Category Archives: business

business, management and leadership

New MSFT chief on hiring approach

Q.How do you hire? What questions do you ask?

A. I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners may say about them. That particular line of questioning leads into fantastic threads, and I’ve found that to be a great one for understanding their self-awareness.

I also ask: What are you most proud of? Tell me where you feel you’ve set some standard, and you look back on it and say, “Wow, I really did that.” And then, what’s the thing that you regret the most, where you felt like you didn’t do your best work? How do you reflect on it?

Those two lines of questioning help me a lot in terms of being able to figure people out. I fundamentally believe that if you are not self-aware, you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, you’re not going to do useful things in the future.

 

 

http://www.afr.com/p/technology/new_microsoft_chief_nadella_ballmer_gUITsRltFlFjLxRUERKKwN

New Microsoft chief Nadella on Gates, leadership and replacing Steve Ballmer

PUBLISHED: 21 FEB 2014 07:45:19 | UPDATED: 22 FEB 2014

New Microsoft chief Nadella on Gates, leadership and replacing Steve BallmerSatya Nadella (centre) says he has learned lots for lessons from Bill Gates (l) and Steve Ballmer (r) as he settles into the top job at Microsoft Photo: Reuters

ADAM BRYANT

This interview with Satya Nadella, the new chief executive of Microsoft, was conducted and condensed by the New York Times.

Q.What leadership lessons have you learned from your predecessor, Steve Ballmer?

A. The most important one I learned from Steve happened two or three annual reviews ago. I sat down with him, and I remember asking him: “What do you think? How am I doing?” Then he said: “Look, you will know it, I will know it, and it will be in the air. So you don’t have to ask me, ‘How am I doing?’ At your level, it’s going to be fairly implicit.”

I went on to ask him, “How do I compare to the people who had my role before me?” And Steve said: “Who cares? The context is so different. The only thing that matters to me is what you do with the cards you’ve been dealt now. I want you to stay focused on that, versus trying to do this comparative benchmark.” The lesson was that you have to stay grounded, and to be brutally honest with yourself on where you stand.

Q.And what about Bill Gates?

A. Bill is the most analytically rigorous person. He’s always very well prepared, and in the first five seconds of a meeting he’ll find some logical flaw in something I’ve shown him. I’ll wonder, how can it be that I pour in all this energy and still I didn’t see something? In the beginning, I used to say, “I’m really intimidated by him.” But he’s actually quite grounded. You can push back on him. He’ll argue with you vigorously for a couple of minutes, and then he’ll be the first person to say, “Oh, you’re right.” Both Bill and Steve share this. They pressure-test you. They test your conviction.

Q.There’s a lot of curiosity around what kind of role Bill is going to play with you.

A. The outside world looks at it and says, “Whoa, this is some new thing.” But we’ve worked closely for about nine years now. So I’m very comfortable with this, and I asked for a real allocation of his time. He is in fact making some pretty hard trade-offs to say, “O.K., I’ll put more energy into this.” And one of the fantastic things that only Bill can do inside this campus is to get everybody energised to bring their “A” game. It’s just a gift.

Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?

A. I played on my school’s cricket team, and there was one incident that just was very stunning to me. I was a bowler; like a pitcher in baseball — and I was throwing very ordinary stuff one day. So the captain took over from me and got the team a breakthrough, and then he let me take over again.

I never asked him why he did that, but my impression is that he knew he would destroy my confidence if he didn’t put me back in. And I went on to take a lot more wickets after that. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of the team. I think that is perhaps the number one thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading.

Q.Tell me about your management approach in your new role.

A. The thing I’m most focused on today is, how am I maximising the effectiveness of the leadership team, and what am I doing to nurture it? A lot of people on the team were my peers, and I worked for some of them in the past. The framing for me is all about getting people to commit and engage in an authentic way, and for us to feel that energy as a team.

I’m not evaluating them on what they say individually. None of them would be on this team if they didn’t have some fantastic attributes. I’m only evaluating us collectively as a team. Are we able to authentically communicate, and are we able to build on each person’s capabilities to the benefit of our organisation?

Q. Your company has acknowledged that it needs to create much more of a unified “one Microsoft” culture. How are you going to do that?

A. One thing we’ve talked a lot about, even in the first leadership meeting, was, what’s the purpose of our leadership team? The framework we came up with is the notion that our purpose is to bring clarity, alignment and intensity. What is it that we want to get done? Are we aligned in order to be able to get it done? And are we pursuing that with intensity? That’s really the job.

Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimising, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula. So the question is: How do we take the intellectual capital of 130,000 people and innovate where none of the category definitions of the past will matter? Any organisational structure you have today is irrelevant because no competition or innovation is going to respect those boundaries. Everything now is going to have to be much more compressed in terms of both cycle times and response times.

So how do you create that self-organising capability to drive innovation and be focused? And the high-tech business is perhaps one of the toughest ones, because something can be a real failure until it’s not. It’s just an absolute dud until it’s a hit. So you have to be able to sense those early indicators of success, and the leadership has to really lean in and not let things die on the vine. When you have a $US70 billion business, something that’s $US1 million can feel irrelevant. But that $US1 million business might be the most relevant thing we are doing.

To me, that is perhaps the big culture change — recognising innovation and fostering its growth. It’s not going to come because of an org chart or the organisational boundaries. Most people have a very strong sense of organisational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.

Q.How do you hire? What questions do you ask?

A. I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners may say about them. That particular line of questioning leads into fantastic threads, and I’ve found that to be a great one for understanding their self-awareness.

