How to Win the Talent War

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.

Think “high-tech entrepreneur,” and you’re likely to envision Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. What you’re not likely to imagine is a woman. Dow Jones VentureSource reports that of the U.S.-based companies receiving venture capital last year, only 6 percent had a female CEO and 7 percent had a female founder. It’s true that fewer women have the engineering and science backgrounds that often spark startup creation — but the disparity may also be the result of “pattern recognition” among investors, according to Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup. And the downside of pattern recognition, he says, is “it’s another word for bias. It’s literally a biased way of thinking that can cause you to miss opportunities that don’t match the pattern.”

“Venture capitalists will often boast about their ability to spot entrepreneurs,” says Ries, who cites a scene in the movie Moneyball in which a group of team leaders evaluated prospects by debating who “looks like a baseball guy” and other superficial aspects. But just as the movie’s hero discovered that objective metrics could be used to build a powerhouse team, Ries contends that it’s time for startups to up their A-game by embracing a more scientific understanding of what actually works. With that understanding, he suggests, funders will be better able to evaluate entrepreneurs on their own merits, rather than simply falling back on alumni and personal networks, or candidates’ previous track record in Silicon Valley — which tends to replicate the white (or sometimes Asian) male power structure. After all, who “looks like a startup guy?”

But with so much money at stake, why has it taken so long for the startup world to codify best practices? Says Ries, “That system of pattern recognition has worked OK for quite a while, because the magnitude of success is so great, it doesn’t have to be that efficient overall as long as you don’t mind wasting people’s time and money along the way.” In other words, venture capitalists — like baseball players — don’t mind batting .300, as long as the hits they do get are Google or Facebook-quality. But with lower barriers to entry — you can start a tech company much more cheaply than in the past — and more companies seeking funding, the pattern is breaking down. The best ideas may not come from the usual suspects. “As the world is getting more and more unstable and disruptive, patterns aren’t holding,” says Ries. “The things that made you successful in past don’t make you successful in future, and it’s produced a crisis, a vacuum.”

The antidote, he says, is to reject traditional ways of measuring startups’ success. Have they been following the plan carefully? Who cares, as long as the possibility exists that the entire premise may be flawed? What if no one even wants what you’ve been so carefully developing? The frightening reality for many startups, Ries learned during his tenure as a Chief Technology Officer, is that many companies have no idea whether they really are successful — or even what success might look like. Inspired by Lean Manufacturing, which transformed the auto industry, he created the “Lean Startup” methodology, which he describes as “management discipline for situations of high uncertainty.” When a company is new and lacks a track record of customer demand, “beating the plan isn’t cause for celebration,” he says. “In fact, successfully executing it often leads to failure because you’re fulfilling a bad plan. You have to learn to tell the difference between value and waste, but unlike in Lean Manufacturing, it’s not so simple: the creation of high quality stuff is no longer a virtue. The value in a startup situation is validated learning, learning if we’re building a sustainable business. You can use Lean Manufacturing strategies but the goal is efficiently figuring out what stuff to make.”

In other words, you’re subjecting startups to the scientific method — crafting hypotheses and testing them, rather than clinging to “vanity metrics” like page views, as many wishful entrepreneurs often do. “There are a lot of people for whom ‘scientific’ means rote, formulaic, and uncreative,” says Ries. “But you don’t get to be Einstein by sitting in your office imagining stuff. You have to make predictions about experiments that then come true — and if you make mistakes, you have to be willing to correct them. The definition of a great scientist is vision and a willingness to put that to the test, and the same is true for entrepreneurship.”

Being certain about what really works means you’re selecting the best people — without the potential bias of pattern recognition. And that means a better return on investment. The Lean Startup metholodogy, says Ries, “makes entrepreneurship accessible to everyone. The whole point of science vs. astrology or alchemy is to strip away bits of folk wisdom that sound good but aren’t true.”

Dorie Clark, CEO of Clark Strategic Communications, has consulted for clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. Clark is the author of the forthcoming What’s Next?: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). Listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.

