PGreenblog

Life's Philosophy; Science's Purpose

Much as I like to think and act exuberantly in the celebration of the abundance of life, I have days where I recognize that I’m 64 years old. Some of those days, I embrace the fact.   Some of those days I just feel it.

When I embrace the fact, I also embrace one of the things that the older among us can claim, that our younger brethren can’t yet.  I can contemplate not just the present and my plans for the future, though I do that always, but also the legacy that I’d like to provide as I leave my footprints embedded in time.

In the course of mulling this over a few weeks ago, in the midst of recovering from vocal cord surgery, I began to think about something that often comes up from my storehouse of memories – the work I did many years ago on 13^th century science and culture and in particular, a medieval friar of the Franciscan Order, Roger Bacon, someone, who when I was writing my varying tomes on the period and the man and on science in general, I began to believe and still do, might have been one of the greatest scientists in the history of our species. 

My purpose in writing about this is not to debate with you whether or not he was or is great – or, honestly, even to care what you think about that – or for you to care what I think about it. That is both a debate beyond the scope of this post and beyond any contemporary research anyone reading this (or writing this) is likely to have done. Its also one that regardless of outcome, won’t move the chain in human thinking one iota.  So please treat what I’m going to be saying about Roger Bacon and his role instead as a both data point and a metaphor for what I’m want to actually talk about.

Continuing on….

All this mulling led me to what I wrote years ago to understand my present behavior.  It gave me a little more insight into the legacy that I am trying to leave. But it reminded me of something else too. Something that perhaps we often forget in the course of our very lucky lives as people who have a shot at helping to transform the world we live in.

Here’s what that is:

The very hallmark of continued human social existence has been that each of us as a human, has an infinite capacity to create something that in some way, incrementally and on occasion profoundly impacts the continued existence of society and the human species.  It’s happened frequently enough throughout history, with the right combinations of people and resources, to so far, ensure, at least for now, the continued existence and even flourishing of humanity and the cultures and society associated with it, with all their problems, glitches, denial of opportunities, errors of judgment and action, and even criminality. Despite the bad, we survive as a species and grow.  Because the good always outweighs the bad, and over time, even if it doesn’t seem so, overcomes the bad. That tells you something – human beings, as a rule, are good, not evil, despite the cynics who would have you think otherwise. Complaining doesn’t solve problems – finding solutions to the problems solve them.

So, in the following paragraphs, please bear with me and take to heart if you can, what Bacon and (if I’m not being too presumptuous) I are saying about invention, the human spirit, the art of science and the abilities of each and every one of us as a human being to transcend and master the course of our own existence in a practical way, not just via some flight of fancy. Please keep in mind, as you read this post, Bacon’s speech is couched in religious terms (e.g. God the Creator etc.) as well they should be since he was a Franciscan friar in the 13^th century. But the content and the principles should be taken in a secular light. My voice, on the other hand, is not religious at all.

Here we go.

The 13^th Century – Cultural Optimism Drives the….Horse

Throughout his entire adult life at the core of his very being, Roger Bacon (1214-1292) believed that human beings had the ability to not only master the laws of nature but to even change them through invention and creation. His approach though wasn’t something carved from fantasy but was rooted in a rational science that was both derived from universal principles and supported via experimentation. In fact, he’s often called the Father of Experimental Science (a lot more important than the Godfather of CRM. J). This idea, completely radical for the 13^th century, was something that is now self-evident to us – the verification of hypotheses through observation, experience, methodological rigor and discovery.  You might think “bad start, Paul, what’s the big deal about that?” For the 21^st century, thanks to Bacon and his successors, it isn’t a big deal. It’s what especially contemporary scientists do. But in the 13^th century, this was revolutionary and would, if it gained popular credence, overturn the bulk of so-called scientific approaches at the time. Science at the time was based more on argument and natural philosophy, rather than a rigorous approach that used the actual practical testing of hypothesis to verify or deny the hypothesis.  To super-simplify (again, this post isn’t meant to be a highly detailed post on areas that I’m not an expert in; but I do know something of the era) the accepted approach to science when the 13^th century began, it was debating and arguing the hypothesis and the more “rational” argument won.  Experimental science changed that.

What made this so exciting was the 13^th century was a century that civilization began to advance with these kinds of ideas in mind for the first time at scale.  They were premised on a broad cultural optimism, which when articulated, said that each and every one of us was capable of what was called special revelation – a creative spark that could generate a new idea that could impact the course of things up to and including all civilization. Though God may have gifted us with that creative spark, the idea that was generated was generated via an individual human being’s thinking process. The advocates of experimental science were effectively saying, “Okay, we think that this idea has some merit. Let’s take it, test it and see if it works and if the results have applicable value.” This concept germinated in a Europe that was undergoing what might have been a renaissance before the Renaissance we know in the 15^th century.  The flowering of the arts and the sciences and desire to discover were given scale and, equally as good, funding, in places like the courts of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, who was the Holy Roman Emperor and his cousin, Alfonso X, also known as Alfonso El Sabio (the Wise) of Castile. These leaders weren’t just conquerors and heads of state; they were patrons who funded scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers and others who were generating new ways of looking at the world and who created new tools and products that would make the world more productive.  For example, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was the sponsor at his court of Salerno, the leading medical school of the 13^th century.  Alfonso X, not only sponsored original experimentation and research, but also was a hands-on researcher himself.  His Libros de saber de Astronomia, which were astronomical tables that he and a research team he led compiled, were the industry-standard until Tycho Brae revised them in the 16^th century.  In conjunction with this research, scientists and engineers at his court invented a mechanical clock to measure time with more precision.

But the inventions weren’t just for a small group in a royal court. There were practical technologies that were created and applied to the larger world – and, were, in context of their era, far more important to the continuation and evolution of the species that the things that we tend to call “disruptive” or “innovative” today. (On a whole other subject, we throw around the terms “disruptive” and “innovative” far too much for things that are neither) For example, during that time, the leather yoke, far more flexible than the yokes of the past were used to drive horses, rather than the oxen used in the past to do agricultural work.  The results were spectacular.  Man, doing the agricultural work produced 45 foot-pounds of work per second.  Oxen with the rigid yoke produced 288 foot-pounds per second; the horse with the flexible leather yoke produced 432 foot-pounds per second and could work 2 hours longer than an ox – an work efficiency increase of 65% in the fields. 

The other agricultural breakthrough of the period was the widespread adoption of three-field crop rotation, a significant change from the centuries old two-field crop rotation. I won’t go into what this is in the interests of space but if you are interested, check the short and sweet explanation given here. Suffice to say, it protected and even replenished nutrients in the soil rather than just drained them.

