation and Silicon Valley’s challenges with respect to diversity, particularly when it comes to enterprise leadership, has been well-publicized.  That issue/challenge may be the central contributing factor in a culture that eschews business model innovation for incremental uniqueness and a “me too” entrepreneurialism.

When we stop and ruminate on the many macroeconomic and core societal problems the world faces today, can we really say that there is a need for yet another social network variant that succeeds only in chewing up time and mindshare – Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t know.  Perhaps these are only the cynical musings of someone who thinks we can do much better, must do much better.

The Social Enterprise of the Future

We have discussed the impact that social media and the channels that have emerged based on social technologies will have on the enterprise previously here and here.  Rob Harles, of Accenture Interactive has a nice article on the social enterprise of the future on CMO.com, including a terrific graphic of what that enterprise might look like.  From the article:

Within five years, “social enterprises” could completely redefine customer value. We will see organizations emerge that will go way beyond polishing their presence on social networks and channels. Instead, they will make social media–the channels, the data, the users, the approach to collaboration–a part of every activity that zooms in on the customer.

The future of social enterprises (see figure, below) will be defined by how these organizations incorporate a real-time stream of predictive insights and personalized messages into their businesses, and how they define customer relationships and experiences by the level of complete digital integration and influence. Social enterprises will notice the redefinition of management roles, with each part of the business responsible for managing, synthesizing, and acting on ongoing torrents of digital information and content received in real time.

 

Additionally, they will depend more on the integrated views of the customer across multiple touch points and channels–such as combining social with physical call centers–to maintain customer happiness, with access to the most up-to-date customer data in real time.

As new technologies and digital strategies need to be developed almost every day, social enterprises will need to constantly adapt to their evolving landscape and anticipate what the social enterprise of the future will look like. This moves away from social strategies that are siloed within the business, focused only on expanding reach and “engagement,” and closer to a landscape where social is everywhere, driving real-time actions tied firmly to measurable business objectives.

If companies get this right, social can increase intimacy and relevance with their customers, which can become the tipping point between buying or not buying and remaining a loyal customer or going elsewhere.

The Growth of the Internet of Things (IoT)

Cisco continues to be among the vanguard of enterprises that are embracing the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).  John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, recently delivered another speech on the concept and the bottom line, from Cisco’s viewpoint, is that the IoT is going to be a $19 trillion profit market in the next few years. That includes $2.9 trillion for manufacturing alone. Internet of Things is becoming the backbone (at least in rhetoric) of Cisco's overall business strategy, and Chambers pointed in that direction once again, stressing that Cisco's IoT game plan combines the company's cloud strategy with data analytics, mobile, collaboration, and most important of all, security.

White Paper - "Content is King, Context is Queen - Together They Rule!

One of the core themes of this blog over the years has been the impact of technology on the marketing art and science.  With the advent of digital, social, and mobile media, the strategy and execution of marketing has embraced and leveraged many new channels as avenues to influencing the target customer.  I have long viewed the development and management of quality content as critical to this new process, perhaps even more than during the decades of analog-only marketing.  With the "always-on" nature of digital/social/mobile communications today and the ability to gather real-time data on prospects, context is becoming increasingly critical to ensuring that valuable content is delivered at the most optimal point in the customer's decision process.

I thought this new model was important enough to author a white paper on it and you can access it by clicking on the image or link below.  Comments and critiques are welcome.

Download Content is King

Get Digital or Go Home

A recent study conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Capgemini Consulting suggests that organizations are now facing a digital imperative and must adopt new technologies effectively or face competitive obsolescence.

Among employees, while there is consensus on the importance of adopting digital technology, most find the process in their organizations to be too complex and slow and believe their leaders lack urgency and a vision for how technology can change the business. As with most initiatives, companies that successfully execute a digital transformation tend to have leaders who share their vision and define a road map, create cross-organizational authority for adoption and reward employees for working towards it.

 

Other key findings from the survey are:

• According to 78% of respondents, achieving digital transformation will become critical to their organizations within the next two years.
• However, 63% said the pace of technology change in their organization is too slow.
• The most frequently cited obstacle to digital transformation was “lack of urgency.”
• Only 38% of respondents said that digital transformation was a permanent fixture on their CEO’s agenda.
• Where CEOs have shared their vision for digital transformation, 93% of employees feel that it is the right thing for the organization. But, a mere 36% of CEOs have shared such a vision.