How I Got My Book Deal, and the Lessons I Learned

This post originally appeared as a guest column on Alan Weiss’ Contrarian Consulting blog.

In June, I signed a book deal with Harvard Business Review Press. Because the process of landing a book contract can be so opaque and discouraging, I wanted to share the story of how I did it.

In 2009, I got serious: early in the year, I drafted two book proposals (I figured more was better, though I’ve later come to learn that publishers get freaked out if your focus appears to be scattered, so stick with one). My kind mystery writer friend hooked me up with her agent, who plunged into pitching the book/s.

Though friends assured me that the hard part was landing an agent, and I’d surely get a deal soon, none was forthcoming. The pundits­ (aka acquisitions editors) claimed to love my writing style but deemed one proposal  “too narrow” and the other one “not differentiated enough.” Oh, and I wasn’t famous. One editor said he regrettably had to decline, because Ivanka Trump was publishing a book on a similar topic.

By the following summer, we’d exhausted most of the usual publishing suspects. But I had a brainstorm: a friend of mine used to share office space with a small international publishing house that might be a fit. Sure enough, my agent sent it over and they quickly responded, calling me in for a meeting with their full staff. I was on the cusp of a contract, I felt sure, when they asked me to revise my proposal to add more international examples (I spent a week furiously researching). But mysteriously, the process dragged on and on. We eventually surmised that the American editor liked it, but the boss in England didn’t–and he ruled the day. After two months of foot-dragging, they finally called off the courtship. No contract.

Discouraged (and agentless, after we mutually agreed she’d exhausted her contacts), I realized the only way to break through the clutter was to work on the “famous” thing. So I made it my mission to reach out to prominent business publications and see if I could blog for them. This wasn’t too much of a stretch, I thought, because in my pre-consulting life I’d been a professional journalist and had won awards for my reporting. You might think online business editors would like good content for free–but you’d be wrong.

I thought I’d have an inside edge with one publication, where I was friends with a regular monthly columnist. With her permission, I emailed the blog editor and declared in the subject line, “[Columnist] suggested I contact you.” No word. I waited a few weeks and tried again, but still nothing. Finally, it was my good luck to meet the editor-at-large for this publication, and I explained my predicament. He told me I could use his name, so I emailed my target again: “[Editor at large] and [Columnist] suggested I contact you.” That seemed to work quite well, and within minutes, he emailed me back and asked to hear my blog ideas. I researched them feverishly and the next day, responded with well-thought-out pitches. To no avail. Once again, he went dark, and I never heard from him again.

I knew plenty of people who blogged for another major business magazine. It turned out (amazingly!) that until last year, literally anyone could sign up to blog for them. It was my bad luck, then, that I literally missed the cutoff by days; they had just decided to start vetting bloggers. No problem, I thought–except that their online editor (who did OK my pitch and invited me to submit several articles) would let months go by before responding, leaving me pathetically to send “follow-up” inquiries. Eventually I stopped hearing from him, too.

That might have been the end of it if I hadn’t wanted to sell my bike, a gorgeous Cannondale I no longer needed. Enter the woman who ended up buying it on Craig’s List (and who, quite pragmatically, researched me online beforehand to ensure I was legit).

“I see you’re a business consultant,” she said. Then the magic words: “You know, I work at the Harvard Business Review.”

It took time, and a few follow-ups, but she agreed to show my proposed blog post to an editor there–and he liked it. Several posts later, one caught the eye of a bigwig, and they hunted me down in Costa Rica over Christmas and asked me to expand it into a piece for the magazine. Once the magazine piece hit (on “Reinventing Your Personal Brand”), everything changed. Three agents contacted me out of the blue seeking to represent me, and one of them actually used to run Harvard Business Publishing. I figured that was a good sign, so I turned the article into a proposal and in less than a month, we received an offer.