A third breakthrough, which added to this agricultural boom, was the introduction of hydraulic power via the waterwheel (which also had huge industrial impact, too). For example, in Flanders, sandy marshland became fertile cropland as hundreds of waterwheels irrigated thousands of acres. 

The combination of these three breakthroughs, when applied to agriculture, led to grain yields increasing from an 11^th century high of 2.5 measures per measure sown to 4.0 measures per measure sown, which amounts to 100% increase in disposable foodstuffs.  Talk about disruptive!  Many more human beings got to eat more healthily thanks to this technological revolution.   I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but compare that to what I’ve heard called “disruptive” over the last few years. Uber.  Better taxis?  Groupon. Delivering discount coupons?  Not disruptive. Sorry.

But it wasn’t just the breakthroughs themselves that characterized this era. The 13^th century was also a period of self-revelation, when the human species began to realize that it was special.  It had the power to transform nature, not just react to it, as most animals do.  It also celebrated that special capability.

Let me explain it another way.

I would imagine that many of us, given our somewhat privileged existences and the commoditization of international transportation, have been to Europe and seen in one place or another gothic cathedrals – and if you have any sense of wonder whatever, have been in awe at the size, complexity and sheer magnificence of the creations.  Many of these, the first groups of them, were built in the 13^th century by cathedral builders who were often called master masons or architect engineers, with the express purpose of celebrating God and Creation.  But one thing that may not be as obvious is that in almost all of these timeless magnificent buildings, if you look at them closely, man is placed at the apex of creation.  Man is central to the creation of the building and to the celebration of God and capital C Creation. For example, the interior of the Cathedral at Reims was a maze that represented a holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  When a visitor to the cathedral solves the maze, they arrive at the center of the cathedral.  What that visitor finds at the center of these homages to God and Creation are not the names of any disciples, nor Jesus or Mary, but the names of the master masons that built the cathedral. These architect-engineers saw themselves as central to the creation of this New Jerusalem, this new and refreshed world of invention, celebration and abundance.  God, in this central area is portrayed on stained glass windows as an architect engineer with a compass in his hands. 

This spirit of creation and invention was infectious among at least a small group of people who had a significant impact on the health and well-being of the world that they lived in.  Witness my man Roger Bacon’s inventive mind – and keep in mind this is the 13^th century. This is a famous passage of his foresight that comes from his work Opus Tertium.

“Machines of navigation can be constructed without rowers, as great ships for river or ocean which are borne under the guidance of one man at a greater speed than if they were full of men. Also a chariot that can be constructed that will move at incalculable speed without any draught animals…also flying machines may be constructed so that man may sit in the midst of the machine turning a certain instrument by means of which wings artificially constructed would beat the air after the manner of a bird flying. Also a machine of small size may be made for raising and lowering weights of almost infinite amounts – a machine of the utmost utility. 

Machines may be also made for going in sea or river down to the bed without bodily danger…and there are countless other things that can be constructed such as bridges over rivers without pillars or any such support.”

What’s utterly fascinating is, in his “Letter Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and Nature and the Nullity of Magic” Bacon claims to have seen all of them, except the flying machine, which of course shows up 300 years later in Da Vinci’s Notebooks.  Is that the case? I don’t know and I doubt anyone ever will. But what makes this incredible regardless is that even if he didn’t see them as a realized work, each of these imagined (or real) inventions has a practical purpose aimed at the betterment of the lot of humans on the planet at that time and in the future. In other words, he was applying a scientific method to providing invention that was practical i.e. of real applicable value to the advance of society.  Utility in the service of knowledge is essential.  There has to be some actual purpose to the creation of knowledge and for its verification. It isn’t created for its own sake. 

But you might argue, what about brand new fresh ideas? Aren’t they sometimes valuable and yet, unique and new so their application isn’t so apparent?

The answer to this is well put indirectly, by the poet, Charles Simic, in a recent New York Review of Books article entitled “The Prisoner of History”

“I live between two worlds, the one I see with my eyes open and the one I see with my eyes closed. Unlike other people, I regard the two as equals and trust my eyes as much as I trust my imagination.”

In other words, of course we have to continually try to imagine the new but it has to be in context – the context of the world as it is and as we imagine it to be with the realization of those new ideas. The key is “realization” – the practical application of verified ideas to solving a problem or advancing something in the real world.

This could easily characterize Roger Bacon, or any of the visionary thinkers of the 13^th century. Or any of us, regardless of era, who want to make what we imagine we can do, real, rather than just continue to imagine it. This is vision and imagination applied to real world problems and needs.

All of this – agricultural advances, cathedral building, Roger Bacon’s vision, reflected a broad cultural optimism. This optimism, a transformation of thinking about the place of humanity and individuals in the grandest scheme of all – the evolution of life, and the universe, drove a 13^th century technological revolution that increased the capacity of the human species to grow more safely and to utilize its gift more actively in a way that was unmatched until the Renaissance.

Roger Bacon’s contribution to this was the creation and initial application of scientific method to the evolution of science.

Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon, labored through life as an almost heretical Franciscan friar, persecuted by his own order, and died in 1292 at age 78, despite being imprisoned for a while by his own order. I’m not going to go into the politics of that or the life of Bacon per se, but instead focus on what he said and saw. Because what he did, reflects what each of us as an individual has the capability to do in his or her life. Personally, it affects how at least I’m thinking about what I might leave behind, even as I continue to concern myself, as most of us do, with my present and future.  I think it’s important because I also think we underestimate exactly who we are and what we are capable of because we get caught up in the minutiae of our everyday existence. We often forget not just the nobility of our own capacity but the actual tools and practices that are there to effect those proficiencies and possibilities. 

We are armed with:

• The knowledge of what the human species is
• Who we are as individuals
• The existence of a philosophical framework that gives us some context to work within,
• The ability to reason and
• Tools and practices,

Having all this makes us responsible at some point in our life to choose a way to use all of this amazing potential and engage with the world to realize that potential and benefit more than just ourselves.  We are each at different levels in our journey to figure this out and each at different degrees of commitment to actually trying to benefit others, rather than just intend to. 

I’ve reached the age where at least for me, I know what I want to do and how I want to do it and am beginning to consider what kind of memory it will leave when my time on earth ends.  It’s a bit frightening to be honest, because I don’t want to consider it, but considering it I am.

In that consideration, Roger Bacon has been a paradigm for me, because of how he thinks about knowledge, science and execution. 

