ClearPurpose

I just completed a total redesign of my website, so it seems like a good opportunity to discuss the linkage from strategy to execution. I believe that everything in your business should start with the strategy. If you have a well formulated and understood business strategy, then you have a framework to easily make the decisions necessary to develop your messaging strategy. And if you have a crisp and coherent messaging strategy, you have a framework for easily making the execution decisions in positioning your business in the marketplace.

You can read the full article here where I walk through that process from business strategy to messaging strategy to web site implementation. I hope it’s helpful to you!

Thanks to new research published by professors at USC and UTSA in the Journal of Marketing, business leaders have a new way of thinking about the adoption of new disruptive technologies and therefore making critical strategic decisions about how they choose to compete.

In the early 1960s, Everett Rogers codified decades of research into the Diffusion of Innovations curve, which tremendously helped business leaders understand market adoption of disruptive technologies. In the early 1990s, Geoffrey Moore advanced this work with his Technology Adoption Life Cycle, which helped innovative business leaders better understand what they can do to manage through these transitions. Now, another 30 years on, Chandrasekaran et al are developing a new Successive Technology Diffusion Model which, I believe, will help both incumbent and disruptive business leaders make the most important strategic decisions for the survival of their companies.

Read the full article here.

Nerds 2.0.1 is one of my favorite books of all time. Maybe that’s the geek in me, or the history fan, or one who really enjoys a good story, or probably all of the above. That’s why today I’ve written a review of a 23 year old book. That and the fact that the history of the Internet began in very scary times when the future seemed uncertain. Nerds 2.0.1 is a story of hope and overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It’s a story that I think many could benefit from here at the beginning of 2021.

Nerds 2.0.1 tells the early history of the Internet. Published in 1998 to accompany a PBS television series, the Internet it describes may not be familiar to those that are constantly connected to life and work via the web today, so don’t expect it to provide useful tips for how to leverage the latest social networks for business success. What it does tell is a story of how persistence, ingenuity, and hard work can overcome the greatest challenges and prove expert skeptics wrong. 

Read the full review here.

Uncharted has shown up on a number of lists of the top books of 2020. Given how 2020 has convinced us that the future is uncharted and unpredictable, there’s a real hunger for an answer to how we can navigate the future. I picked up the book hoping it contained some new approaches and tools that I could use in my work with clients. I wanted quick and easy practical steps and instead the author delivered long and messy stories of real life. She’s a great storyteller and her chapters are full of compelling stories, but no easy answers.

Read the full review here.

The audiobook version of A Sprint to the Finish, read by the author, is available now from a number of leading retailers (more coming soon).

You can currently find it at:

• Google Play
• Apple
• Kobo/WalMart
• Audiobooks.com
• NOOK Audiobooks
• Chirp
• Scribd

I hope you find it interesting, entertaining, and informative!

One of the online classes I took this year was “Robots in Society: Blessing or Curse” offered by Delft University of Technology. Last week I was informed that the final paper I submitted for the course had been selected for their “Hall of Fame”. 

The Connected Intelligence Revolution is the collision of advanced data processing technologies with massive amounts of available data, resulting in new ways that we see the world, anticipate the future, make decisions, and take action.

This revolution promises great benefits for companies, individuals, and society, but it also introduces great dangers. In a global economy, with rapidly changing technologies, ensuring that no one gets left behind is a complex, multifaceted challenge that requires action and commitment at the individual, company, industry, national, and international levels. I believe that the actions I have outlined in this paper are reasonable, realistic, and can result in a positive outcome for all stakeholders.

Read the full paper.

One of the richest tools I’ve found for connecting strategy and execution is the Strategy Map introduced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 2001.

In their Balanced Scorecard work, Kaplan and Norton had defined four “perspectives”: Learning and Growth, Internal business process, Customer, and Financial. The Strategy Map creates a cause-and-effect relationship to emerge between these four perspectives, with the Internal and Customer perspectives being central.

If we are to achieve our strategy, what needs to be true about our business (Internal), and therefore what needs to be true about our culture and our people (Learning and Growth)? When we achieve our strategy, how will that translate into value for our customers (Customer) and therefore into value for our investors (Financial)?

As helpful as the Strategy Map is for “connecting the dots” from the company’s people and culture all the way to financial performance, with the strategy at its core, the Strategy Map often could not capture on a single page all of the things happening within the business to execute the strategy, and how those activities would be managed.

Kaplan and Norton introduced the concept of Strategic Themes as a way to focus on specific parallel aspects of the strategy. I like to consider the Pillars of the strategy as Strategic Themes and to map out the logical flow of the strategy at a greater level of detail. I also like to use this view to identify key initiatives that align with the aspects of the Strategy Map. Finally, the Strategic Themes level of mapping is also a great place to begin to call out specific metrics that can be used in monitoring the strategy to make sure that execution is staying on track.

Those metrics are then managed through the Balanced Scorecard. The Strategy Map and Strategy Themes help us translate the strategy into specific actions we need to take as a company and the Balanced Scorecard provides the tool for regularly monitoring our progress in executing the strategy.

Read the full story here.

Warner Bros. made big news this past week by announcing that new feature films in 2021 will simultaneously release in theaters and streaming on HBO Max. 

For many that haven’t closely followed the company’s corporate transactions, the decision was a bit of a head scratcher. But once you understand that Time Warner was acquired by AT&T in 2018, who had also acquired DirecTV in 2015, it all starts to make sense. Kind of. In a troubling sort of way.

AT&T clearly believes in vertical integration. Vertically integrating has many advantages — you can control the value chain, drive out inefficiencies, and make decisions to maximize profitability. 

But it also comes with significant challenges. I’m not sure AT&T is up for those challenges. The companies in AT&T’s portfolio come from industries with very different expectations, market disciplines, cultures, and ecosystems. 

In 2020, streaming networks are the shiny thing that everyone is chasing. AT&T wants to turn the crank on the vertically integrated machine they’ve built to deliver growth in HBO Max subscribers. Who cares if Warner Bros. gets squeezed a bit in the process?

It turns out a lot of people care. 

Let’s hope AT&T learns their lessons before they do too much damage.

Read the full story here.

Last week, General Motors’ Chairman and CEO Mary Barra increased the company’s commitment to electric vehicles from $20 billion to $27 billion by 2025 and announced the company’s plan for an all-electric future. This week General Motors sent another significant signal of this pivot by withdrawing from the Trump administration-led litigation against California’s tough fuel economy and emissions regulations.

Startups often pivot multiple times before settling on a winning business model. What GM is doing is much trickier.

The auto industry has been a mature industry for quite some time. When industries approach the end of their life, smart companies try to “jump” to another S-curve still in the startup phase. That’s what GM (and every other automaker) is trying to do. Making that jump isn’t going to be easy. Big mature companies are complex. GM customers, employees, and dealers are all heavily invested in the company’s gas-powered legacy. The company’s business model and economic engine are fine tuned for the way GM has always operated. 

While it might seem that logically GM has a strong starting point, the investment that the company needs to make to transition to electric vehicles may be greater than for a pure-play startup like Tesla. General Motors also has everything at stake. Their existing revenue streams and loyalties can easily be lost if the company stumbles in this transition.

Billy Durant successfully led his companies through the S-curve jump from horseless carriages to automobiles in creating GM. Can Mary Barra do the same as GM tries to jump from gas-powered to electric-powered vehicles? We will have to wait and see.

Read the full story.