I also ask: What are you most proud of? Tell me where you feel you’ve set some standard, and you look back on it and say, “Wow, I really did that.” And then, what’s the thing that you regret the most, where you felt like you didn’t do your best work? How do you reflect on it?

Those two lines of questioning help me a lot in terms of being able to figure people out. I fundamentally believe that if you are not self-aware, you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, you’re not going to do useful things in the future.

Q.What might somebody say in a meeting that, to you, sounds like nails on a chalkboard?

A. One of the things that drives me crazy is anyone who comes in from the outside and says, “This is how we used to do it.” Or if somebody who’s been here for a while says, “This is how we do it.” Both of them are such dangerous traps. The question is: How do you take all of that valuable experience and apply it to the current context and raise standards?

Q.Any final big-picture thoughts on how you’re going to approach your new role, and how you want to make your mark?

A. Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future. In our case, given 39 years of success, it’s more about reinvention. We’ve had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It’s going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future.

One of the things that I’m fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilisations to families to companies. We all know the mortality of companies is less than human beings. There are very few examples of even 100-year old companies. For us to be a 100-year old company where people find deep meaning at work, that’s the quest.

business, complex adaptive systems, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, healthy habits, meaning, musings, quantified self, rapid learning health systems, research methodology

Google gunning for the end of death…

Terrific summary of the state of play.

British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey believes achieving human immortality is inevitable. Last October de Grey told the audience at a US technology conference that they could expect to live 1000 years, maybe longer.

 

http://thenewdaily.com.au/life/2014/02/11/medical-science-close-curing-death/

Could medical science be close to curing death?

8:49pm, Feb 11
MICHELLE HAMER
If you were given the chance, would you choose to live forever, or another few hundred years? It may sound like the stuff of fantasy, but some very smart people are working to make death a thing of the past.
Live forever

Scientists are working to stop the ageing process, and extend the living… Photo: Shutterstock

Nanobots in your blood stream, backing up your brain to a computer, swapping your fallible human form for a sophisticated holographic avatar – it might sound like science fiction, but these are just some of the ways that science is hoping to extend human life and inch us closer to living forever.

US futurist, inventor and Google’s head of engineering, Ray Kurzweil has predicted that by the end of the century humans and machines will merge to create super humans who may never face the prospect of death. And Kurzweil, 65, hopes to be among those kicking mortality to the curb.

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil: Working to bring an end to death. Photo: Getty

“Twenty years from now, we will be adding more time than is going by to your remaining life expectancy,” Kurzweil told Forbes Magazine. “We’ve quadrupled life expectancy in the past 1000 years and doubled it in the past 200 years. We’re now able to reprogram health and medicine as software, and so that pace is only going to continue to accelerate.”

Kurzweil is no slouch when it comes to accurate predictions. In the 1980s he predicted the incredible rise of the internet, foresaw the fall of the Soviet Union and identified the year when computers would beat humans at chess.

His next predictions include the programming of nanobots to work from within the body to augment the immune system and fight pathogens. By 2045 he sees us backing up our minds to the cloud and downloading ourselves into robotic forms.

And he’s not the only scientist hoping to blow out hundreds of candles in the future.

Immortality: Not if, when

British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey believes achieving human immortality is inevitable. Last October de Grey told the audience at a US technology conference that they could expect to live 1000 years, maybe longer.

Ageing, he says, is a simple case of bad engineering, and once the human body’s kinks are ironed out we’ll be able to reverse its effects and put death on the back burner.

“My approach is to start from the straightforward principle that our body is a machine. A very complicated machine, but nonetheless a machine, and it can be subjected to maintenance and repair in the same way as a simple machine, like a car,” de Grey has said. “What I’m after is not living to 1000. I’m after letting people avoid death for as long as they want to.”

Google is on board

It’s a goal that even tech giant Google thinks is worth pursuing.

When Google entered the anti-ageing business last year, with the launch of its new biotechnology company Calico, it brought a new level of interest, respectability and crucially – funding – to the field.

Calico has poached some of the leading anti-ageing researchers from across the world to work on the challenge of extending life.

“I think that if Google succeeds, this would be their greatest gift to humanity,” said David Sinclair, an Australian professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Professor Sinclair led a research team which last year announced it had reversed muscle ageing in mice, the results of which exceeded his expectations.

“We want immortality so badly that we’re always ready to be swept away into unthinkingness … Half in love with the impossible we’ve always wanted to conquer death.”

“I’ve been studying ageing at the molecular level now for nearly 20 years and I didn’t think I’d see a day when ageing could be reversed. I thought we’d be lucky to slow it down a little bit,” he was quoted as saying.

“There’s clearly much more work to be done here, but if those results stand, then aging may be a reversible condition, if it is caught early,” he said.

The research involved improving communication between a cell’s mitochondria and nucleus. Mitochondria are like a battery within a cell, powering important biological functions. When communication breaks down between this and the nucleus, the effects of ageing accelerate.

Human trials of the groundbreaking process are expected to start this year.

Buying life

It’s the sort of breakthrough that can’t come soon enough for several  billionaires across the globe who are pouring their fortunes and hopes into immortality research.

Russian entrepreneur, Dmitry Itskov founded the 2045 Initiative in 2011 with the aim of thwarting human death within three decades. Itskov envisages ‘neo-humans’ who will relinquish clunky human forms and adopt sophisticated machine bodies. He claims humans will eventually download their minds into artificial brains, which will then be connected to humanoid robots he calls Avatars.