These days, I’m blogging for the Harvard Business Review (thank you, my bicycle-buying friend!) and the Huffington Post, and guest-blogging for many other outlets. My book What’s Next: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand is coming out next year from Harvard Business Review Press. And I learned the following lessons in my quest to land a book deal:

• Work with an agent who specializes in business books. As with the rest of life, it’s about personal connections (specifically, which editors they have a track record of selling to).
• Blogging is a terrific way to build your platform. Seek out places to feature your work, and don’t let jerky online editors get you down. If you persist, you will find a place that seeks out and values your work (at a minimum, you can create your own blog to get started).
• Look (and prepare) for opportunities. It was sheer luck I sold my bike to an HBR staffer, but I was already prepared with blog ideas and pitches thanks to my initial work reaching out to other publications.
• Brand matters. By now, I’ve written for lots of media outlets, but the response you get from a piece in the Harvard Business Review outshines them all.

What are your best strategies for building your profile and/or winning a book deal?

Dorie Clark is CEO of Clark Strategic Communications and the author of the forthcoming What’s Next?: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). Listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.

© Dorie Clark 2011. All rights reserved.

Why Your Personal Brand Shouldn’t Be Your Corporate Brand

This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

I recently read John Warrillow’s excellent “Built to Sell,” a short, business parable (in the vein of “The Go-Giver“) about how to create a company that other people will actually want to buy. The main problem small business owners have, Warrillow posits (like Michael Gerber before him), is that they’re too involved in the day-to-day operations of the company. That means acquirers will only be interested in ponying up if the owner agrees to stay on for several years post-purchase — and there’s a lot that can go wrong between now and payday.

What to do instead? Warrillow suggests removing yourself from the equation as much as possible by having your company specialize in doing one thing well (the book’s hero decides that his ad agency will focus exclusively on logo design), developing a clear and repeatable process (“our five-step logo design process”) and building a sales team ASAP (no one wants to buy a business where you’re the sole rainmaker). That’s great advice for entrepreneurs building toward a “liquidity event” — but, as Warrillow points out in a great interview with Tim Ferriss, it’s exactly the wrong move for professionals whose business and personal brands are more tightly entwined. That’s why the most important branding decision you’ll ever make is what type of personal brand to cultivate.

Leaving aside your investment portfolio (or stock options), there are two fundamental ways to make money in business. The first, which I’ll call the “Business-Builder Model,” is to construct a company that thrives on scale and makes a profit on others’ work. Your law firm has 500 employees, you make a profit of X percent on your associates’ hourly rate, and you’ve got a successful business model. Same with ad agencies (as in Warrillow’s example), large consulting firms or the like. If you’re the owner, your personal brand must be different from — and usually less prominent than — your corporate brand, or you’ll never be able to sell it. (To its detriment, even a company as large as Apple — so identified with CEO Steve Jobs — suffers major stock dips on rumors about his health.)

In the second model — the “Expert Model,” more appropriate for solo practitioners and some executives — your personal and business brands are essentially synonymous. That’s because your business model depends on you getting famous and people paying a premium to work with you specifically. Instead of selling a process or a commodity, you’re selling access to your unique insights, applied to the client’s situation.

Warrillow is right to counsel the business-builders to hire staff who are “good at selling products, not services” because they will “be better able to figure out how your product can meet a client’s needs rather than agreeing to customize your offering to fit what the client wants.” You really, really don’t want every widget buyer demanding a different color. But when you’re the brand, it’s fine to personalize your advice. In fact, that’s how you make money. (I can read “Getting Things Done” like everyone else, but I really want David Allen to come to my office and set up the system for me. And I can hire plenty of executives to be my SVP, but I really want the one who got famous for leading a business unit turnaround at her previous company.)

The two models — Business-Builder and Expert — are exact opposites, and if you try to blend them, you’re not going to get far. You can succeed with either one, but you have to decide early on which you’re going to pursue.

Which path have you chosen? Why?

Dorie Clark is CEO of Clark Strategic Communications and the author of the forthcoming “What’s Next?: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). She is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, the National Park Service and Yale University. Listen to her podcasts, or follow her on Twitter.

