ClearPurpose

This week, BuzzFeed announced that it was acquiring HuffPost (acquired by Verizon in 2015 as part of the $4.4 billion AOL acquisition) in a complex deal with Verizon Media. Meanwhile, AT&T is still looking for a buyer for DirecTV (which they acquired in 2015 for $49 billion). Also announced this week, T-Mobile is shutting down their TVision Home service that they aquired in 2017 (while confusingly launching a similar service also called TVision). These transactions are just the latest in a long line of symptoms of a consistent problem. While mobile operators are great at operating wireless networks, they fail their stakeholders when they stray beyond their strategic boundaries.

Verizon and AT&T have reached their similar situations by moving in opposite directions. Verizon seemed to start without a strategy, so they made some big mistakes, and now that they have a strategy they need to unwind those mistakes. AT&T had a strategy, but they ignored it and made some big mistakes. They now don’t seem to know what their strategy is, but still need to unwind those mistakes so their debt doesn’t kill them. Meanwhile, T-Mobile was a scrappy, under-resourced upstart that executed against a focused strategy.

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Rich Horwath is a consultant who helps companies with their strategic planning. In StrategyMan vs. the Anti-Strategy Squad Horwath uses a super-hero vs. super-villain comic book to teach his approach to strategic planning. He does so by introducing the factors common in businesses that lead to “bad strategy” in the form of the villains who are set on killing the strategy for TechnoBody, a fictional company. At each step in the process, the villains show up, only to be defeated by the heroes from the Strategic Thinking Institute (Horwath’s company). The heroes teach basic principles and tools that lead to successful strategic planning. 

StrategyMan is a fun and informative book. While a relatively quick and enjoyable read, it contains much to help business leaders recognize common behaviors that can impede strategic planning and learn tools and principles for doing it right. Optimally, the book would make a good pre-read for a team heading into the strategic planning process. Unfortunately, Horwath leans heavily on the terminology and some frameworks that are unique to his approach to strategic planning. While there’s nothing wrong with the Strategic Thinking Institute approach, companies that already have their own terminology, processes, tools, and timelines may be hesitant to confuse participants by introducing an alternative framework.

Read the full review here.

Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older and more perceptive (or perhaps more cynical) but with each election cycle, voters seem increasingly to be voting against a given candidate rather than for the one that gets their vote. So much of campaigning these days is trying to convince voters why the competitor is a bad choice rather than making the case for why the candidate is a good choice. It’s sad. And I’m glad businesses, for the most part, don’t work that way.

Smart businesses, on the other hand, realize that they don’t need to please everyone. In fact, trying to be “all things to all people” is one of the hardest business strategies to pursue and one that is rarely (if ever) successful.

Successful businesses carefully select which customers they want to please and then focus all their attention on that subset. For most businesses, this is a very small minority of the overall total market. And while business leaders, especially entrepreneurs, are always looking for opportunities created when existing solutions poorly serve customers, businesses do best when they focus their marketing and personal pitches on the value that they create rather than on the shortcomings of their competitors.

And when customers feel really good about the choices they make in the marketplace, we all win!

Read the full article here.

Media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg formed startup NewTV early in 2017, landed Meg Whitman as CEO in March 2018, announced $1 billion in funding in August of that year, and two months later renamed the business Quibi. The service officially launched in April of this year and now, two years after its naming and six months after its launch, the service is being shut down.

I’m guessing the main problem is a simple, and unfortunately common one.

They simply forgot to ask if anyone needed a Quibi.

The really sad thing is that Katzenberg, Whitman, and their investors probably didn’t need to spend money on research or spend time in customer discovery. Their concept had already been disproven. In September 2015 Verizon launched go90, a mobile-centric video streaming service with studio-quality content. The service failed to attract subscribers and was shut down in July 2018 (a month before Quibi’s funding).

Katzenberg and Whitman don’t understand how to launch a startup. They tried to run Quibi like a big corporate initiative. Verizon can afford to lose $1 billion on a bad big bet. No startup can afford to lose $1 billion.

Smart startups realize that their concept is merely a collection of hypotheses. Those hypotheses need to be tested, proved, and improved. Smart startups spend as little money as possible until their experiments have shown that they provide a solution that the market really needs, wants, and is willing to pay for. And when they truly know that, they scale like crazy.

Quibi did everything backwards. They spent tons of money without testing any hypotheses. And when their hypotheses were wrong, it was too late. The money was spent. The goodwill with the industry, investors, and the public was gone. There was nothing left to do but close the doors.

If you have an idea for a startup, learn this lesson. 