According to 2045.com: “Substance independent minds will receive new bodies with capabilities far exceeding those of ordinary humans … Humanity will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species.”

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel donated $US3.5 million to Aubrey de Grey’s not-for-profit research foundation, telling the New Yorker at the time that: “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead”.

Clearly Thiel would prefer to remain among the living and he’s prepared to pay for his pitch at immortality, most recently making a large donation to the Singularity Institute, which focuses on creating artificial intelligence that could see the rise of cyborgs (merged humans and machines).

Maximising life, minimising death

US entrepreneur turned science innovator, David Kekich, dedicated his life and impressive bank balance to reversing ageing after he was paralysed from a spinal cord injury in 1978. Kekich initially raised money for paralysis research but then switched to anti-ageing research. He founded the Maximum Life Foundation in 1999 and aims to reverse human ageing by 2033.

On his website Kekich writes: “We are moving from an era in which nothing could be done to defeat ageing into an era in which advancing biotechnology will give us the tools to do overcome it … Now, at the dawn of the biotechnology era, the inevitable is no longer inevitable. The research establishment – if sufficiently funded and motivated – could make spectacular inroads into repairing and preventing the root causes of ageing within our lifetime.”

But given that there are yet to be any proven means for extending human life, these billionaires may be motivated more by ego than altruism.

As US author Adam Leith Gollner writes in The Book of Immortality: the Science Belief and Magic Behind Living Forever (Sribner 2013): “We want immortality so badly that we’re always ready to be swept away into unthinkingness … Half in love with the impossible we’ve always wanted to conquer death.”

Yet he says all humans can really do to live longer is to eat well and exercise.

“We all have to go … whether dying in battle, tumbling off a horse, succumbing to pneumonia or being shivved by a lover. Maybe one day we just don’t wake up. However it happens, we enter the mystery.”

business, data saving lives, entrepreneurship, management and leadership

Insights can go stale…

  • Data is meaningless unless it helps make decisions that have measurable impact. Unfortunately, many decision makers are ensnared rather than enlightened by Big Data, preventing data and insights from making it to the front lines in relevant and usable forms.  Too many Big Data projects are formulated without input from front-line operators, or consume so much time that the insight goes stale before it can be used.

    In our experience, generating value from Big Data is a matter of connecting data to insights to action in a fast, repeatable way.

Picture a factory:

  • Insights are products—goods that are valuable because they are useful;
  • data is the raw material from which the products, the insights, are made; and
  • front-line operators are the consumers, or the people who need and use the product.

The “insight factory” approach enables companies to sift through massive amounts of data quickly, run the right analytics, and provide relevant insights so people can take meaningful action.

Add this to the analogy of a the brontosaurus nervous system being too slow to respond to an tale injury.

  1. Decide what it is you want to produce – get to specific questions
  2. Source the raw materials – start with “small data”
  3. Produce insights with speed – act like a startup
  4. Deliver the goods and act – “Good enough” information available now can be used now to inform specific actions.

For an insight factory to work, think of the people who use the insights as your customers. They need to be part of a process that gives them simple ways to use the insights, such as interactive frontline tools (e.g. competitive price tracker, customer scorecards, or store operations health monitor). The most effective approach is not to push these tools on managers, but to listen and respond to their needs and then create pull.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mckinsey/2013/10/22/four-steps-to-turn-big-data-into-action/

10/22/2013 @ 9:31AM |9,473 views

Four Steps To Turn Big Data Into Action

Data is meaningless unless it helps make decisions that have measurable impact. Unfortunately, many decision makers are ensnared rather than enlightened by Big Data, preventing data and insights from making it to the front lines in relevant and usable forms.  Too many Big Data projects are formulated without input from front-line operators, or consume so much time that the insight goes stale before it can be used.

In our experience, generating value from Big Data is a matter of connecting data to insights to action in a fast, repeatable way. Picture a factory.Insights are products—goods that are valuable because they are useful; data is the raw material from which the products, the insights, are made; and front-line operators are the consumers, or the people who need and use the product.

The “insight factory” approach enables companies to sift through massive amounts of data quickly, run the right analytics, and provide relevant insights so people can take meaningful action.  And we’ve seen top-line sales increase 5 – 15 percent as a result.

1. Decide what to produce

Before work begins at an insight factory, you should have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, such as reducing customer churn or predicting what a given customer segment will buy next. Decide what discrete questions your business needs to answer and the actions you want those answers to enable. Prioritize questions that address the largest economic opportunities and that lead to practical actions. Then configure your factory to produce just those insights. One retailer, for example, discovered that 90 percent of its year over year sales decline was concentrated in 12 percent of its customers in specific markets. It focused questions, accordingly, on understanding the root cause and quickly reversed the trend with targeted local market merchandising tactics.

2. Source the raw materials

While it’s useful to identify a range of data sources to build insights, start with the best data immediately available.  Chasing after the “perfect dataset” is time-consuming (and often fruitless) and reduces the ability to act quickly. Instead, start with “small data”. A comprehensive “data warehouse” is a great asset over the long term, but a smaller, more selective “data mart” makes it easier to produce insights fast, preventing you from getting mired in complexity. Over time, you can then layer on additional data sets. In one case, a leading retailer setting out to understand its customers began by complementing transactional POS data with third-party customer data from aggregators, syndicated competitor data, and public sources that were immediately available. Over a year, it enriched these insights by adding social media data (for sentiment analysis), location data (to understand store traffic and movement), and financial information from credit card providers (for share-of-wallet).