 

Dorie’s Book Review: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

I’m on a Clay Shirky binge after his excellent Cognitive Surplus, and loved Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008) even more. His major theme in both is that because the cost – in both time and money – has dropped for organizing groups, more people are taking collective action and that can produce  cool results not driven by a profit motive (social uprisings, Wikipedia, Linux, etc.). My favorite highlights:

• Why was the news media so slow to perceive the threat posed to them by the Internet? The fact that they’re “professionals” – i.e., inculcated into a particular guild mentality. Shirky notes, “When a profession has been created as a result of some scarcity, as with librarians or television programmers, the professionals are often the last ones to see it when that scarcity goes away.”
• Though it’s tempting for web Pollyannas to define TV as bad and passive and the Internet as good and interactive, that’s not always the case. In the early days, everyone could interact with each other – but when you get into Ashton Kutcher levels of Twitter followers, it’s just not happening. Shirky reminds us that you can’t forget the dynamics of fame – i.e., when there’s “an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.” Specifically, he writes, “The mere technological possibility of reply isn’t enough to overcome the human limits on attention.”
• As many HTML-eschewing humanities types will agree, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring…It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.”
• Why did the priest sex abuse scandal revealed by the Boston Globe in 2002 (with a lot of the heavy lifting done, I should note, by my former Boston Phoenix colleague Kristen Lombardi) shake the church so dramatically, when the Father Porter scandal the decade prior didn’t create many lasting changes? Shirky argues convincingly that parishioners’ ability to self-organize had dramatically increased thanks to the web, allowing them to form powerful advocacy groups like Voice of the Faithful.
• Shirky points out that managing employees is an expensive venture – overhead kills. That’s why, he says, “organizations cannot afford to hire employees who only make one important contribution – they need to hire people who have good ideas day after day.” You have to ignore “casual participants.” But that means their potential contributions (to write code, or create marketing ideas, or whatever) is left on the table. Microsoft can’t afford to have them on their payroll – but there’s no reason for Linux not to take advantage of their occasional help. That’s the biggest difference, and advantage, in an open source, ‘collective action’ kind of world.
• Going back to an idea I talked about in reviewing Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, Shirky cites a paper by Ronald Burt of the University of Chicago called “The Social Origins of Good Ideas.” The best ideas, it turns out, are from “people whose contacts were outside their own department.” Too narrow of a worldview (i.e., all your friends work in the same department) and your ideas tend to be too “echo-chambery.” So start making lunch dates!

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Dorie Does Design Thinking: Dorie’s Book Review of Change By Design

Companies shouldn’t just come up with a product idea and then tell designers at the end, “Make it pretty” – or it will lead to some ugly, ridiculous stuff. That’s the central premise of Tim Brown’s Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, and I’m in total agreement. Brown, the head of famed design consultancy IDEO, argues that “design thinking needs to move ‘upstream,’ closer to the executive suites where strategic decisions are made.” So IDEO prides itself on an ambitious process in which an eclectic team of designers, ethnographers, psychologists and more actually observe customers in their natural environment (picture a dude with a clipboard watching you cook dinner) in their quest to understand how customers use products and what can create a killer gap. After all, a design team could be tasked with “creating a new bottle design.” But if the product inside isn’t what customers want, the packaging really doesn’t matter. IDEO is famed for inventing new processes (like how to run an ER or bank office better), in addition to cool new tangible designs.

I’ve long been a proponent of the marketing analogue for this (“marketing thinking,” perhaps?) because if you don’t include a marketing mindset from the beginning, you’ll similarly end up with bad products and a mandate to pawn them off on suckers – and that’s no way to run a lasting business.

IDEO’s “deep dive” approach (and their willingness to learn from outliers) creates interesting insights. As Brown notes regarding a project for kitchen supply manufacturer Zyliss, “The team started out by studying children and professional chefs – neither of whom were the intended market for these mainstream products. For that very reason, however, both groups yielded valuable insights. A seven-year-old girl struggling with a can opener highlighted issues of physical control that adults have learned to disguise.”