I’ll explain.

The first principle of knowledge in the mind of Bacon was virtue.  That, translated into 21^st century lingo is that we have to be good human beings. Bacon understood that there is a clarity that goodness provides that allows one to understand truths – not necessarily or only big universal truths but scientific truths. A good person, because their intent is good, is prone to knowledge, because they are emotionally connected to doing good things.   His way of putting it:

“For it is not possible that the soul should rest in the light of truth, while it is stained with sins…Virtue therefore clarifies the mind so that man may comprehend more easily not only moral but scientific truths.” (From his 1268 Opus Majus).

But it goes further than that. None of us, and, I fervently believe this, are devoid of the potential for creativity.  We all have an infinite capacity to create and for applying that creativity in beneficial ways, what Bacon calls “special revelation” or what the incredibly underrated philosopher Philo Judaeus calls “a miniature heaven” in his “On Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses.”

In Bacon’s Opus Tertium:

“...Therefore, this way, which precedes special revelation is the wisdom of philosophy and this wisdom alone is in the power of man, yet supplemented by some divine enlightenment which in this part is common to all, because God is the intelligence active in all our souls in all cognition.”

Bacon is saying what I said – each of us has that divine spark, the potential to create but it also is a potential that has to be realized by the individual. God will not do it for you.  God grants you the capability and the broad opportunity to act on it.  You are responsible to realize your potential and then put it into action in a way that is beneficial. Again, Opus Tertium:

As God wishes all men to be saved and no man to perish and his goodness is infinite, He always leaves some way possible for man through which he may be urged to seek his own salvation…For this reason, the goodness of God ordained that revelation should be given the world so that the human race may be saved. But this way, which precedes revelation, is given to man so that if he does not wish to follow it, nor seek a fuller truth, he may be justly damned at the end.

Putting it simply, it would be a horrible waste of each of our lives if we don’t apply this gift in a way that benefits each of and all of us.

I know that this may be arcane for some of you (though, those that it is arcane for probably have stopped reading), waxing too philosophical for others, and maybe you think this is self-indulgent, which, admittedly, it might be.  But, aside for what I’m wrestling with as I enter the last third or, with a LOT of luck (and working out and eating right) 40% of my life, what Roger Bacon established in the 13^th century via his philosophical framework and the creation of experimental science and what the application of practical science led to with the technological breakthroughs and conjoined cultural optimism of the era, is one of the reasons we are able to continue to claim innovation and disruption and technological breakthrough and scientific achievement in the 21^st century.

So with that in mind, I’m going to go through one more thing (there is SO much more that I’m leaving out) about Roger Bacon concerning experimental science and then close this out with some of why this impacts me so, so much and how it has impacted what we all do, so that we can see things in perspective – or in the context of the biggest picture of all – the continuation of the human species for the sake of its own growth.

Roger Bacon and the Integritas Sapientiae

Roger Bacon’s approach to experimental science was driven by a framework and a methodology grounded in a deeply rooted philosophy that was verifiable through research and testing – or disproven as such.

In Bacon’s case the philosophy was defined by the concept of God as the Creator of all things in an orderly fashion. What that implied was that all things were related in some way via the laws that governed them. That meant that while God created the heavens, earth, man and woman, the trees and the fruit that grew on them – all of which were different in visible ways and fashioned for different reasons, they were related to each by the universal laws of creation and the Creator and governed by those same laws.

To Bacon, this translated to eight clearly definable branches of science; the laws of each of them were discoverable with a single, universal method.  The sciences (for those of you interested) were:

1. Common principles of natural sciences and philosophy
2. Optics
3. Astronomy
4. Barology (science of weight and its relation to gravity)
5. Alchemy (actually chemistry not magic)
6. Agriculture
7. Medicine
8. Experimental science 

Bacon called these sciences the integrated sciences.  Each of the eight had a unique position in the pantheon of science but at the same time all eight played a central role in the body of principle and practice that gave the human species hegemony over nature – the ability to alter it to their benefit. 

What in the name of … do I mean by this? (Hey, don’t shoot the messenger).  For example, to understand agriculture, you had to know botany, soil testing, animal husbandry and horticulture. Your knowledge as an agricultural scientist had to span the interactions between climate, vegetation and animal populations. This allowed you to figure out how to improve the conditions that would benefit organic life.  Think about the example earlier of the leather yoke, horses, waterwheels, and three-crop rotation that disrupted all previous models for growing food and improved the lives of people everywhere by providing more food.  This was a systematic, practical, applicable science.

Science had a timely prudence too. For example, he was a strong advocate of military research because of the imminent threat of the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan who he saw as the Anti-Christ.  By 1241, they had reached the Danube in Europe, so researching war weapons became paramount.  Based on both the Opus Majus and another of his works, De Secretus Operibus, there is evidence that he invented gunpowder (according to arguments made by several scholars).  He didn’t envision it as needed for bombs or bullets per se, but he did see it as something that would defeat the Anti-Christ, Genghis Khan.

This great achievement, the beginnings of a rigorous method for experimental science, was first proposed in both his greatest work, Opus Majus (translates to Great or Big Work, ironically), and in his less well known, Communia Naturalium. While its true value wasn’t realized until the 17^th century really, its seeds were planted in the 13^th century’s cultural optimism.

There is so much more to Bacon’s experiments. There is some evidence that he invented a telescope and a compound microscope hundreds of years before the accepted dates of their invention. He did what can be seen as seminal work in optics and in light and radiation. I could go on. But, to close this out, I want to focus on something I think even more important – his passion for finding the truth – in things, in laws, in natural law, in the universe and in life – and the lessons that I’ve learned at least in the search that he has helped guide me on for my life.

Roger Bacon, on truth and humility.

Bacon understood that truth wasn’t only the property of the renowned – all humans were possessors of truth and thus deserved the respect of their peers.  Without that humility, not only weren’t you acting as a human being according to what God provided to you, but you also were denying yourself the opportunity for learning some of the truths that are being made available to you.  Look at these passages in Opus Majus:

• “The wiser men are, the more humbly will they submit to learn from others; they do not disdain the simplicity of those who teach them.”

• “Just as man’s conduct towards God is regulated by the reverence required, so is his conduct toward his neighbor regulated by justice and peace and his duty to himself by integrity of life.”

• “It comes to pass that he who ceases to be a man by the loss of his goodness is turned into a beast.”

Lessons Learned

So, what does all this rambling on about Roger Bacon mean – at least to me?  Let’s bring it in.