3. Produce insights with speed

We have found that when it comes to analytics, productive action is mainly a product of speed. Focusing on quick decisions and execution, which circumvent long discussions, leads to insights the front line can actually use. Put finite time limits on your insight factory to force short production times and rapid bursts of structured output based on repeatable analytical models and automation.

We recommend acting like a start-up. Start-ups are driven by an inherent need for speed that doesn’t let perfect get in the way of good enough. Aware AWRE -0.31% that a futile quest for perfection creates paralysis, they thrive on a test-and-learn culture that celebrates failing early and moving to action quickly with imperfect information. Create small, nimble teams combining strategic, analytical, and technical skills to address specific topic areas rather than a single, generalized, and usually slow-moving “committees.” To keep the factory running around the clock, consider recruiting offshore talent to execute structured analysis continuously, at relatively low cost.

4. Deliver the goods and act

“Good enough” information available now can be used now to inform specific actions. If data yields the insight that milk and eggs are 90 percent likely to be purchased together, why not quickly pilot the placement of milk and egg shelves next to each other rather than wait for more comprehensive options?

Making sure that insights drive action requires a clear understanding of what front-line managers can actually use. These managers need to identify what they need. Too often, marketers or sales people are provided with data analysis they subsequently ignore. In many cases, the analysis isn’t practical, isn’t clear, isn’t trusted, or isn’t perceived as relevant. For an insight factory to work, think of the sales and marketing people who use the insights as your customers. They need to be part of a process that gives them simple ways to use the insights, such as interactive frontline tools (e.g. competitive price tracker, customer scorecards, or store operations health monitor). The most effective approach is not to push these tools on managers, but to listen and respond to their needs and then create pull.

Build a “factory” culture over time

To successfully weave the insight factory into the fabric of the way the business works, avoid  leading off with momentous change. Accustom stakeholders to incrementally embed data and insights into everyday decision making. Over time, the integration of insight factory production into business-as-usual will create a willingness to accept bigger decisions and greater change.

Tim McGuire is a senior McKinsey partner from Toronto who leads the firm’s global Consumer Marketing Analytics Center; Chris Meyer is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Dallas office who leads the firm’s work in Big Data & Analytics in Retail; Maher Masri is an associate principal in McKinsey’s Marketing and Retail practices; Abdul Wahab Shaikh is an engagement manager in McKinsey’s Atlanta office.

business, entrepreneurship, management and leadership

Strategic thinking

  • From this HBR article
  • strategic thinking is seen as a universally important skill
  • it about being able to see, predict, and plan ahead
  • “Strategic leaders take a broad, long-range approach to problem-solving and decision-making that involves objective analysis, thinking ahead, and planning. That means being able to think in multiple time frames, identifying what they are trying to accomplish over time and what has to happen now, in six months, in a year, in three years, to get there,” he writes. “It also means thinking systemically. That is, identifying the impact of their decisions on various segments of the organization–including internal departments, personnel, suppliers, and customers.“
  • It’s also important to pass strategic thinking onto employees
  • One of the key prerequisites of strategic leadership is having relevant and broad business information that helps leaders elevate their thinking beyond the day-to-day
  • need to communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company
  • Whenever possible, try to promote foresight and long-term thinking
  • promote a “future perspective” in your company. If a manager suggests a course of action, you need to him or her ask two questions: First, what underlying strategic goal does this action serve, and why? And second, what kind of impact will this have on internal and external stakeholders? “Consistently asking these two questions whenever action is considered will go a long way towards developing strategic leaders,” he writes.

http://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/how-to-foster-strategic-thinking-in-employees.html

How to Get Your Employees to Think Strategically BY 

Studies show that strategic thinking is the most important element of leadership. But how do you instill the trait in others at your company?

What leadership skill do your employees, colleagues, and peers view as the most important for you to have? According Robert Kabacoff, the vice president of research at Management Research Group, a company that creates business assessment tools, it’s the ability to plan strategically.

He has research to back it up: In the Harvard Business Review, he cites a 2013 study by his company in which 97 percent of a group of 10,000 senior executives said strategic thinking is the most critical leadership skill for an organization’s success. In another study, he writes, 60,000 managers and executives in more than 140 countries rated a strategic approach to leadership as more effective than other attributes including innovation, persuasion, communication, and results orientation.

But what’s so great about strategic thinking? Kabacoff says that as a skill, it’s all about being able to see, predict, and plan ahead: “Strategic leaders take a broad, long-range approach to problem-solving and decision-making that involves objective analysis, thinking ahead, and planning. That means being able to think in multiple time frames, identifying what they are trying to accomplish over time and what has to happen now, in six months, in a year, in three years, to get there,” he writes. “It also means thinking systemically. That is, identifying the impact of their decisions on various segments of the organization–including internal departments, personnel, suppliers, and customers.”

As a leader, you also need to pass strategic thinking to your employees, Kabacoff says. He suggests instilling the skill in your best managers first, and they will help pass it along to other natural leaders within your company’s ranks. Below, read his five tips for how to carry out this process.

Dish out information.

Kabacoff says that you need to encourage managers to set aside time to thinking strategically until it becomes part of their job. He suggests you provide them with information on your company’s market, industry, customers, competitors, and emerging technologies. “One of the key prerequisites of strategic leadership is having relevant and broad business information that helps leaders elevate their thinking beyond the day-to-day,” he writes.

Create a mentor program.