Along similar lines, they’ve pioneered something called the “unfocus group,” which – unlike traditional focus groups of average consumers – gathers specifically-invited, unique contributors to weigh in with their particular perspective. (Says Brown, “On one memorable occasion – we were looking at new concepts for women’s shoes – we invited in a color consultant, a spiritual guide who led barefoot initiates across hot coals, a young mother who was curiously passionate about her thigh-high leather boots, and a female limo driver whose full livery was accented by a pair of outrageously sexy stiletto heels. Needless to say, this group proved to be extremely articulate about the emotional connections among shoes, feet, and the human condition.”)

Brown’s quick take? “Design thinking is neither art nor science nor religion. It is the capacity, ultimately, for integrative thinking.” To label it design thinking privileges their discipline a bit (I’m still rooting for ‘marketing thinking’), but hey – they’re entitled. The world needs more of exactly what Brown describes.

Do you incorporate design thinking (or some variation thereof) in your work life? How has it helped (or hurt)? How can we best create the products and services that customers genuinely want?

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategy consultant for clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. Visit her website, listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.

Big Think about the Internet: Dorie’s Book Review of Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky – who teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program – is the official “Internet big picture guy.” His new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age is a sweeping look at the evolution of communication, how humans use their time, and potential uses of technology (starting with London’s 18^th century gin craze and moving on from there). This isn’t the place for hands-on tips about effective online techniques – nor is it meant to be. Shirky’s all about providing broad context and larger meaning.

The basic idea (the “cognitive surplus” we’re talking about) is that in the past, people were forced to be passive viewers (if you didn’t own a TV station, you couldn’t make TV shows). All that is changing with technology and the Internet, and it turns out (as Shirky claims) that passivity was a historical accident. Nowadays, people have gobs of extra time and if we harness even a tiny fraction of it for the public good (such as creating Wikipedia entries), then society can create some amazing new things.

Shirky’s a good writer, and tosses in copious examples from highbrow sources (electronic efforts to keep the authorities honest in Africa) to the pedestrian (hordes of hormone-addled Josh Groban fans raising money for charity).

Shirky – instead of gaping over new technology, like a lot of commentators – suggests that we not ask “Why is this new?” but instead,  “Why is this a surprise?” Napster, then, becomes a phenomenon not of evil millennials hell-bent on thievery, but instead, as he points out: “1) Digital data is infinitely and perfectly copyable at zero marginal cost; 2) people will share if sharing is simple enough, and we generally resist being spiteful under the same conditions; and 3) Shawn Fanning designed a system to link 1) to 2) via the right incentives.” That, I think, is exactly right. On Internet activism, Shirky also correctly points out that Facebook has simply “lower[ed] the cost of social coordination among its users.” Calling 200 people takes a lot of time; emailing 200 people takes almost no time. (And yes, with information overload, you may still have to call them to follow up – but things are definitely speeded along.)

Toward the end of the book, Shirky presents an interesting thought problem from the Gutenberg era. “…Observers of early print culture assumed that the abundance of books would mean more people reading the same few texts…As it turned out, the press undermined rather than strengthened the earlier intellectual culture. Because each reader had access to more books, intellectual diversity, not uniformity, was the result. This increase in diversity of sources corroded faith in older institutions…The changes today have something of that feeling.”

So what’s next for a world in which the Huffington Post has almost as much credibility (and sometimes more) as the Washington Post? What do you think?

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategy consultant for clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. Visit her website, listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.

Where Good Ideas Come From: Dorie’s Book Review

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation exemplifies its premise perfectly: that true innovation comes from cross-fertilization with other disciplines, other people, and other viewpoints. Using science (and a look into the work of Charles Darwin, among others) as a jumping-off point, Johnson creates a fascinating and highly-readable sociological inquiry and primer for anyone who wants to juice their intellectual capacity. So what can spark your best ideas?

