How Big Is Your Deficit?

No, this isn’t another commentary about sovereign debt or the government’s budget.  I’m referring to the technical deficit that accumulates when a product team rushing to deliver a development project is forced to make tough decisions like:

“Yes, we should develop this in an all-encompassing way.  But there’s no time to lose!  So let’s take a faster, more focused approach.  We’ll deal with the rest later.”

“We’ll put all those bug fixes into the next release.”

“We can live with that behavior for the time being.”

These are often the right choices at the time.  I’ve certainly seen companies delay a product launch too long while they polish every little bit of tarnish on every minor feature. In the meantime, a competitor releases a product that is “good enough” and eats their lunch.

Yet product executives should still be aware of the technical deficit and consciously decide whether they need do something about it. If you don’t actually know what your deficit is, I suggest you wander down the hall and talk to the engineers.

The list of technical compromises often gets pushed out of sight because rarely is anyone willing to pay to address it. Some items may get fixed when a customer demands it or when a piece of code happens to be rewritten. But over time, forgotten bugs start to trip up the development team. Gradually it ends up taking half an hour to compile software that used to compile in a fraction of the time. The engineering team can’t seem to churn out features as fast as they used to. In the lab, they start talking about how a “total rewrite” will soon be necessary to advance the product. There are hundreds, or even thousands, of bugs in the tracking system that haven’t been resolved for years. All this adds up to higher development costs that compound release after release unless you bite the bullet and start to work off your debt.

One solution is to make a good hard “bug scrub” one of the “features” in your next product release. Just take some percentage of your backlog and start cleaning things up. Or consider a “strengthen the business” feature.  Have someone work on improving compile time or creating tools that will save effort in the future. If you consider the potential recovery of lost development time these approaches will pay for themselves in short order.

Assuming some technical debt can make sense.  But eventually you need to face the music.  So be sure to pay some off from time to time before, like the Greek financial crisis, it spirals out of control.

Chris Barrett (VP Engineering)
 

Willpower For Managers

The managers I respect most have the ability to control their emotions, think clearly and remain focused regardless of the bedlam around them.  I marvel at their patience when dealing with difficult people and I feel inadequate when I think of my occasional temper tantrums.  I wonder if managerial self-control is an inherent personality trait or something that can be cultivated?

A recent article by Roy F. Baumeister in NewScientist magazine claims that willpower is not so much a moral quality as a muscle that can both tire and be strengthened.  Controlling thoughts and emotions, restraining impulses and performing tasks and duties all draw from the same reserves of willpower.  After you exert any sort of self-control you have less willpower for new demands.  Cutting back effort conserves what remains.

Since willpower is used when making choices, daily decision-making also tires the muscle and impairs self-control.  In the NewScientist article, the author recounts a study that examined the difficult decisions faced by parole judges.  Early in the day, and after eating, judges were more likely to take the risky step of granting parole than later in the day, when their willpower was depleted from making choices, or before meals when they were hungry.  It was easier just to keep the convicts locked up than summon the self-discipline to carefully weigh the pros and cons involved in granting parole.

In fact, there appears to be evidence that willpower is a kind of “energy” that is tied to levels of glucose used to carry energy from the digestive system to muscles and organs.  Studies show that after exerting self-control, people perform better on the next self-control task when given a slug of glucose between tasks.  This suggests why dieting is so hard.  In order to resist tempting foods you need willpower.  But to have willpower, you must eat.  As you restrict food intake you diminish the psychological strength needed to succeed.  Out comes the junk food.

What can you learn from this to become a better manager?  First, armed with knowledge of willpower, you can schedule your tougher decisions and interactions for when you know you’ll be better equipped to tackle them.  Second, like training for a marathon, you can gradually improve your willpower “muscles” by exercising them regularly.  Third, if you’re trying to lose weight, stop smoking and manage a tough work situation all at the same time, remember that you only have so much willpower, so don’t let a little backsliding stop you from persevering.

When all else fails, take a tip from the willpower researchers.  Stir some sugar into your coffee, grab a can of soda or snack on a few jellybeans.  It won’t do much for your diet but it might just help you make a better decision when you really need to.

Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
 

Making Ideas Stick

Recently I had a conversation with a brilliant CEO who shared his frustration at trying to keep track of the many business ideas that constantly race through his head.  He was certain that he was losing good opportunities before he could capture his thoughts.

I’ve seen this challenge in many entrepreneurs and senior managers who spend long days buried in emails, voice mails and meetings.   Finding the time for a structured planning session with their management teams is challenging enough; capitalizing on spontaneous thinking is next to impossible!  Yet we have all experienced that some of our best ideas come when we’re not consciously looking for them.

A few years ago I was coaching a senior marketing manager who was struggling with this issue. I handed her a 3”x3” sticky note pad that fit easily into her notebook or pocket and suggested that every time an idea popped into her head, she write it down.   Since her quarterly team meeting was coming up, we instructed her entire team to follow the same practice – record their rapid fire ideas on how to improve their stalled market share on a sticky note pad as they thought of them.  The rules were simple:  don’t dismiss any thoughts or notions; just write them down.   Don’t edit or censor.  Even the crazy ideas can be built upon by the rest of the team.

When the group assembled for their quarterly meeting, they stuck all their notes on a wall then began grouping them into similar threads looking for themes.   Through the physical process of posting and grouping the notes, they shared some great (and wild) ideas, laughed a lot, and came up with some novel approaches that hadn’t been considered before.  In the end, everyone had contributed to the planning process and they left their meeting with three solid projects to pursue.

Writing down your thoughts captures good ideas and stimulates further thought.  Make it a habit, whether you use paper and pen or an app.  But when it comes time to pool your ideas with others, in my experience, the process of physically touching each idea and manually moving sticky notes around on a wall generates useful interaction that’s not easy to replicate electronically.

Business is a contact sport.  This is one great tactile way to capture your ideas and make them “stick.”

Sandra Pacey (Director, Marketing)
 

Delivering Intentional Customer Experience

Want to create successful long-term client relationships and drive repeat business? By now, almost everyone knows that basic customer satisfaction isn’t enough.  The most successful companies strive to deliver not just transactional customer satisfaction, but a unique overall customer experience.

Creating an “Intentional Customer Experience” requires effort in two domains:

  1. Culture:  ensuring that our employees have the best of intentions, and
  2. Process:  becoming intentional in our actions

Customer-centric leaders (eg.  Sales people, customer service managers, etc.) can foster appropriate cultural norms across an organization in a couple of ways:

1.  Leading by example through demonstrating customer-centric behaviors:

  • Responsiveness to internal and external clients
  • Going the extra mile to ensure seamless “warm” hand-offs to colleagues on client actions
  • Speaking frankly internally and with clients
  • Celebrating success internally and with clients
  • Taking the time to cultivate relationships while meeting deliverables
  • Showing respect for others (especially clients) by preparing for meetings
  • Saying “thank-you”

    • 2.  Coaching other employees on:

  • Developing a game plan for a client interaction
  • Listening skills (when to listen and when to talk)
  • Responding to customer questions
  • Building relationships (connecting)
  • Soliciting feedback from the customer

    • Documented processes can complement cultural norms, by increasing the odds of successful client interactions.  They are a safety net for complex interactions or in rapidly growing or large companies in which culture isn’t always enough.  Many companies actually do follow best practices for a positive customer experience without even realizing it.  To become intentional, perform a review of successful client engagements for practices that could become part of an intentional client engagement process.   These might include:

    1. Initial assessment of the client and opportunity (this might enable the tailoring of a customer experience to different customer “personas”)
    2. Early engagement meetings with company experts to create shared understanding of the customer’s needs
    3. Designating an executive “sponsor” who can rally internal responsiveness to the client
    4. Establishing “status checkpoints”, including internal “synch meetings” and client “feedback meetings” leading up to proposal and throughout the engagement
    5. Rehearsals for critical client meetings

    Of course no amount of good service can overcome a bad product.  Effective value delivery (ie. the transaction) is the core of a customer’s experience and the foundation of successful customer relationships.  However, the many customer interactions that occur before and after the core transaction are what truly distinguish brand leaders.

    Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
     

    Inside Selling vs. Outside Selling

    Let me start by saying I’m NOT talking about the difference between the Inside Sales and Outside Sales functions. Instead, let’s acknowledge the importance of having a sales team that is effective at selling inside its own organization. This is often an under appreciated and overlooked sales skill.

    You might ask what needs to be sold internally, since everyone in the company is on the same team and should be pulling in the same direction. Well, as any experienced sales person knows, the list is surprisingly long:

    • Selling themselves. This is essential for remote sales staff to foster internal relationships that are vital for field support and timely responses.
    • Selling new product ideas. Whether suggestions from customers, partners or sales staff themselves, product ideas from the field are often pitched by Sales to Product Management.
    • Selling customer forecasts. Fighting to ensure the company meets customer demand is essential to maintaining client relationships and is particularly critical when manufacturing leadtimes extend or products are on allocation.
    • Selling market directions. Sales are “in the market” picking up knowledge of real-time purchasing trends, competitive intelligence and economic indicators that should be acted upon by Marketing.
    • Selling growth opportunities. An inspired sales team has the capacity to rally an entire company around a new opportunity.  Selling growth opportunities is also key to maintaining or increasing sales investment when required.

    Successful sales managers will coach their staff on the important role played by the sales organization in guiding the deployment of corporate resources.  They realise that sales professionals must wear two selling hats – their external one and their internal one. High performing organizations have sales teams that are masters of both the external and internal sale.

    So let’s give a tip of our hat to those talented sales people who are always selling – whether they’re with a client or inside corporate headquarters!

    Joe Connelly (VP Sales)
     

    A Bundle of Joy or Two Rocks Tied Together?

    The “family pack” is a time-honored retail tradition.  A per-unit price break is offered to encourage the customer to buy several units at once.  The retailer sells more stuff while preserving the price point of the individual item.

    A more complex commercial strategy used by B2B marketers with extensive product lines is to bundle complementary products together.  Bigger companies do this to increase order sizes and de-position smaller, single-product competitors.  Ideally, reduced selling costs offset any bundle discount.

    On the surface, multi-product bundles appear to have two primary customer value propositions:  convenience and price.   Unfortunately, these are neither particularly compelling nor sustainable.

    Consider a company that sells equipment to radio stations.  From their portfolio, with careful selection, a client can outfit an entire studio from scratch. A marketer might get the bright idea to create a cheaper and easier  “radio station studio bundle” to increase market share and improve inventory planning.

    But a competent radio station engineer takes pride in choosing the right equipment.  Buying equipment is like buying power tools – it’s fun!  They brag about the deals they negotiate.  The bundle takes all this away.  The marketer has inadvertently subverted the position of the buyer.  Soon, repeated requests for substitutions by picky engineers slow the sales process and undermine the bundle.  Competitors create their own bundles.  Now everyone’s frustrated and the vendors are selling at lower margins. Oops.

    But wait!  For a radio station in a small town or university that lacks experienced staff, a pre-engineered “station in a box” could be quite attractive. The primary value proposition isn’t convenience or reduced price; it is confidence and time-to-operation.  The bundle is a solution for an entirely new market segment:  inexperienced radio station operators.

    The most successful bundles offer a solution that the individual products can’t on their own – not just convenience and price.  Creating a true solution bundle is like secretly inventing an entirely new product that targets new market sectors with a compelling value proposition.  Market it accordingly.

    A final word to wise bundlers:  While a strong product can pull through average products, it’s pointless to bundle together mediocre products with a big price break hoping they’ll fly off the shelf.  Everyone, especially your customers, knows that two rocks tied together still don’t float.

    Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
     

    Why Is That Person So Frustrating At Meetings?

    Recently I was helping one of my clients fill a new marketing position.  Along with selecting someone with the right skills, identifying the right cultural fit was also important, especially for this smaller company.

    During the interview process, a group of software developers was hauled into an impromptu meeting with one of the candidates.   The interviewing manager asked if they had anything they wanted to discuss with the candidate.  After a few minutes of awkward silence, someone muttered some general comments before they gratefully escaped back to their cubicles.  It was not the kind of interaction that the interviewing manager had hoped for.