Every manager in your company should have a mentor. “One of the most effective ways to develop your strategic skills is to be mentored by someone who is highly strategic,” Kabacoff says. “The ideal mentor is someone who is widely known for his/her ability to keep people focused on strategic objectives and the impact of their actions.”

Create a philosophy.

As the leader, you need to communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company. “Individuals and groups need to understand the broader organizational strategy in order to stay focused and incorporate it into their own plans and strategies,” Kabacoff writes.

Reward thinking, not reaction.

Whenever possible, try to promote foresight and long-term thinking. Kabacoff says you should reward your managers for the “evidence of thinking, not just reacting,” and for “being able to quickly generate several solutions to a given problem and identifying the solution with the greatest long-term benefit for the organization.”

Ask “why” and “when.”

Kabacoff says you need to promote a “future perspective” in your company. If a manager suggests a course of action, you need to him or her ask two questions: First, what underlying strategic goal does this action serve, and why? And second, what kind of impact will this have on internal and external stakeholders? “Consistently asking these two questions whenever action is considered will go a long way towards developing strategic leaders,” he writes.

IMAGE: GALLERY STOCK
LAST UPDATED: FEB 10, 2014
business, entrepreneurship, management and leadership, quotes & aphorisms

The Way A Cheetah Would Pursue A Sickly Gazelle – Jeff Bezos

The company’s relationship with those publishers was called the Gazelle Project after Mr. Bezos said Amazon “should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” A joke, perhaps, but such an aggressive one that Amazon’s lawyers demanded the Gazelle Project be renamed the Small Publishers Negotiation Program.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

‘Sadistic’ Amazon Treated Book Sellers ‘The Way A Cheetah Would Pursue A Sickly Gazelle’

JIM EDWARDS     
BezosjeffJeff Bezos

Amazon was so ruthless with small book publishers that its pursuit of new, more favourable contract terms with them was “sadistic,” according to Brad Stone’s books about the company, “
The Everything Store.”

Basically, small publishers leaped at the chance to get better distribution through Amazon in the early 2000s. But once they became dependent on Amazon for sales, Amazon turned the screws, Stone claims, demanding longer pay periods and lower discounts. Publishers who didn’t “pay to play” would get unfavorable treatment on Amazon, making their books more expensive and harder to find.

CEO Jeff Bezos regarded the publishing business as a “sickly gazelle,” Stone writes, according to a review in the New York Times:

The company’s relationship with those publishers was called the Gazelle Project after Mr. Bezos said Amazon “should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” A joke, perhaps, but such an aggressive one that Amazon’s lawyers demanded the Gazelle Project be renamed the Small Publishers Negotiation Program.

Mr. Stone writes that Randy Miller, an Amazon executive in charge of a similar program in Europe, “took an almost sadistic delight in pressuring book publishers to give Amazon more favourable financial terms.” Mr. Miller would move their books to full price, take them off the recommendation engine or promote competing titles until he got better terms out of them, the book says.

“I did everything I could to screw with their performance,” Mr. Miller told the writer. The program was called Pay to Play until the Amazon lawyers changed it to Vendor Realignment.

 

 

 

 

A New Book Portrays Amazon as Bully
By DAVID STREITFELD
Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com.David Ryder/Getty ImagesJeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com.

 

It was perhaps inevitable that Amazon would have a rocky relationship with book publishers. Publishers are analog, Amazon is digital. Publishers are New York, Amazon is Seattle. The large publishers traditionally did not know much about their customers, and did not really care. Amazon knew a lot about customers and made the most of it.

As for smaller houses, they were among Amazon’s most fervent early supporters. Amazon talked a lot in the beginning about leveling the playing field for small publishers. It did, but then things went south.

Brad Stone’s new book, “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” vividly documents just how troubled the Amazon/publisher relationship became by about 2004. The retailer’s critics, who worry about a culture where Amazon has eliminated all gatekeepers except itself, will not be reassured by this book.

In negotiations with larger publishers, Mr. Stone writes, Amazon kept demanding more as it got bigger: steeper discounts, longer periods to pay and better shipping. Mr. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, then turned up the heat on the most vulnerable publishers — those most dependent on Amazon.

The company’s relationship with those publishers was called the Gazelle Project after Mr. Bezos said Amazon “should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” A joke, perhaps, but such an aggressive one that Amazon’s lawyers demanded the Gazelle Project be renamed the Small Publishers Negotiation Program.

Mr. Stone writes that Randy Miller, an Amazon executive in charge of a similar program in Europe, “took an almost sadistic delight in pressuring book publishers to give Amazon more favorable financial terms.” Mr. Miller would move their books to full price, take them off the recommendation engine or promote competing titles until he got better terms out of them, the book says.

“I did everything I could to screw with their performance,” Mr. Miller told the writer. The program was called Pay to Play until the Amazon lawyers changed it to Vendor Realignment.

Even some Amazon employees were literally sickened by how they had to behave, Mr. Stone writes. One book group employee said he had post-traumatic stress disorder for a year after quitting. Another was fired after he said it would be unethical to revisit a contract that had already been negotiated with Oxford University Press.

Nearly a decade later, Amazon’s hold on the bookselling market, both print and digital, is much greater than it was in those early days. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Stone’s book, which was written with the cooperation of Mr. Bezos.