• Density. As if Boston, my home city, needs more of an inferiority complex (see Globe business columnist Scott Kirsner’s New Year’s vow not to fret anymore about the advantages of Silicon Valley or New York City), Johnson cites compelling research by theoretical physicist Geoffrey West which suggested that “the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.” (However, the Internet is diminishing the importance of literal, physical proximity. Johnson also mentions a phenomenon he calls the “10/10 Rule,” in which for past innovations such as TV, it took  “a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.” These days, a YouTube or a Facebook can catch fire and achieve world domination in a fraction of the time, so perhaps there’s hope for Beantown.)
• Talking with Colleagues. Where do scientists make most of their important discoveries? Not at the lab bench, says psychologist Kevin Dunbar, who literally tracked them with videocameras. Instead, the locus of innovation is the conference table. Writes Johnson, ““The group environment helped recontextualize problems, as questions from colleagues forced researchers to think about their experiments on a different scale or level. Group interactions challenged researchers’ assumptions about their more surprising findings, making them less likely to dismiss them as experimental error.”
• Talking with Cool, Diverse Friends. Freud’s Wednesday night salons and Parisian café culture are prime examples of this phenomenon, in which friends from diverse disciplines “cross-pollinate.” Johnson writes, “Participants flock to these spaces partly for the camaraderie of others who share their passions, and no doubt that support network increases the engagement and productivity of the group. But encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. Collisions do – the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.” Stanford Business School Professor Martin Ruef agrees. His research indicates that individuals with diverse social networks were three times more innovative than those with “uniform, vertical networks” (aka the same old bland people you know from work).
• Reading More. Johnson praises Bill Gates’ habit of a taking a 1-2 week “reading vacation” per year, in which he brings a stack o’ books he’s been meaning to get through during the year and dives in. Reading a book every couple of weeks just doesn’t do the trick, says Johnson. You need ideas mashing together simultaneously to get the necessary friction.
• Writing More. The “commonplace book,” a staple of the 17^th and 18^th century learned elite, gets a shout-out here. The idea? Says Johnson, “Transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.” Seeing how Faulkner juxtaposes with Stephen King and how Aristotle meshes with Tom Friedman can be interesting indeed. Also, Johnson talks about the “power of the slow hunch,” in which an idea (like Darwin’s take on evolution) germinated over time. He nearly had it for a year before it finally crystallized; writing it down can ensure you don’t lose your best ideas prematurely.
• Doing More. The secret of great innovators, from Ben Franklin on down? Have lots of diverse hobbies. The information and skills you gain in one realm will redound to your benefit in another.
• Sharing More. Overall, Johnson makes the case that “We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.” An “open source culture” in which IP considerations are put aside (at least somewhat) can spur better ideas for everyone (he cites universities as a prime example). Indeed, the very concept of a blog – and people (including me) writing for free – is part of the mix of ideas.

So, a summary straight from Johnson: “Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.”

Now go forth and innovate! What are your best ideas for hastening new ideas?

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. Listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.

 

How Companies Win: Dorie’s Book Review

It’s rare and thrilling to find a business book with genuinely innovative ideas. I’m sad to report (because their PR firm kindly sent me a review copy) that How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In by Rick Kash and David Calhoun is not it. There are some interesting insights, which I’ll get to. But overall, the book suffers from four critical flaws.

1.     It’s boring. This really shouldn’t be the case, since they credit a ghostwriter in the acknowledgements. But regardless, the book strives for a pseudo-academic tome that makes it almost painful. Witness what seems to be a thesis sentence for the book on Page 4: “The second lesson to be learned is that in an era of oversupply it is now imperative that you construct a framework in your company that encompasses and aligns everyone toward meeting not just the current but the latent and emerging demand of your highest-profit customers and consumers.” Got it.