Since I found out about Roger Bacon and was drawn to him, he has been a guidepost for my life – a hero that framed much of what I’ve done with my life.  He’s given me guidance in how be what I hope is a good person, a practical foresighted thinker, and someone who will accomplish something of value on the planet to be remembered by.

Guideposts

1. The universe is governed by a natural law that affects all things regardless of apparent differences. 
2. It is the continuous discovery of that universal natural law and how it works that drives and sustains the human species, whether or not its conscious goal.
3. Each human being on this planet, each of us, regardless of life’s station, has been granted an infinite capacity to create and is a possessor of truths that each of us can learn from.  Titles and position don’t matter.
4. With that creative capacity, comes to the responsibility to actively seek to use it in a practical way to benefit others – either the species as a whole or groups or individuals. We are granted the gift; doing something with it is up to us.
5. We each are able to gain more and greater knowledge if our purpose for gaining it is good (virtuous).  That means that we are best served as people if we are driven to do good for more than ourselves.
6. There is a rigorous method of going about applying that creative gift – proving what you think, regardless of where you apply it. Bacon’s desire to prove what he supposed and the method he developed, can appropriated by how we produce content, develop technology, and do anything else with our lives. For example, when I write, I am always able to defend what I say.  I’ve counseled those of my younger brethren who tend to be strong-willed and opinionated that they can write whatever they want, but they need to be prepared to defend whatever they say, which, to be blunt, many times they can’t. You have to be able to show that what you say is defensible by its truths.  If it isn’t or you can’t verify the argument, then don’t say it.

 

Our lives today were nourished in the wellsprings of prior centuries and the prior achievements of our forebears. On the one hand, we should respect that past, but we should never live in it.  Because if there is one other thing we learned, it is that our wonderful species is constantly evolving and changing and we have to both drive that change in order for the species to continue and respect that change as it occurs.

Roger Bacon was a major influence in teaching me all these things. I don’t know if any of this resonated with you. I don’t know if this was an exercise in sheer self-indulgence. I do know that the impact on me has been to make me think about what I do and who it impacts, act in a fashion that supports reason and truth as best as the flawed creature I am knows how, and at the same time, provides me with a moral compass. I hope that when I finally go, my epitaph does not read, “he was #1 in CRM” or “He was the Godfather of CRM” but instead it says, “He was a good person” or “He did good.”  Then I’ve fulfilled my life’s purpose and what has been my dream for many years.

Footnote

For an interesting look at the recent biographical material on Roger Bacon, take a look at this 2013 work that is fairly simple and probably a bit too speculative but good enough to give you a decent idea of who the man was.  The book is “Roger Bacon, The First Scientist” by Brian Clegg. (The link is for the Kindle version)  For anyone interested in Roger Bacon at all, it’s worth the read.

 

How Marketing-as-a-Service Builds Trust and Engagement

Note: While I recover from vocal cord surgery, I can't do a whole lot. But that doesn't mean that a. ideas stop generating and b. others aren't doing a lot.

They continue and they are.

So what I thought I would do is publish a guest post or two here and a few on ZDNet while I sit back and while away the hours regaining my voice - speaking not writing.

What better way to start than with one of the people in the business world who is a terrific thinker and someone who understands what value actually is.  There are a lot of ideas of value that range from the overly simplistic - value is price (wrong) to the complex - co-created value for example. Dr. Graham Hill, of Optima Partners is one of those rather rare individuals who actually understands what value is and how to practically apply the concepts of value that he espouses - leading him to a highly successful career as an advisor to companies who's very nature is complex.

In this guest post, Graham, a longtime friend and thought leader, identifies something that is highly germane to contemporary business issues - what he calls marketing-as-a-service (The acronym is MaaS. I suppose).  How do you create engagement through building trust - or rebuilding it.  Take a look at this. Its fresh - and it is realistic. Thank you, Dr. Hill. Thank you for that. Realistic.

Take it away, Graham.

 _________________________________________

Talk to most marketers and you get the impression that they know what makes their customers tick. They have piles of marketing research to prove it. But do they really? The recent fast.MAP Marketing Gap Tracker looked at the differences between what marketers think and what customer think. Surprise, surprise, it found that marketers don’t really know how their customers think at all. One of the Tracker’s key findings was the importance of customer trust. The annual Edelman Trust Barometer looks at how much customers trust business across a range of factors. The most recent Barometer made for pretty sad reading. It highlighted that customer trust in companies of all types has fallen significantly over the past few years to the point where only 44% of customers now trust business. Although most companies are aware they must do something to bridge the trust gap, they typically look for prophylactic trust 'sticking plasters' rather than try to repair the underlying reasons why their businesses unintentionally destroy trust. Trust is one of those things that follows a hysteresis curve; it takes a long time to build but can be destroyed in a very short time by stupid, short-term or immoral behaviour.

How Data-driven Marketing Destroyed Customer Trust

As far back as 1994, Morgan & Hunt wrote about the importance of developing trust in customers. They showed that trust was necessary to develop working relationships with customers. Seth Godin understood this very well when he wrote his excellent book on Permission Marketing. Unfortunately, feeding the quarterly product P&L beast meant that the majority of marketers opted for data-driven targeting for short-term sales, even at the cost of potentially more profitable future loyalty. This short-term approach inevitably resulted in the erosion of trust and the growth of what Liljander & Roos called spurious relationships. They estimate that as few as 5% of customers have true relationships with companies and then usually through someone they know personally. This can have very expensive consequences; it should come as no surprise that mobile telcos typically spend over 70% of their marketing acquisition budget on replacing customers that churned to competitors the previous year. Inger Roos has shown that customers are more often pushed because of critical service failures than jump because of better offers. Mobile telco marketers are as unhappy about this as customers are, but few of them are willing to risk not making their net adds targets by switching budget from acquisition to retention marketing or heaven forbid, to customer service. And when they do it is much more likely to be through an innovative co-created mobile telco startup like giffgaff than an incumbent like its parent telco Telefonica O2.

More of the Same Failed Marketing Will Not Rebuild Trust

Despite all of this, I see a lot of companies actively looking at how they rebuild trust with their customers. Not for its own sake, but as a driver of customer engagement. Faced with the proliferation in channels, an explosion in modular content and the fragmentation of customer segments, marketers have been at a loss how to respond. As a pair of Economist Intelligence Unit studies on Beyond Loyalty: Meeting the Challenge of Customer Engagement (Part 1 and Part 2) suggests, managers believe that developing stronger customer engagement will increase revenues, increase customer loyalty and thus, increase profits. Unsurprisingly, this has got marketers rather excited. Unfortunately, their response has typically been a more finely-grained version of their current data-driven targeting approach. For example, Marketing Week's Programmatic Buying Essential Guide suggests that up to 75% of all display ads will be bought programmatically by 2017. And this in-spite of the fact that 69% of customers find highly personalised ads 'creepy', 47% want more control over the ads that are displayed to them and 38% use ad blockers to block them entirely. Companies will ultimately be the losers in this war of attrition between pushy marketers and uninterested customers.