    A group of marketers would probably have been tripping over each other to share their opinions and quiz the candidate on her background!   It’s a fact that certain personalities are drawn to certain careers, something we should keep in mind when we interact and communicate with others.  Marketing and Sales types are more likely to shoot from the hip, loudly debating an issue out in the open (usually all at the same time!) before their thinking begins to crystallize.  Engineers and software developers on the other hand, tend to look at a problem introspectively, forming solutions before sharing their thoughts.

    As a manager, when you gather together people from different functions it is important to take notice of who is actively participating and who is fairly quiet.  The quieter ones often have lots to contribute but while they’re “processing” aren’t comfortable jumping into the debate. They may even appear uninterested or unengaged in the topic.  To get the most from your meetings, it’s worth the effort to periodically perform a roundtable check-in to make sure you’re not missing someone’s valuable input.

    The interviewing manager at my client regrouped by giving the software developers advanced notice of individual meetings with the candidate at their workstations.  Success!  The debriefings after these interviews provided excellent insight into how well the candidate would fit with the team.

    Understanding the human dynamics of communications preferences can make a big difference in your interviewing practices, your management effectiveness and your personal relationships.  So, the next time you’re in a meeting, carefully observe the different dynamics at play.  Who knows, you may just discover that the person you always found so frustrating (whether the loud mouth or the dormouse) may simply process information differently.

    Sandra Pacey (Director, Marketing)
     

    The Best Hangover Cure

    A hangover is what’s left behind from the night before.  A New Year’s Day hangover is the worst kind.  It especially hurts because it prevents you from properly enjoying a fresh start for the upcoming year.

    Once you’ve recovered from your New Year’s Day hangover, you’ll need to tackle the hangover back at work. You know, the incomplete performance reviews, that year-end report, the calls that didn’t quite get returned before the holidays, the 2012 annual operating plan and objectives that never actually got finalized. Plan on devoting a couple days to cleaning up this backlog. This workplace “hair of the dog” will make you feel better before you get started on the important work of the New Year.

    One of the best cures for a workplace hangover is to spend some time getting organized.  Go through all your outstanding actions and prioritize them. Before these good intentions slip away from you, get the important ones completed.

    I find that classifying outstanding actions into “A” (must get done and fast!), “B” (seemed important at the time) and “C” (best of intentions but . . .) is better than a forced ranking, particularly if you have a long “to do” list.  Between you and me, let’s just accept that you’re going to have to abandon the “B” and “C “items, so you can make progress with the “A” list. After all, the idea isn’t to load yourself down with too many chores; it is to clear your hangover so you can concentrate on the wonderful new opportunities in the New Year.

    Many of you, full of ambition (or driven by fear), drunkenly took on more work than you could possibly handle last year.  Now, rather than celebrating with a champagne toast to your accomplishments, you’re crying into your beer over the mountain of work that lies ahead.  After spending the past year drinking from a fire hose, it’s no wonder you’ve got a hangover!

    So if you’re starting yet another year with a wicked workplace hangover, here’s a New Year’s resolution suggestion:  rather than just trying to get better organized, consider doing something about that drinking problem too.  Cheers!

    Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
     

    Working At Being Happy

    Everyone works to live.  Some of us live to work.  Either way our happiness is inextricably linked, for better or worse, with our work.  If we better understood the nature of this linkage, perhaps we could look forward to greater happiness in 2012.

    The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index was a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization.  An analysis of more than 450,000 responses from 2008 – 2009 revealed the impact of money (income) on two aspects of subjective well-being:  emotional well-being (the frequency and intensity of experienced feelings that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant – think of it as “happiness”) and life evaluation (how people think about their life when asked – i.e. life “satisfaction”).

    Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, from the Princeton University Center for Health and Well-being, analyzed the data and found that income correlates more closely to life evaluation (satisfaction) than daily emotional well-being (happiness). But happiness does rise with income up to about $75,000 annually.  Apparently, past a certain level of stable income, an individual’s emotional well-being is constrained by other factors in their temperament and life circumstances (health, loneliness, etc.).  Similarly, low income exacerbates the emotional pain of misfortunes such as divorce, ill health and being alone (basically it sucks to be poor, especially in bad times).  For you math geeks, the analysis looks at the correlation against log income since this reveals the impact of relative differences in income.