2.     Fancy Word Syndrome. One vice of consultants is that they frequently use fancy words to sound smart when they’re explaining pretty basic concepts. This often stems from either insecurity or (as I’m guessing here) a desire to create a proprietary approach they can charge a lot of money for. Check out:

• “thesis for winning” (your plan)
• “need states” (when customers want to buy your stuff)
• “demand profit pools” (the target groups you want to sell to)
• “strategic growth opportunity areas” (where you want to focus)

3.     No there there. Kash and Calhoun’s concept, unfortunately, isn’t that earth-shattering. Basically, they’re saying that because the worldwide supply for goods and services is growing (thanks in part to globalization), the only move for successfully companies is to grow demand or risk falling behind. How to grow demand? Be innovative and strategic. Um, yeah.

4.     Overt shilling. Let’s be honest: every consultant or executive who writes a book hopes that they’ll get business out of it. But these guys are over the top, attempting to create a fake new specialty (“demand chain management”) that Kash can consult on (and for which Nielsen, the company Calhoun runs, can sell its new Fusion service). I’m surprised they got away with a particularly unctuous and self-serving anecdote involving a meeting between Kash’s firm and the former CEO of Anheuser-Busch, at which he was so awed by an incisive question that he immediately blurted out, “You’re hired!”

 

How Companies Win by Rick Kash and David Calhoun

 

 

All that being said, Kash and Calhoun do manage to marshal some interesting points to back up their thesis that (shocker!) it’s good to be innovative.

• First, they note that pricing power from 1991-2009 (as compared to the period from 1947-1990) declined 79% in the business-to-business market and 35% in the business-to-consumer market. That’s actually pretty amazing proof that you need to focus on differentiation.
• They cite an observation of Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor in The Innovator’s Solution that expected returns from innovation can drive 60-80% of a firm’s market value. “The top 20 percent of companies that successfully drive innovation,” they recount, “deliver four times the total shareholder returns that the bottom 20 percent do.”
• They make a powerful case that pricing is key to success: “A 1 percent price increase has a 50 percent greater impact on operating income than does a 1 percent decrease in variable cost. More remarkably, that same 1 percent price increase has a 215 percent greater impact on operating profit than a 1 percent volume increase in sales.”
• Finally, the power of branding is enormous: “The Stern Stewart research firm has determined that if your customer believes that your product is both meaningfully relevant and highly differentiated, your margins go up 50 percent faster, your profits go up more than 200 percent faster, and your market capitalization also goes up more than 200 percent faster than it does for competitors who have not successfully created relevant, differentiated offers.”

Have you read the book? What do you think? And just how important (or not) do you think pricing is?

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. Listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.

 

4 New Year’s Resolutions to Fast Track Your Career

It’s that time of year — when family members, morning talk show hosts and co-workers grill you with impunity about how, precisely, you’re going to fix yourself. There are plenty of contenders for your New Year’s Resolution list — perhaps some you attempted last year but abandoned. How do you prioritize? And which ones will actually make you money and advance your career this year? Here are four ideas.

1. Upgrade your autonomy. Specialists in the uber-trendy field of positive psychology have identified the #1 barrier to your happiness (the cultivation of which is surely a worthy New Year’s goal). The culprit? Lack of autonomy (as anyone with a micromanaging boss can tell you). This year, find ways to flex your mojo by choosing, to the extent possible, when and how to do your work. Two good strategies are lobbying for more flexibility in your schedule (as with Best Buy’s “Results Only Work Environment“), or, at minimum, aiming to reduce the number of soul-sucking meetings you’re subjected to (check out these tips for reasons to cancel meetings and some positive alternatives you can suggest).

2. Take more lunches. Networking maven Keith Ferrazzi famously instructed us to “Never Eat Alone” (the title of his excellent 2005 book) as a way to build connections. The advice becomes even more urgent, however, when coupled with research from Stanford University business school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who investigates how executives cultivate power. As he notes in a recent Harvard Business Review blog, “If you’re in a position to bring together unrelated groups of individuals who benefit from being in contact with each other, that’s a form of power.” In short, the path to success is becoming a “broker” who fills holes, transmits information and cultivates connections.