Building Engagement through Marketing-as-a-Service

There is some hope however. Aimia, (the operator of multi-sided loyalty programmes such as Nectar and AirMiles, and frequent flyer programmes such as Air Canada's Aeroplan) described in a recent white paper on The Four Futures: The Digital Loyalty Survey how it is focusing on a two-pronged strategy based on a combination of emotional engagement with customers and customer control over their own data. This is an interesting approach, but one fraught with potential problems, not least customers’ lack of interest in taking on an onerous and non-value-adding activity like managing their own data. Perhaps part of the solution is providing 'Marketing-as-a-Service' to support customers' making contextual decisions, as Alan Mitchell suggested in a recent Ctrl-Shift post on Flourishing in a Personal Information Services Environment. This would have the added advantage of turning marketing into a service that enables customers to co-create more value (see my recent post on How Contextual Marketing Turns Marketing into a Service). Ultimately, this may lead to a full-scale ‘MeCommerce’ multi-sided platform that facilitates customers' life event management, either provided by brands themselves (through a platform solution like MyWave) or by an external intermediary. But this is hard to pull off. As a recent article by Andrei Hagiu on Strategic Decisions for Multi-sided Platforms points out, building a winning platform is very difficult, particularly if the platform is run by an external intermediary rather than a trusted brand. And as another article on Mastering the Intermediaries suggests, Cos are starting to fight back against external intermediaries.

What Do Customers Really Want?

Through a combination of stupidity, short-termism and immorality marketers have managed to destroy customers' trust. Rebuilding that trust is an important driver of improved engagement. Many marketers see engagement as the key to increasing revenues, customer loyalty and thus, profits. Unfortunately, many marketers are responding with more of the same data-driven marketing that destroyed customer trust in the first place. Helping customers make decisions through Marketing-as-a-Service would be a better approach to building engagement. This might pave the way for a MeCommerce platform enabling customers to remove the hassle from managing their key life events. At the end of the day, it will be customers that decide whether MeCommerce thrives, or whether it dies on the vine.

Ladies and Gentlemen, place your bets.

Further Reading:

fast.MAP Marketing Gap Tracker 2013/4

Edelman, 2014 Trust Barometer

Graham Hill, How Stupidity, Short-termism and Immorality Ruined Marketing

Morgan & Hunt, The Commitment Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing

Seth Godin, Permission Marketing

Liljander & Roos, Customer Relationship Levels - From Spurious to True Relationships

Inger Roos, Switching Processes in Customer Relationships

ForresterResearch, Case Study: Giffgaff Uses Co-Creation To Build A Differentiated Mobile Service Business

Economist Intelligence Unit, Beyond Loyalty: Meeting the Challenge of Customer Engagement Part 1 and Part 2

Marketing Week, Programmatic Buying Essential Guide

Colin Strong, Are Brands Entering an Uncanny Valley? Aimia, The Four Futures: The Digital Loyalty Survey

Alan Mitchell, Flourishing in a Personal Information Services Environment

Graham Hill, How Contextual Marketing Turns Marketing into a Service

Andrei Hagiu, Strategic Decisions for Multi-sided Platforms

Benjamin Edelman, Mastering the Intermediaries</

Happy New Year 2014–AND Best Commercials 2013

Actually, I have no criteria except I love these commercials. Some are brilliantly funny and cray cray adorbs. Some are beautiful, and soar. One will rip at your heart.

I still think that good advertising – especially TV commercials – are an art form where they are concentrating a brilliant idea into 60 seconds (more or less – as you shall see) – and it represents the company that is doing the advertising incredibly well. I’ll comment a bit here and there as I list these for your viewing pleasure. I think that this year, one set of commercials is approaching the iconic status of “MasterCard – Priceless” and “Intel Inside” but falls just short because it doesn’t have the level of catch phrase (though it has one) or musical ID (though it has one) that these two do. Here we go. There is no particular order really. I love ‘em all.

Happy New Year!!

 

#1 – Som Sabadell Bank (Beethoven’s 9th Symphony’s Ode to Joy Flash mob – sorta)

Most moving commercial of the year – or that I saw this year (has 29M views)

 

 

#2 – T-Mobile/Sprint  (James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell series “ At Sprint, Everything’s Important”) –

Totes McGotes episode because of the sonorous tones of James Earl Jones saying it.

 

#3 – AT&T (Beck Bennett, “Its Not Complicated” series w/kids) –

Cutest kid episode – because, well, it’s the cutest one.

 

#4 - Bud Light Easily the BEST TAGLINE OF THE YEAR ("It's Only Weird if it Doesn't Work") –

Quinoa Episode - my fave of all of these Bud Light ads – and the actor pulls it off perfectly.

 

#5 – Hope for Paws video – This one was done in 2012, but I saw it in 2013.

Rescue of a blind dog from a trash heap. Please be ready to cry – because if you have a heart, or any organ in fact, you will – tears of joy too by the end.

Also, I gave $100 as soon as the video was over. Be ready to end 2013 with a donation to this amazing group.

CRM Idol 2013 Voting Starts...NOW!

Okay, patrons of the arts and sciences. We are down to the final week of CRM Idol 2013 and this is arguably the most exciting of them all. This is where you, the people, get to vote on who you like as the sole winner this year and this is the time where the videos of the CRM Finalists are revealed for your viewing pleasure.

Voting for a winner is going to be pretty tough since all five finalists are truly deserving of the opportunity. They are all excellent companies, all interesting, all with great potential. That said, only one can win this so please choose wisely.

The Procedure

1. Please look at all five of these embedded videos.
2. Click on the link that is provided to see the CRM Idol page of the company and the one that takes you to the judge’s review.
3. Then click on the link provided at the bottom of the page for the vote and vote for the one – only one – that you think should be the winner of CRM Idol 2013.

Simple, yet it’s a weighty decision. What you vote actually can impact these five excellent companies future.

So here we go.