Companies that effectively manage the digital transformation can expect to gain in one or more of three areas:

• Better customer experiences and engagement
• Streamlined operations
• New lines of business or business models

Though innovative new business models are what every CEO dreams of, companies more often see digital technologies support a transformation of their customer experience or operations.

 

The Complexity of Digital Marketing

This "transit map" from Gartner visually represents how hard it is to be a marketer today.

M2M and the Internet of Things

A dozen years ago in a white paper on emerging technologies I included a section on machine-to-machine (M2M) technology, though at the time that nomenclature wasn’t generally accepted.  My simple example of the power of M2M featured communications among a population of Coke machines in a large downtown area sharing real-time inventory data to allow any individual machine to direct a customer to the next closest machine should they be out of the carbonated beverage that customer desired at that particular time.

That example was fanciful at the time, but M2M has now gained traction as one of the “next big things” as hundreds of companies are combining wireless, Wi-Fi, mobile, web, and context technologies to offer information and convenience in innovative new ways.  The escalating pace of adoption for smart devices – phones, tablets, home appliances, industrial equipment - is creating new demands on enterprises and consumers around the globe which requires new thinking about the connected environment.

M2M technologies allow wireless and wired systems to communicate with other devices possessing the same capability.  M2M uses sensors, meters or like devices to capture event data (electricity usage, temperature, inventory) and share it via network with an application that translates the data into information that can be used by other devices, networks, applications and enterprises.

M2M is a critical platform for the enablement and maturation of the concept of the “internet of things” which includes everything from smartphone apps that control a home's living environment remotely to real-time analytics that help ease traffic congestion and city parking challenges.

The notion of an “internet of things” has been around for a while now.  Kevin Ashton coined the term in 1999.  Of course, a concept is never truly viable until it has its own consortium hence, the Internet of Things Consortium

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the connection of all machines, devices, sensors, automobiles, cameras, and other "things" to help customers improve operations and save valuable time, money and even lives. The IoT connects places such as manufacturing floors, energy grids, healthcare facilities, and transportation systems.

With cloud infrastructure becoming more prominent, M2M applications have expanded beyond a one-to-one connection to become a system of networks that transmits data to personal appliances. This has made it far easier to effect M2M communication and lessened the amount of power and time necessary for information to be communicated between machines.

The critical dynamic here, and one that has been growing for at least 15 years, is that smart devices connected to the internet would eventually far outnumber the people that would be connected to the internet.  Voila! We are there.  Per Cisco, over 12.5 billion devices were connected in 2010 and Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) predicts some 25 billion devices will be connected by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020.

ERP solution provider SAP has begun to explore M2M and recently conducted a survey among IT decision makers on the impact, current and forecasted, of M2M.  Some interesting data points that emerged from that survey included:

• 85 percent of IT decision makers (ITDMs) think that M2M is a natural technological evolution and will advance the "consumerization of IT" trend
• 82 percent think that M2M interaction enables businesses to respond to real-world events
• Sixty-five percent of ITDMs think increased workforce mobility is the biggest opportunity for M2M
• 65 percent think the major challenge in M2M is managing and analyzing the real-time data.
• By year's end:
  • Mobile devices will outnumber the human population
  • Data volume will reach 4 billion terabytes
  • 90 percent of consumer-connected devices will have access to some personal cloud.
  • SAP estimated that by the end of 2020, there will be 24 billion connected devices and by 2015, 35 percent of mid-to-large organizations will adopt in-memory computing

The possibilities for machine-to-machine in concert with other emerging technologies are extraordinary. Almost every machine or device has the potential to become connected, creating interactions with other technologies and services and bringing significant impacts to processes in and across all industries.

As the notion of an “Internet of things” becomes increasingly mainstream, businesses will incorporate machine-to-machine technology to gather and use information towards both strategic and tactical ends. The end result will be new products and services that will drive new revenue streams and reduce costs for businesses.

Inbound Marketing the Hubspot Way

We don’t really endorse products/solutions/services per se here at Nonlinear Thinking but we were to make that leap, we couldn’t find a better company to endorse than Hubspot.  They have done nothing short of inventing and then reinventing the concept, process and practice of inbound marketing.

Having used Hubspot almost since its inception, the endorsement comes from practical experience.  It just makes your marketing better.