 

 

business, entrepreneurship, healthcare, policy, politics

Deborah Rhodes: A test that finds 3x more breast tumors, and why it’s not available to you

  • Not sure about this one – better diagnosis, no pecuniary interest, no business model vs GE and the entire RSNA cabal, very emotional
  • It is a good story of why good, disruptive ideas hit the wall

http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_rhodes.html

Deborah Rhodes: A test that finds 3x more breast tumors, and why it’s not available to you

Working with a team of physicists, Dr. Deborah Rhodes developed a new tool for tumor detection that’s 3 times as effective as traditional mammograms for women with dense breast tissue. The life-saving implications are stunning. So why haven’t we heard of it? Rhodes shares the story behind the tool’s creation, and the web of politics and economics that keep it from mainstream use.

Deborah Rhodes is an expert at managing breast-cancer risk. The director of the Mayo Clinic’s Executive Health Program is now testing a gamma camera that can see tumors that get missed by mammography.

business, management and leadership

How to really disrupt an industry: Get personal, make enemies, stay focused and delight customers

cute and semi-convincing…

http://www.startupsmart.com.au/growth/start-up-profiles/how-to-really-disrupt-an-industry-get-personal-make-enemies-stay-focused-and-delight-customers/2014011711517.html

How to really disrupt an industry: Get personal, make enemies, stay focused and delight customers

Friday, 17 January 2014 | By Rose Powell

Andy Sheats’ two-year-old, private health insurance start-up, health.com.au, has over 40,000 customers and is turning over $46 million each year. After cutting his entrepreneurial teeth at realestate.com.au, the start-up that transformed the property market, disrupting has become a tactic and a way of life.

Sheats spoke to StartupSmart about his top tips to disrupt industries in useful and profitable ways.

Disruption will always be volatile, so embrace it

Likening industry disruption to the French Revolution, Sheats says start-ups need to embrace the power shifts and volatility of creating change.

“What does industry disruption have in common with the French Revolution? The rich and comfortable get what’s coming to them when the people who are the foundation of their success realise they’ve been treated with contempt and act on it,” Sheats says.

For start-ups, the monarchy and upper class to be disrupted are high-margin industries resting on their laurels, who according to Sheats, need to be toppled.

“Why? Because complacency means they are not continually adjusting their products and services to meet the evolving requirements of their customers. Here’s news: this complacency plants the seed that will become a disruptor, and when it blooms those customers will leave.”

Use being little to your advantage

Describing disruption as “business model judo”, Sheats says start-ups need to pick their battles and make the most of their capacity to be nimble and responsive.

“Use the strength and power of a challenger against them – to turn a complacent business’s size, fat margins and momentum into a liability. An industry experiences disruption when this judo results in complacent businesses unable to economically respond due to their revenue or cost-structure,” Sheats says.

Large companies can struggle to change their products, services or processes as trends change and customer expectations evolve. Those who dominate less competitive industries are the most precariously placed for a smart start-up to take market share away from.

“An industry where there’s healthy competition and a lot of change and innovation is not flat enough to disrupt. Disruption only works because the incumbent is inadequate and enough customers are dissatisfied to switch to the new player, who offers something different,” he says.

Focus on the issue or gap, not the hefty competitor

As the virtue of disruption is better outcomes for customers, start-ups need to be smart about getting personal. By focusing on the people they want to serve, not the companies they’re trying to take them from, you’ll find the energy to keep going.

“A disruptor is a new player that identifies areas where current players really let customers down and finds a way to turn these chinks in the armour to their advantage,” Sheats says, adding sometimes what needs to be disrupted is people’s expectations about what’s possible.

“Use a new approach that unlocks untapped customer sentiment to reshape the industry in your favour. How you do that is by changing the status quo and continuing to challenge the status quo, even when you are the incumbent,” Sheats says, adding doing a thorough investigation of what your big competitor doesn’t do that your future customers want is a great starting point.

“We started by identifying what the incumbent insurers weren’t doing: with health.com.au, it was making health insurance more transparent and easier to understand and allowing customers to manage their policy online,” he says.

Below are Sheats’ five ways to do business like a disruptor:

  1. Question everything: The ‘it has always been done that way’ mentality should be a red rag to a disruptor. Don’t be afraid to probe and find out why. You can change ‘that way’.
  2. Focus on the customer: The people who switch from the incumbent to you do so because you serve their needs better, they are central to your continuing success.
  3. Do different things, and do them differently: Having a very clear unique selling proposition immediately becomes a hook that helps customers in their decision to switch to you.
  4. Fight on your ground: You’ll never win against the incumbent if you fight by their rules; they’re established and they have deep pockets. Change the rules by using their strengths against them, and then fight the battle in a context where you have the advantage.
  5. Keep innovating: As a disruptor you need to move faster, learn faster, and change faster than the incumbent. Your ability to continue to meet the needs of your customers this way is key.
business, management and leadership

Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility

Great HBR article on  HR as it should be… agreed with nearly every point, save the brutal culling of people if their jobs became superfluous.

  • The best thing you can do for employees is hire only “A” players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.
  • If we wanted only “A” players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people—and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them—we learned to offer rich severance packages.
  • Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults and then rely on common sense instead of HR policies
  • Salaried employees were told to take whatever time they felt was appropriate.
  • Expenses policy: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.”
  • asked managers and employees to have conversations about performance as an organic part of their work
  • Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams
  •  let employees choose how much (if any) of their compensation would be in the form of equity
  • Leaders Own the Job of Creating the Company Culture
  • Good Talent Managers Think Like Businesspeople and Innovators First, and Like HR People Last

Source: http://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1

PDF of article: How Netflix Reinvented HR – Harvard Business Review

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

PDF version of deck: netflix_culture

 

netflix culture

business, entrepreneurship, management and leadership, startup

Characteristics of successful innovators

Oaaahhh shucks… had the strange feeling he was talking about me throughout this post, seriously.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/the-five-characteristics-of-successful-innovators/

[ALSO THIS RELATED POST:  http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/entrepreneurs-brains-are-wired-differently/]

The Five Characteristics of Successful Innovators

by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic  |   1:00 PM October 25, 2013

There is not much agreement about what makes an idea innovative, and what makes an innovative idea valuable.