    The research shows that in the broadest sense money does buy happiness:  increasing income increases a person’s life satisfaction even among those who are already well off, and it has a positive effect on happiness up to a (fairly generous) point.  Of course, happiness also depends strongly on social and psychological factors like respect from friends and family, reliability of friends and relatives, number of working hours and job satisfaction.  Knowing this, we have the ability to make some conscious choices about our behaviour, and where we spend our time, to make the trade-off between happiness and life satisfaction.  Like so many things in life, optimizing happiness and life satisfaction is a balancing act.

    But it should make us all at least a little happy to realize that, unlike the majority of people in the world, we are blessed to be satisfied enough to even consider these choices.

    Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
     

    Marketing Mixology

    I’m a fan of the TV show Madmen.  It’s about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the 1960s.  It is a fantasy universe where stylish, drunken marketers rule the world, creative ideas materialize out of thin air and you can drink all day but still be brilliant.  The show is also a clever social commentary on the status of minorities and women, social responsibility and work/life balance. But a real part of the pleasure of the show for me is the clothes and the ever-present cocktails.

    I’m a bartender from way back so, inspired by Madmen, I’ve been rediscovering the ocean of mixed drinks that have poured from the minds of inventive bartenders. I like to think of marketers as the bartenders of a company.  They take ingredients from behind the company’s bar, mix them in a way that appeals to the customer and serve them up with a flourish that helps define the customer experience.  Mixology has been around a lot longer than marketing but the fundamentals are actually quite similar. Here’s what I mean:

    • Like all cocktails, a marketing mix has a base ingredient that is the foundation for the rest of the marketing strategy.  It might be a pricing strategy (“Low prices.  Every day”), the use of direct sales for distribution (“Buy direct from the manufacturer”) or the superiority of the product (“We’re the Rolls Royce of Widgets”).
    • While some people drink straight liquor, there is a reason mixed cocktails exist.  Every target market, like every drinker, has different interests, tastes and needs.  It is the secondary ingredients of the marketing mix, the right combination of price, promotion, packaging and distribution strategies, that elaborate and build on the base strategy to effectively reach the target market.
    • Shaken or stirred? Experimenting with different ways of combining the elements of the marketing mix is the essence of marketing.  In many cases it is the promotional mix that benefits most from this experimentation.  And, like a well-made cocktail, the order in which the various promotional ingredients are executed is almost always important.
    • The right glass and garnish are essential!  Before they even taste what you have to offer, customers form an impression of your company.  The image presented in the style and tone of your marketing, and the way you package yourself (ie.  your brand), are often what encourage them to sidle up to the bar and place their order.

    If you’ve stuck with me through this strained metaphor … cheers!  I have to admit that it seemed a whole lot more brilliant last night after a couple of Manhattans.  Ah well, apparently I’m no Don Draper . . .

    Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
     

    When It’s Time To Rebuild Your Sales Team

    One of the toughest questions a CEO or VP of Sales must face is: “Should we rebuild our Sales organization?” If this decision is being considered, the outlook is probably pretty bleak:

    • Declining revenues and missed budgets
    • Lost strategic customers or major opportunities
    • Slowness in responding to major changes in the external environment (new competitors, new technologies, new markets)
    • Declining sales motivation and effort

    Nevertheless, before taking more drastic actions it makes sense to FIRST try sales training, new sales tools or incremental sales support resources to improve the situation.  These incremental approaches are less risky, less expensive and can have more immediate impact. However, if after careful analysis it becomes clear that it is time to shake things up, consider these guidelines:

    • Ensure you recruit the very best new sales staff you can afford. A-players attract A-players so the long-term payback will be significant.  Besides, you certainly don’t want to face having to rebuild again in the near future.
    • Simultaneously rebuild and document your sales processes.  Effective processes become the “memory” of your sales organization throughout the changes.  Make the processes ‘light and efficient’ so they don’t overburden the new sales team.
    • Take a clinical approach to Customer Relationship Management.  Implement one of the many excellent off-the-shelf CRMs like Salesforce.com.  Avoid over-customization and homegrown solutions!
    • Cultivate adaptability to change as a core competency within the Sales organization
    • Lead with inspiration and motivation not through fear.  There will be plenty of uncertainty during the transition.  Your existing and new employees will need a clear vision and positive motivation now more than ever.
    • As CEO, empower your VP of Sales and your highly experienced Sales staff. You’ve put the future of the company in their hands so let them do their job by drawing upon their experience and playing to their strengths.