Don’t be a Quibi.

Read the full story here.

IBM recently announced plans to split into two companies. The company continuing on with the IBM name will focus on cloud and AI solutions, while IBM’s traditional managed infrastructure services will reside in a to-be-named NewCo. 

I’m a huge fan of focus, so this is a good thing, perhaps even overdue.

However, I have often said that a company’s purpose should be “forever” and if a company changes its purpose, then that probably means it’s no longer the same company. This planned change is a good opportunity to reflect on the fact that IBM is no longer International Business Machines. While the company’s stock ticker, headquarters location, and even management and employee teams have enjoyed some level of continuity, it is not the same company.

In this article, I discuss how the company’s purpose and very nature have changed over the decades.

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It’s not often that I get an extremely strategic piece of direct mail, but that’s exactly what happened yesterday. 

Yesterday’s mailing from Ligonier Ministries included a brochure titled “Unwavering Commitments.” The terminology immediately made me think of the term “Non-negotiable Principles” that I’ve been using lately to reflect how organizations need to step up from the platitudes often called “Core Values” to something more meaningful and real.

In reading through the commitments in the brochure, I think they represent a mix of “Non-negotiable Principles” and “Pillars”. With that in mind, in the article linked here I take a shot at laying out the core elements of Ligonier’s strategy purely using this one document.

While this “marketing” piece isn’t designed to be the perfect “strategy” document, it does a great job of ensuring that all stakeholders understand the goal and how the organization will make decisions in working to achieve it.

When was the last time you so clearly communicated your strategy to stakeholders?

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Today we look at security cameras and connected lights to learn the simple lesson that companies need to make trade-offs in developing products for the Connected Intelligence era. 

Over the years, I’ve used connected security cameras from Ring, Nest, and Arlo. Each of these companies has made decisions. Those decisions involve trade-offs. They’ve had to make compromises to bring their products to market. In this article I look specifically at two decisions each has had to make: battery power vs. AC power, and subscription plan options.

Connected lighting is another space where I’ve seen meaningful compromises and trade-offs. At VisuALS Technology Solutions, as we focused on restoring independence, dignity, and hope for those with debilitating conditions, we studied various options for enabling those we serve to be able turn lights on and off in their homes. In this article I look specifically at the decisions smart lighting companies have had to make about whether or not to require a hub, and whether to make the light bulb smart or rather to make the switch or outlet smart.

There is a way around these compromises. Arlo has done so in the camera space and Philips has done so in the lighting space. They have been able to largely overcome the compromises caused by these trade-off decisions by expanding their product line to cover all of these options. This optionality, however, translates into complexity for the consumer as he seeks to figure out how to capture the power of the Connected Intelligence Revolution in his own home.

In other words, sometimes overcoming tradeoffs merely introduces another tradeoff. Welcome to the revolution!

Read the full article here.

Earlier this week I started a new series on how the Connected Intelligence Revolution is redefining every product and every industry. Today, I want to look at  garage door openers, to explain how challenging connected intelligence is for existing market leaders.

Garage door openers aren’t very susceptible to displacement by software. The factors that make an opener competitive — power, speed, quietness, reliability — have been developed by a small number of market leaders over several decades. A software engineer can’t simply write a few (thousand) lines of code and recreate those capabilities. That should be good news for the incumbents, but instead what we’ve seen is the evidence of how hard it is for existing players to adapt to new realities. 

In his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen described how companies and their ecosystem partners value the things that have always defined success in their industry (e.g. powerful motors and quiet screw drives and reliability). They don’t value things that have never defined success in their industry (e.g. software development and wireless security and agility and integration). They don’t have the architecture or the mindset to be leaders in those capabilities, and they struggle to assign resources and make the investments necessary to establish leadership in those disciplines.

While software-driven startups haven’t had success in building garage door openers, a few are having success with retrofit controllers. These devices are wirelessly connected and app controlled and simply appear to your existing garage door opener like another remote control. Several of these startups have taken the first steps from merely wirelessly connecting the garage door opener to actually bringing it into the Connected Intelligence Revolution. 

So incumbents need to consider whether and where they play in the Connected Intelligence Revolution. Do they need to overcome the inertia of their value network and truly lead in this new revolution, or do they focus on their traditional core strengths and look for partners and complementary ecosystem players to provide the connected intelligence (and be content merely being a commodity component of the total solution)? 

That may sound like a simple question, but the implications are significant for value capture and the nature of the customer relationship. It should be approached with strategic rigor, discretion, and humility. 

Read the full story here.