UserVoice

UserVoice CRM Idol site

UserVoice Judges’ review

UserVoice Video

NextPrinciples

NextPrinciples CRM Idol site

NextPrinciples Judges’ review

Next Principles Video

MindTouch

MindTouch CRM Idol site

MindTouch Judges’ review

MindTouch Video

Cirrus Insight

Cirrus Insight CRM Idol site

Cirrus Insight Judges’ review

Cirrus Insight Video

BlueCamroo

BlueCamroo CRM Idol site

BlueCamroo Judge’s Review

BlueCamroo Video

The Voting Survey

Okay, now you've seen the videos, you've read the reviews. Time to vote. Pick your 2013 CRM Idol champ!! Here's where you go. Make it count and thank you.

CAST YOUR VOTE HERE

Life Isn’t Abstract: The Internet of Pings

About three weeks ago, I wrote a post on my journey to health (losing weight) via a trip to the Duke Diet and Fitness Center (DFC) and also identified some broad lessons that can be generally applied when it comes to optimizing both marketing and customer experience.

For many reasons, including my recent attendance at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2013 and their thematic “Internet of Customers”, recently, I’ve been thinking about the oft-buzzworded “Internet of Things” and how it’s being used to portend the beginning of a totally connected mankind. The tendency that most of the articles and posts have is to put it sometime into the future but in reality its first phase is well underway.

What I’m NOT going to do is to write a big tome on the Internet of Things to prove that we are in phase one. What I am going to do is to continue to expose a personal journey but in the context of how phase one, what I’m calling the Internet of Pings (mostly because I think its cute and clever – and accurate), is here without us even knowing it necessarily.

The journey continues…

As I continue down a path to I hope what ends in excellent health, I realized how much I’m dependent on interconnectedness to actually accomplish my goals. I rely on so many different devices and apps that I actually don’t know how I’d accomplish what I’m trying to do without it.

Look at this day in the life when it’s focused on my health….

The Internet of Pings

I go nowhere without my Fitbit One which is responsible for measuring how many steps in a day I take and how many calories I burn according to the standards I set are. I need to average about 11,000 steps a day in order to optimize my chances of losing weight and I probably am very close to that – actually a little over if I look at the stats. I actually CAN look at the stats, which continues to make the interconnectedness point. That Fitbit One via Bluetooth is synced with its own app and to Microsoft’s HealthVault, which has all my important medical information including that provided by Fitbit One.

HealthVault has become my central repository for everything and its available as an app in IOS or Windows or Android. It also can be accessed via the web. It is one hundred percent cloud based. Because I’m pre-diabetic, I’ve decided to monitor my blood sugar and bought a OneTouch VerioIQ Blood Sugar test device which isn’t connected to anything but is a relatively accurate over the counter device that gives me data that can be then placed in HealthVault – though at this point, manually. Which is why “pings” and not “things” at this stage.

But Fitbit One is also synced to my favorite of these apps, MyFitnessPal.com which I use on my iPhone, iPad and online via browser. The Fitbit One syncs the calories I’ve burnt with the thresholds I’ve set in MyFitnessPal so I can see how many calories in a day I can safely eat and continue to lose weight. What makes MyFitnessPal so important is that it syncs with the Fitbit One within seconds, and it has a user generated database over 1 million foods that can be accessed and entered into a running diary of the food I eat and the nutrition breakdown for each food by meals every day. It also tracks goals and allows you to set the levels of caloric intake you aspire to. It can do much more than that too. It’s worth looking at the site just to see the vast scope of this extraordinary application.

But the interconnectedness goes a lot further. When I do my cardio, I am wearing a Polar FT60 Heart Monitor, which is giving me an accurate account of my caloric burn and my fitness in general. While it’s measuring that based on my heart rate, the Fitbit One is monitoring the steps I’m taking. In order for the Polar FT60 to work, as in all heart monitors, I’m wearing a sensor belt and a transmitter – in this case the Polar H7 Bluetooth transmitter. That Polar H7 transmitter also syncs with something called MySleepRate.com, which is IOS app that literally figures out my sleep patterns – how much time I am awake, how much time I am lightly sleeping, REM sleeping, deep sleeping; how much time I’m stressed, aroused (meaning frequency of awakening by something, no…not THAT arousal! Jeez.) It even records the environmental noises and if I snore and the time of night that it occurs to see if those noises or snores woke me up. It gives me a sleep quality rating and after 5 days will give me a sleep assessment and how I can do better – something I need because I average considerably less than 5 hours of sleep a night.

So what do we have? It looks something like this (pardon my graphic horribleness).

1. Fitbit One connected and synced with HealthVault and MyFitnessPal
2. OneTouch VerioIQ for testing the level of blood sugar with the data manually entered into Microsoft HealthVault but not synced to it.
3. Polar FT60 monitoring my heart rate and caloric output via its H7 Bluetooth Transmitter and sensors with the Fitbit One measuring steps but not connected to each other.
4. But the H7 is used for monitoring my sleep patterns via MySleepRate even though its not tied to the Polar FT60.

If you look at this, you get some “hipbone connected to the thighbone” action – quite a bit in fact, though by no means is it truly fully interconnected - yet. While some of it is synced (FItbit One with varying) and some linearly tied (Polar H7 dual usage) there is still disconnection. But there is enough there to see what the early stages of the Internet of Things looks like in every day life. That’s why the Internet of Pings. There are devices communicating with each other; data is being provided; but the deeper fuller interconnectedness is still a promise or two or three away from realization. But the future is going to be fascinating. That’s one of the reasons I’m working so hard on my health. I want to be around to see it. The Internet of Pings/Things might be just the way to get there.

Also, please forgive me if the links look link running product endorsement. I’m not a brand influencer type of guy – I usually find it offensive. I’m not endorsing these, but they are very likely, via the Internet of Pings, extending my life, if not outright saving it.

Life isn't Abstract: The Duke Diet and Fitness Center, Customer Experience and Me

This one is personal – and will involve some information about me that you might not really care to hear – or maybe you do. If you don’t, either mentally redact it (though to do that you’d have to have seen it) or don’t read this. If you do read this, think about why I’m writing this. Not to be too personal, but to show you how deep the impact of positive customer experience can be. Trust me, this is a good story, not a TMI one…or maybe TMI but good, nonetheless.

The big picture

In case you hadn’t noticed (if you know me or have seen me), I’m overweight. I know it’s a shock – most of you say, “how can that be? He’s so…he’s so….hmmm, overweight works.”

I’m also 63 years old, heading rapidly to 64. When you reach this age, young in spirit and heart, notwithstanding, you realize that you need to do some things that you wish you didn’t have to think about.