    Often the decision to rebuild a sales team is deferred until the issues have become critical.  Despite the urgency, senior executives must give the new sales organization time to deliver results and must avoid the temptation to micro-manage.  Establish a clear and simple methodology to forecast business so the sales team can be held accountable with proper budgets. Then let your new top guns spend their time on meeting or beating their revenue and profit targets.  When it comes to sales results, the way to “Excel” is rarely through spreadsheets!

    Joe Connelly (VP Sales)
     

    The “Bear” Necessities of Value Propositions

    Two guys are camping. In the middle of the night a grizzly bear approaches their tent. Razor sharp claws and hungry jaws are just inches away. One of the campers pulls on his socks and starts to lace up his running shoes. The other guy sneers, “Face it, we’re goners. You can’t outrun that bear.” The first camper replies calmly, “I don’t need to, I just have to run faster than you!”

    When you’re marketing and selling your products, are you trying to beat the competition or are you trying to outrun the bear? Here’s a test. If I were to ask you why a client should buy your product or service would you fumble around trying to articulate a “unique value proposition”? Would you then complain that your incompetent marketing team has struggled to really capture your competitive differentiation? If so, I’ll bet that you’ve been trying to outrun the bear.

    Most of the time you don’t need to be unique to be successful – you just need to be better than most of the other campers. So rather than agonizing to come up with unique differentiators, just be clear on what distinguishes you from your competitors. This may not actually have anything to do with your product or service but could be some other aspect of your business: the way you go to market, the quality of your customer experience, the speed at which you innovate, etc.

    There’s a lot of waste involved in striving for differentiation when being distinguished will do. Unless your offer truly is unique, you’ll spend too much effort trying to come up with a value proposition that simply doesn’t exist. Or worse, you’ll latch onto a very narrow scenario in which you are credibly differentiated, thereby limiting your target market and constraining your growth potential.

    “Unique” is a pretty high standard for any value proposition. By all means promote your value proposition as unique to generate excitement in the marketplace – I like to engage in marketing hyperbole as much as the next guy. But inside the tent, rather than wringing your hands over what makes you unique, just lace on your runners and go with what distinguishes you from the norm. Once you’ve identified the uncommon (though probably not unique) value that you offer, your marketing and sales team can get on with the race to find the many prospective clients hiding in the forest.

    But tell them to watch where they’re running. You know what a bear does in the woods . . .

    Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
     

    Judging a Writer by His Book

    Seems like everyone I know is thinking about writing a book (even I’m working on a project right now).

    Maybe it is the age of my peers.  They’ve spent lifetimes learning and are itching to share their hard won experiences with others.  It’s part altruism and part self-congratulatory chest puffing.  But these are impressive people so something good might come of it.

    Or perhaps the democratization of writing through social media is encouraging people to think bigger.  With a few blog posts under their belts and a modest following on Twitter, they have the confidence to tackle something more substantial.  Wouldn’t it be great if what they created was based on research so that it would really add to the world’s body of knowledge?

    Then there are the self-promoters who want to raise their profile and grow their business.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  A book can be a means of demonstrating credentials.  Being an author is like being a professor – you now carry the aura of an expert.

    Whatever their motivation, I tip my hat to anyone who has the gumption to write a book.  The effort scares the heck out of me – do you know how many words you need to come up with?  Tens of thousands!  Imagine that the next time you struggle with a 140-character tweet or 500-word blog post.

    More terrifying still is that once published, these words become a permanent measure of your intelligence, erudition and humor – for better or worse.  So, best be clear on why you want to write a book, honest about your talent and convinced that you have the determination to see it through.

    But don’t dismay if you can’t seem to get started on the book you’ve always meant to write. You are already an author of sorts.  Your experience, values and opinions are passed on to others every day in the way that you live.  So why not start thinking about your actions at home and at work as writing a book for others to read?

    Each day is another chapter in the book of your life – and that’s the most important story of all.

    Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
     

    Marketing Catch-22

    “It was love at first sight.  The first time the CEO saw the CMO he fell madly in love with him.” - with apologies to Joseph Heller.

    The CEO looked up from the draft press release. It had been a good year. Actually, it had been an amazing year – the best year in the company’s history.

    “Nothing succeeds like success”, enthused the CMO, “We need to publicize our momentum, particularly to the local press.” He’d been brought in with a bit of fanfare and at “great expense” a couple of months ago to “raise the volume” on the company’s marketing.

    The CEO looked dubious. Despite the pride he felt in the company’s accomplishments, there was a nagging voice telling him to be careful. He rubbed his jaw. “Maybe we shouldn’t mention our actual revenues . . .” he began. “And won’t blowing our own horn just attract headhunters who’ll poach our best people?”

    The CMO counted to ten. It wasn’t the first time he’d had this debate.

    Another CEO had hammered him to find new customers but refused to publish customer testimonials. “Why would we tell our competitors who are best customers are?” he’d asked in astonishment. “They’ll just steal them away from us!” It had been like fighting with one hand tied behind his back.

    Funny, it always seemed to be the CEOs that pounded the table hardest for results that chickened out when it came time to promote their successes.

    “Well, I guess some headhunter might hear of us and try to contact some of our employees”, conceded the CMO. “Of course, it’s just as likely that some prospective clients might call us too. And maybe even some job seekers who’d love to work for a company on a roll.”

    The CEO considered this as the CMO continued heatedly, “Besides, I’ll wager that a press release publicizing our success might actually make our employees quite proud. Everyone wants to be associated with a winner.”  (“Except you, it seems”, he thought in frustration.)

    Eyes narrowing, the CEO said, “OK, then rewrite this thing to acknowledge the contribution of our fine employees and maybe attract some new A-players to the team.“

    “Can you do that?”, he challenged.

    “Can do!” the CMO exclaimed boisterously, annoyed that he hadn’t thought of this himself. Caught on his back foot by the CEO once again – damn.

    The CEO had already turned back to his computer as the CMO headed out of the office, crumpled press release in hand. Pausing, he looked back and delivered a parting shot, “By the way, it’s up to the department managers and HR to keep the employees happy. My job is to raise the profile of this company and get customers in the door.”

    The CEO glanced up and grunted,  “So?  Then get on with it!”

    Doug Michaelides (VP Marketing)
     

    Who’s Got the Ball? If You Don’t Know . . . It’s You!

    “Sure, luck means a lot in football. Not having a good quarterback is bad luck.” – Don Shula

    If you’re managing projects, you are the quarterback.  So when something new comes along that you don’t have an established system for – you have the ball.  It is your job to call a play (develop a plan) and pass the ball to someone to execute or else prepare to run the play yourself.

    Often in smaller organizations, you may find yourself running the play fairly regularly, but as organizations grow and projects become more complex, you have to be passing more often.  At the very least key tasks within the plan must be handed over to other team members.  There’s just too much going on for one person, no matter how talented, to handle it all.

    Making the transition from player to “quarterback” isn’t easy.  Here are some of the rules of play:

    • Not only do you have to start “passing the ball” (but not the buck!) you have to make sure that team members recognize when they have the ball.  It may not be obvious to them, so it’s worth stating explicitly.
    • Similarly, the other people in the organization also need to know who has the ball and what is expected from them to support the ball carrier.
    • And don’t forget the huddle!  The entire team needs to know what play (plan) has been called.  But as your team matures, be prepared to empower them to make “in play” decisions and exercise discretion.

    Once people get used to carrying the ball you may be pleasantly surprised with their abilities.  The team members who step up to take ownership for success are your potential leaders of the future.  With a culture of players owning and driving issues across the goal line, you will all be amazed at how productive the team becomes.

    Creating a high-performance team doesn’t happen overnight.  If your team doesn’t really know what to do with the ball, you need to coach them and consider a little recruiting. In the long run, training players so they can execute themselves will result in a scalable process that gets the fans cheering.

    Otherwise you will always have the ball yourself – and quarterbacks like that often get sacked . . .

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    Chris Barrett (VP Engineering)
     
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