For example, discussions on whether the internet is a better invention than the wheel are more likely to reveal personal preferences than logical argumentation. Likewise, experts disagree on the type and level of innovation that is most beneficial for organizations. Some studies suggest that radical innovation (which does sound sexy) confers sustainable competitive advantages, but others show that “mild” innovation – think iPhone 5 rather than the original iPhone – is generally more effective, not least because it reduces market uncertainty. There is also inconclusive evidence on whether we should pay attention to consumers’ views, with some studies showing that a customer focus is detrimental for innovation because it equates to playing catch-up, but others arguing for it. Even Henry Ford’s famous quote on the subject – “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” – has been disputed.

We are also notoriously bad at evaluating the merit of our own ideas. Most people fall trap of anillusory superiority that causes them to overestimate their creative talent, just as in other domains of competence (e.g., 90% of drivers claim to be above average — a mathematical improbability). It is therefore clear that we cannot rely on people’s self-evaluation to determine whether their ideas are creative or not.

Yet there are relatively well-defined criteria for predicting who will generate creative ideas. Indeed, research shows that some people are disproportionately more likely to come up with novel and useful ideas, and that – irrespective of their field of expertise, job title and occupational background – these creative individuals tend to display a recurrent set of psychological characteristics and behaviors. As summarized in a detailed review of over 100 scientific studies, creative people tend to be better at identifying (rather than solving) problems, they are passionate and sensitive, and, above all, they tend to have a hungry mind: they are open to new experiences, nonconformist, and curious. These personality characteristics are stronger determinants of creative potential than are IQ, school performance, or motivation.

Creativity alone, however, is not sufficient for innovation: innovation also requires the development, production, and implementation of an idea. This is why the number of “latent” innovators is far larger than the number of actual innovations, and why we all have at some point generated great ideas that we never bothered to implement. Here are a couple of mine: rent-a-friend – a service that enables tourists to hire locals for advice or simply some company – and location-based dating via an app that finds your nearby matches based on personality profiling. As with most of my ideas, these have since been successfully implemented by others, who also happened to have them.

The key difference between creativity and innovation is execution: the capacity to turn an idea into a successful service, product or venture. If, as William James noted, “truth is something that happens to an idea”, entrepreneurship is the process by which creative ideas become useful innovations. Given that entrepreneurship involves human agency – it depends on the decisions and behaviors of certain people – a logical approach for understanding the essence of innovation is to study the core characteristics of entrepreneurial people, that is, individuals who are a driving force of innovation, irrespective of whether they are self-employed, business founders, or employees. The research highlights several key characteristics (in addition to creativity):

  1. An opportunistic mindset that helps them identify gaps in the market. Opportunities are at theheart of entrepreneurship and innovation, and some people are much more alert to them than others. In addition, opportunists are genetically pre-wired for novelty: they crave new and complex experiences and seek variety in all aspects of life. This is consistent with the higher rates ofattention deficit hyperactivity disorder among business founders.
  2. Formal education or training, which are essential for noticing new opportunities or interpreting events as promising opportunities. Contrary to popular belief, most successful innovators are not dropout geniuses, but well-trained experts in their field. Without expertise, it is hard to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information; between noise and signals. This is consistent withresearch showing that entrepreneurship training does pay off.
  3. Proactivity and a high degree of persistence, which enable them to exploit the opportunities they identify. Above all, they effective innovators are more driven, resilient, and energetic than their counterparts.
  4. A healthy dose of prudence. Contrary to what many people think, successful innovators are more organized, cautious, and risk-averse than the general population. (Although higher risk-taking is linked to business formation, it is not actually linked to business success).
  5. Social capital, which they rely on throughout the entrepreneurial process. Serial innovators tend to use their connections and networks to mobilize resources and build strong alliances, both internally and externally. Popular accounts of entrepreneurship tend to glorify innovators as independent spirits and individualistic geniuses, but innovation is always the product of teams. In line, entrepreneurial people tend to have higher EQ, which enables them to sell their ideas and strategy to others, and communicate the core mission to the team.

Even when people possess these five characteristics, true innovation is unlikely to occur in the absence of a meaningful mission or clear long-term vision. Indeed, vision is where entrepreneurship meets leadership: regardless of how creative, opportunistic, or proactive you are, the ability to propel others toward innovation is a critical feature of successful innovation. Without it, you can’t attract the right talent, build and empower teams, or ensure that you remain innovative even after attaining success. As Frances Bowen and colleagues recently noted, there is “a vicious circle [whereby] innovation leads to superior future performance, but such investment can also give rise to core rigidities and hence less innovation in a future time period.” In other words, innovation leads to growth, but growth hinders innovation… unless innovation is truly ingrained in the organizational culture, which requires an effective vision.

In short, there is no point in just hoping for a breakthrough idea – what matters is the ability to generate many ideas, discover the right opportunities to develop them, and act with drive and dedication to achieve a meaningful goal.

Ideas don’t make people successful – it’s the other way around.