The key components in their definition of inbound marketing include:

• Content Creation - You create targeted content that answers your customer's basic questions and needs, and you share that content far and wide.
• Lifecycle Marketing - You recognize that people go through stages as they interact with your company, and that each stage requires different marketing actions.
• Personalization - As you learn more about your leads over time, you can better personalize your messages to their specific needs.
• Multi-channel - Inbound marketing is multi-channel by nature because it approaches people where they are, in the channel where they want to interact with you.
• Integration - Your publishing and analytics tools all work together like a well-oiled machine, allowing you to focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.

Addendum: Social Business Gains Traction

As an addendum to an earlier post on social business, this chart from the second annual MIT and Deloitte Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project survey on how businesses use social media suggests that the concept of social business is being adopted aggressively across all industries.  How well and how strategically it is being adopted is still an open question.

 In all 12 of the major industry sectors covered by the survey, the percentage of respondents who said social software or social business was “important to their organization today” increased from the previous year’s survey. No industry sector declined and none remained flat.

Interestingly, the industry sector with the strongest year over year increase in the survey was energy and utilities, moving from 7% of respondents ranking social business as “important” in 2011 to 29.1% in 2012.  That exponential increase may be linked with the increasing adoption of smart grid technologies that allow utilities to more easily interact with their customers.  A 2012 research report by Navigant Research predicted that by the end of 2017, the number of utility customers using social media to engage with the utility companies would rise from 57 million in 2011 to 624 million.

Unsurprisingly, for the second year in a row, the technology/media/telecommunications sector respondents were most likely to rate social business as important to their organization with 87% saying that social business was important or somewhat important to their organizations in 2012.  A bit more surprising was that the education (82%) and professional services sectors (76%) followed closely behind.

Another finding from the survey was that while companies in most industries are generating social data from their initiatives, few businesses were analyzing the data or integrating it into their organization’s systems and processes.

The new study from MIT and Deloitte will be released in July.

Mobile-First Strategy and the Growth of Responsive Web Design

As more and more consumers hold their “computer” in their hand rather than on their lap or use a venerable desktop version, the pressure on enterprises to improve/refine/perfect their active connection to these increasingly mobile consumers becomes ever more important.  For many businesses, commerce happens in a much more real-time and immediate manner than ever before and the ability to access those mobile consumers and influence their purchase decisions require that their digital access points be built for mobile.  Sadly, too few companies at this point are designing and developing business applications with the mobile interface as the primary design driver.  Traditional PC-based application development still rules over a “mobile first” strategy. 

A "mobile first" approach is where new websites and applications are designed for mobile devices first, instead of initially designed for laptops and desktops. Estimates suggest that by 2015, more people will access the Web via mobile devices than desktop computers.  Opinions on the validity of a “mobile first” strategy vary, but there are some reasonably strong advocates running around.

“Google programmers are doing work on mobile applications first, because they are better apps and that's what top programmers want to develop.” – Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman

“We're just now starting to think about mobile first and desktop second for a lot of our products.” - Kate Aronowitz, Design Director Facebook

“We really need to shift now to start thinking about building mobile first. This is an even bigger shift than the PC revolution.”  - Kevin Lynch, CTO Adobe

Still, every organization needs to assess what is the better process for engaging their key constituencies. One general school of thought is that if you don't design your products and services for what is rapidly becoming the dominant UI, you will not maximize the success of your business in the long run.

Not surprisingly, most Web development teams have designed for the desktop first. Mobile, if it even happens, is simply ported off the desktop version.  Consideration of what the mobile experience requires, in terms of user interface and navigation, seems cursory at best. But that thinking is based on a smart phone 1.0 context – challenges in browsing, Web access that was problematical, and slow network speeds.

As iPhones and Androids have driven a tidal wave of technological ease and sophistication in smart phones and smart devices, the necessity of designing for mobile has become more acute.  That is causing companies to consider adopting a mobile-first strategy to ensure that they capture mobile markets before going after the more traditional desktop community.

Into the breach a new approach, responsive web design (RWD), has arrived aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktops to smart phones).  The “philosophy” underpinning RWD is that designing for mobile first can not only open up new opportunities for growth, it can lead to a better overall user experience for a Web site or application.

Whether this all makes sense for your organization is a function of multiple components of your business model – who your customers are, the way you make money, and the channels that facilitate the most profitable engagement.  If your key markets are increasingly seeking you out via the mobile platform, it may be time to alter your app development strategy.