To change the pronoun’s case from “you” to “I”, I realized that it was time to lose weight, not because I’m ashamed of it – I’m not. My weight really isn’t a big psychological impediment to achievement or a constraint to my engagement with life. But it is a health concern that has to be taken seriously because of a very simple principal. I love being alive and get real joy from the relationships and activities in my life. So I want to be alive for a long time to come.

I’ve tried many times to lose the weight and have but have that classic weight yo-yo or if you prefer a different metaphor, weight roller coaster problem. I lose, I gain, I lose, I gain. Wheeeeee! Well, not wheeeee! really.

Part of the problem is that I spend so much time on the road (I’m writing this on a plane coming back from San Francisco, for example…and continuing to write this on a plane going back to San Francisco and now on a plane to Lafayette, Louisiana and now on a plane back from San Francisco again) that any rhythm or as some of my friends like to say, cadence, I get into, gets broken by travel. Second, I seem to have a metabolism that quits on me. My standing punch line in a not ha-ha funny way is that I can inhale air and gain weight. More on this later; its part of the story.

In any case, I’ve tried to lose weight many times. Actually in the early 90s between strength training and cardio and watching what I ate, I got down to 11% body fat. Additionally, in 2006 through diet and cardio I reached 190 – which I thought was my ideal body weight. Please note this comment too. It, too, bears on things later.

But here I was, at an impasse. How am I going to create a program that incorporates my lifestyle and at the same time does what I’ve been unable to do, despite my best efforts? I truly didn’t have a clue. Not a friggin’ clue.

The preliminaries

So I decided in July, one day, to start doing something about this. I have to take it out of the hands of the amateurs (me) and put it in the hands of the professionals. But who are these professionals?

I began a pretty focused investigation of who these superstars, who were going to save the day for me, might be. I had a clearly defined structure for this investigation – despite my normally ad hoc approach to life.

1. There was a problem to solve – I needed to drop 50 pounds in a healthy way.
2. To do that, I needed a program that I could adhere to once I had it in my hot little hands.
3. I needed this program to take my lifestyle i.e. continuous travel, into account.
4. I needed the program to be personalized though I had to assume it would be a modular version of that – built on best practices of “people like me.” I doubt someone put some program out there that was labeled “Just Waiting for Paul Greenberg – The CRM One” and hoped that I would find it.
5. I needed to commit to it, once I had it to get the outcome I was looking for (see #1).

This is far better project development and management than I’m capable of professionally and better planning than I ordinarily do, but it seemed to me that this was important enough for me to actually add rigor to my thinking, something I’m not exactly known for. ☺

So, dig I did. Of course, when you enter the realm of health and wellness, the amount of crap is super high and that ranges from the obvious garbage like “you can lose 100 pounds in 3 days drinking this herbal supplement (and taking a chain saw to your belly). I was looking for a combination of science and spirit. The former to help me get the data I need to make intelligent decisions on what to do; the latter because my extraordinary wife of 32 años, Yvonne, convinced me about two years ago of the value of centering one’s self and living in the moment. I knew this had to be a program component or what I was looking for wouldn’t be sufficient.

So I hunted and hunted and hunted and didn’t really come up with anything that made immediate impact or even obvious sense. (Note this too, has some bearing on this story). Then one day, the story goes, Paulie was reading an article on obesity and fitness on line and he saw a reference to something in the article called the Duke Diet and Fitness Center (DFC). So, being of sound mind and overwrought body, he found the Center and BAM! it nailed it –and him. This was the place. Interestingly, and this will have a bearing on the customer experience/CRM lessons learned later, I only saw one reference in an article that happened to cause me to look at this.

The reason that DFC seemed to be the place was the mixture of science and spirit, of training and education, of compassion and rigor. Their website wasn’t really adequate to the task but there was just enough to convince me to make it a contender – the only one. It was competing with me doing nothing about my weight issue but continuing to let things ride – up the scale. However, it was kind of no contest but you know how it goes, affirmation and validation are always necessary when it comes to making decisions that not only might change your life, but change the way you do life.

So, while I was trolling around about the DFC, I found the lodging that was adjacent to it – a place called Trinity Commons – and I spoke to the guy managing the DFC portion of Trinity Commons (it was otherwise, as I found out later, used for Duke off campus student housing) a down home guy named Eddie O’Brien who told me he was a graduate of the program and “it saved my life.” Eddie it turns out lost 160 pounds being in the program and was a healthy man now.

I was convinced. I called them and was sent a packet of information and forms to fill out - a 13 page medical questionnaire, a 6-7 page (I forget) mental health questionnaire and some other forms including a food tracking form that wanted me to track every single thing I ate for 3 days including a weekend day. That wasn’t terribly hard since I typically (when on) tracked the food I ate using MyFitnessPal, a great app BTW. They also wanted me to bring a copy of my medical records. I paid them a relative boatload and now seemingly cheap price (all in context, isn’t it?) and off we went for the 5-day program.

The Program

I went down to Durham N.C. and checked into the Trinity Commons apartments because that was what these were – really nice apartments in a facility that was about a block away from the DFC and was actually off campus housing for Duke students minus a few of the apartments set aside for the program. The stories associated with being in what was effectively a dorm at the age of 63 are a trip, told over a drink of choice. Ask me sometime. In any case, I went on a Saturday as recommended and stayed through the next Saturday. But the program was from Monday through Friday.

While there I met an extraordinary group of people in those who attended and the staff. The weights of the attendees varied from very heavy to slim and trim. Why slim attendees? They were former not-slim attendees who came back to the program on a regular basis and used it to not just see friends but to make themselves accountable. One young guy whose name I’m leaving out deliberately had been coming back since he started in 2005 and had lost 100 plus pounds and looked terrific but his bonds with others who were there and had traveled on their own journey with him was something to behold.

I could describe some of the terrific people here but in the interests of their privacy and because this is a customer experience and marketing tale with lessons to be learned, I won’t. Suffice to say, that I remain in touch and they literally all were truly great, warm, intelligent, friendly people, whose lives I’m glad have touched mine.

For me, it was, come out of the five days there with a program to use when I left. That meant one that took into account my lifestyle, which as you know means traveling like a maniac and insane amounts of work and busyness.

Honestly, what I expected and what I got were two different things – all to the beyond good. Even though I intended to fully participate, I am by either nature or training, don’t know which, a bit of a skeptic, when it comes to personal things being helped by outside “forces.” So what I expected was pretty modest. I would learn some things and I would attempt to apply what I learned “on the outside” after the five days were up.