Read the full post on the Huffington Post site.

How to Become More Powerful

Get ready: the art of acquiring and retaining power has been demystified. Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Power: Why Some People Have It–And Others Don’t (based on a class he teaches at Stanford’s business school) is one of the best business books in recent years. No padding here–Pfeffer offers insightful and informative strategies you can deploy immediately. Here are some of the best:

 

Jeffrey Pfeffer's Power: Why Some People Have It - And Others Don't is a knockout business book.

 

 

• People avoid asking for help or favors (such as dinner once a year with the CEO) because they think it’s fruitless–yet it’s one of the best ways to reinforce bonds and people are very likely to say yes. Why? Because 1) people like to think of themselves as generous; and 2) “saying yes to a request for assistance reinforces the grantor’s position of power.” Don’t be afraid to ask – it’ll set you apart.
• How to build a power base when you’re still low on the totem pole? “Build a resource base”–i.e., cultivate things other people want, which could be anything from money (if your department controls resources) to jobs, information, or just listening. Notes Pfeffer, in a nod to behavioral psychology, “Helping people out in almost any fashion engages the norm of reciprocity – the powerful, almost universal behavioral principle that favors must be repaid. But people do not precisely calculate how much value they have received from another and therefore what they owe in return. Instead, helping others generates a more generalized obligation to return the favor, and as a consequence, doing even small things can produce a comparatively large payoff.”
• Your ticket to professional success? “Occupy a brokerage position.” In others words, put yourself between groups and fill holes and help transmit information – the additional contacts and knowledge will give you more power. But note that the benefit only accrues to you if you’re in the position yourself – simply knowing someone who’s a broker won’t do you much good.
• Alpha Dog Redux. Harkening back to a previous post of mine on “How to Become an Alpha Dog” and the research of social scientist Amy Cuddy, Pfeffer sounds a similar tone: “…if you have to choose between being seen as likable and fitting in on the one hand or appearing competent albeit abrasive on the other, choose competence. Self-deprecating comments and humor work only if you have already established your competence.”
• Rebranding yourself can be tough, as I write about in my recent Harvard Business Review blog post on “How to Reinvent Your Personal Brand.” Pfeffer advises that if you’re developed a bad rap somewhere, the best move is simply to leave -  it’s just too hard to overcome it. He adds that “…because impressions are formed quickly and are based on many things, such as similarity and ‘chemistry’ over which you have far from perfect control, you should try to put yourself in as many different situations as possible – to play the law of large numbers. If you are a talented individual, over time and in many contexts, that talent will appear to those evaluating you. But in any single instance, the evaluative judgment that forms the basis for your reputation will be much more random.”
• Mild negative traits are not a deal-killer. When someone has a reputation as somewhat difficult (the key is somewhat, not pathologically), that can actually help your power base because people who are “forewarned” and hire you anyway will be more committed to the decision (Pfeffer cites Larry Summers’ well-known truculence).
• Got an enemy? Be generous and you’ll win in the end. Two good options are to “co-opt them” (create a committee, let them lead it, and they’ll be working from the inside, not the outside) or to help them get an even better job…far from where they can bother you.
• How to keep perspective when you’re already in power? The sage words of a Swiss executive: “What you have to do is every now and then expose yourself to a social circle that really doesn’t care about your position.”
• Status is “portable.” How is it that so many high-level business execs successfully run for public office, or so many actors and rappers create fashion lines? And how come Bono is now a prominent humanitarian ambassador? It’s because, as Pfeffer observes, “…people assume that if you are smart enough to succeed in one highly competitive domain, you must be competent in other, even unrelated domains as well. One implication of this phenomenon for you is that the specific organization or domain in which you rise to power may matter less than the fact that you manage to achieve high-level status someplace. The prestige and power that come from achieving a senior position will generalize to some extent to other contexts, providing you with status there as well.”