80-Tomas-Chamorro-Premuzic

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in personality profiling and psychometric testing. He is a Professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL), Vice President of Research and Innovation at Hogan Assessment Systems, and has previously taught at the London School of Economics and New York University. He is co-founder of metaprofiling.com. His book is Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt.

business, entrepreneurship, healthcare, management and leadership, policy, politics

HBR Blog: Resolving Health Care Conflicts with a walk in the woods

4 step process to resolving conflict:

  1. Have each stakeholder articulate their “self-interests” so that they are heard by the others. What does each need to get from this exchange?
  2. Look at where the overlap among these self-interests reveals agreement, what we call the “enlarged interests.” In our experience, these agreements always outnumber the disagreements.
  3. Collaborate to develop solutions to the remaining disagreements, or “enlightened interests.” This is the time for creative problem solving.
  4. Certify what has now become a larger set of agreements, or “aligned interests.”

Any outstanding disagreements are held to the side for future negotiations.

[…….]

The inclusion of all stakeholders is essential because people only truly embrace solutions that they help create. Anytime that one party tries to impose something on another, the natural inclination of the imposed upon party is to resist. A little time spent upfront engaging in joint problem solving saves many hours — and headaches — that come with a mandate.

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/four-steps-to-resolving-conflicts-in-health-care/

We have been engaged in health care negotiation and conflict resolution for two decades. We have worked on conflicts as mundane as work assignments and as complex as hospital mergers. We use and teach a simple four-step structured process that works in cases ranging from simple one-on-one interactions to extended multi-party discussions.

After assembling representatives of all stakeholders in a conflict, the first step is to have each stakeholder articulate their “self-interests” so that they are heard by the others. What does each need to get from this exchange? The second step is to look at where the overlap among these self-interests reveals agreement, what we call the “enlarged interests.” In our experience, these agreements always outnumber the disagreements.  The third step is to collaborate to develop solutions to the remaining disagreements, or “enlightened interests.” This is the time for creative problem solving. The fourth step is to certify what has now become a larger set of agreements, or “aligned interests.” Any outstanding disagreements are held to the side for future negotiations. We’ve taught people in as little as 30 minutes how to use this approach. (See our book Renegotiating Health Care for more detail on the process.)

We call this process the Walk in the Woods after a play that dramatized a well-known negotiation over nuclear arms reduction. The delegations from the United States and the Soviet Union were at loggerheads. During a break, the two lead negotiators went for a walk during which they unearthed their personal as well as each nation’s deeper, shared interests in peace and security. This understanding enabled them to break the deadlock and move forward.

The same negotiation principles that can reduce nuclear stockpiles can be effectively applied even at the front lines in health care. For example, there is often pressure to change who does what when new technologies are deployed or initiatives are undertaken to lower costs. Consider the situation in a traditional orthopedic practice where a physician sees every patient who comes through the door. Is this really best for the patient, the practice, and the larger system?

Most patients who arrive at an orthopedic office suffer from straightforward conditions such as a simple, non-displaced fracture or a sprain. These can be adequately treated by a properly trained physician’s assistant (PA), and patients can typically be seen much more quickly by a PA than by a specialist. If outcome quality and patient satisfaction can be maintained and costs lowered, this should be an easy move to make. Such shifts in responsibility, however, are often resisted and the resulting conflict can be acrimonious. Why?

Both physicians and patients have come to expect to interact with each other. Doctors prize their clinical autonomy and their relationships with those they treat, and the fee-for-service model rewards them for taking care of patients themselves. Patients, meanwhile, want to be treated by an “M.D.” and often a board-certified specialist rather than their primary care physician (PCP). The PCPs value their relationships with the specialists in the network and focus on their gatekeeper role rather than stretching the scope of care they provide. Insurers want to control costs, of course, and they and others exert pressure to divert simple cases from high-cost specialists to less expensive physician’s assistants or other non-specialist care-givers. No one is happy with the resulting conflict: Orthopods fear losing their patients; patients are anxious about getting lesser care; PCPs worry that their relationships with specialists will erode; and insurers and administrators find the resistance by all parties frustrating, time-consuming, and expensive.

Now, imagine that the physicians in our orthopedic practice host an open house Walk in the Woods discussion that includes referring PCPs, patients, and representatives from insurers. Engaging in the four-step process, the parties would find that high outcome quality, patient satisfaction, and keeping care affordable are on everyone’s list of self-interests. Through the process, the orthopedists could educate both the PCPs and patients on when a specialist’s expertise is truly needed. Patients could articulate how they weigh the trade-off between waiting time and the provider they would see. The insurers could explain some of the cost implications of different options. One can envision the idea of physician’s assistants treating routine injuries emerging from the process as each party identifies the benefits that meet their combined and self-interests:  The orthopods may be freed up to see a greater number of more complex and interesting cases; the PAs are able to work to the level of their ability; the PCPs expand their relationships with more members of the orthopedic practice; the insurer reimburses less for uncomplicated treatments; and patients would get appropriate care, save time, and help keep premiums down.

The two aspects of this approach that can be extrapolated to myriad other conflicts are the use of a structured process and inclusion of all key decision-making stakeholders. The structured process minimizes the ego battles and tangential scuffles by keeping all parties focused on productively resolving the central issues. Depending on the number of parties and complexity of the negotiation a Walk can take from 10 minutes to 10 days or more.

The inclusion of all stakeholders is essential because people only truly embrace solutions that they help create. Anytime that one party tries to impose something on another, the natural inclination of the imposed upon party is to resist. A little time spent upfront engaging in joint problem solving saves many hours — and headaches — that come with a mandate.