I got so much more than that. While I’m not going to detail all of it, let me give you a brief energetic overview.

In that five days, I had one on one meetings and classes and training and exercises with medical staff and fitness instructors and health psychologists and nutritionists. I did a variety of required things including blood work, and weigh-ins. I did some optional tests including the “bodpod” and a test to determine my actual as opposed to calculated resting metabolic rate (more on that later). I got a great massage that used a number of different techniques. I received fitness instruction that took into account what I was looking for – a plan to sustain me on the road.

I can’t say that all of the classes were ideal. For example, there was one that looked at the issue of weight and shame – and that just isn’t my problem. I’m not ashamed of my weight (I’m happy to say the bulk of that weight is now gone) and never have been. I’m not lacking confidence – god, no. For me, this was and is a health issue – one I have to deal with as my age increases. Hell, I’m in my 60s now (don’t feel it but am) and health is something that has to matter. In the beginning of the 5 days, there was a session in which each participant (about 15 of us) were asked, “why are you here?” My answer, “I like my life.” I was being modest actually. I love my life – not everything but on the whole. Its amazing and I’m blessed or lucky depending on your proclivities, to have it. So I want to live and long time and too much weight can be an impediment to that.

What did I learn?

I had some eye opening results that have made this something that I had to do rather than just something that I wanted to do. Though its both. Okay, if you don’t want to get all personal now, eyes down to the lessons section. But if you’re okay with NTMI – nearly too much information – then read on.

1. I found out that I am pre-diabetic. Diabetes is indicated by a glucose level of 126 or more – in two fasting glucose tests in a row. I had 124, barely below the threshold. No second test necessary. The solution is, ta da, lose weight. So no reason for me to freak and I didn’t. Just doing what I have to do.
2. I found out that I’ve been operating under a misconception for years. To explain: When you figure out how many calories you should consume per day to lose weight, for the most part its based on a calculated resting metabolic rate (RMR). That means the amount of calories that you expend in a day if you do nothing but sit (in effect). My calculated RMR has always been between about 1880-1900. I took a test and found out that my actual RMR is 1400 calories per day. That means that I’ve been eating 500 calories more a day (translated to 3500 per week – a full pound up a week!) than I should have been. That means with exercise I was pretty much on a permanent plateau.
3. I learned to slow up when I eat. It takes the brain 20 minutes to register that you are full. Imagine how much you can pack into your stomach in that time. Far beyond mere satisfaction before it registers as “OMG, my stomach hurts.” Simple solution. Take a bite, put the fork down. Pick it up, take a bite, put the fork down. That simple thing is sooooo easy to do – and you eat less.

There was much more, but I came out of there with a clear personal mandate. Lose enough weight to get to 195 (five pounds under the bodpod determination that my ideal weight for my size, body composition etc is 200. Hey I’m a little vain, okay?).

So where am I? Down from 245 to 216 as of this writing (since late August – and I’m not starving by any means). Please, do me a favor and don’t congratulate me or give me kudos or support. I’m good. If you comment, please focus it around the customer experience and marketing parts on this or on the institution. There are lessons ot be learned that I want to point out and will from here on.

The customer experience lessons

This is a successful program – with one big caveat as you will see. They have an 85% success rate because the change is to your life and lifestyle. Its not implementing a fad diet. It is a combination of smart programming and an incredibly well thought out environment, populated by people who not only care but are good human beings besides.

What is/was mission critical to this program and the experience of each participant is two things:

1. The mixture of the elements of the program – Medical, behavioral, spiritual, physical, emotional. They have evolved a holistic model that is appropriate to the 21st century citizen. They take all facets of a human being into account and build the personalized programs from a combination of medical data, behavioral and emotional knowledge, nutritional information and physical training and planning. They balance all of it with spiritual centering via mediation and other programs for and from the soul.
2. The highly deliberate environment – built around two principles that I can see – 1. Community 2. Treating adults like adults – letting them control their own choices while guiding them to the right place. – During the time you are there, the environment is deliberately focused around fostering a sense of community and support –from each staff member who are clearly chosen for their combination of expertise and their humanity to the way that the program participants are encouraged to do things with each other. I went to a Durham Bulls game with one of the participants, for example. They had alumni who were there for round 7 or 8 for example, speak on their history at the Center – and two friends who met at the center who spoke together emphasized not just the DFC’s work but the evolution of their friendship and how they have sustained since 2005. The second aspect of the environment is that they didn’t force anyone to do anything. Everyone there was treated as a responsible adult who was accountable to themselves. No one had to do anything they didn’t want to, though there were constraints nonetheless. So, all meals were chosen from a specific set of choices on menus. The server staff at the cafeteria gave you ONLY what you chose – no changes possible, no bigger a portion than that provided. Choose it yourself, but live with your choices. You should know why you are there.

The lessons of public presence

One thing puzzled me from before I went and was reinforced over the five days there. Why did I have to look so hard to find this program when I was doing the research to find programs like this? I found it buried in a newspaper or online journal article of some kind. My curiosity and my desire to do something drove me to investigate this – or else it would have remained obscurely buried.

When I got there, I found out that the attendance for this extraordinary program was down somewhat in an era where obesity was rampant. Now its cost might be a factor – it isn’t cheap – but there are enough heavy people who want to solve the problem who can afford this program out there So I don’t think that was much of a factor.

The actual problem was marketing – or at least, marketing defined as via a public, visible presence. As I told one of the senior staff – you have a program that sells itself…but it doesn’t broadcast itself.” They tended to be almost too humble about the benefit they brought to people – at least in a public forum. For example, they have a partnership with the National Football League (NFL) for athletes as they and after they retire. Imagine what a public endorsement from one of those athletes can mean to a program like this Yet if you go to the NFL retirement program web pages – you can barely find mention of this relationship. Ugh.

The second egregious problem – is the unrealized potential of the post-care environment - meaning the DFC didn't recognize what it was - or at least wasn't doing anything about it.

What I mean by this is that there is clearly a sense of community from the graduates. For example, several of them – a pretty high percentage I’m given to understand – come back for follow up sessions even when they are down to their “normal” weights. Some of it is for the former customer making themselves accountable to someone other than themselves. Some is planned together with other grads to be able to reconnect. The sense of community at the site is so strong that it creates a desire to go back to this safe, nurturing environment that not only treats your health but handles you as an adult, not a child with a problem. That was there.

BUT…. Other than a few alumni Facebook pages, there is no real online community to go to and to continue the relationships between alumni and staff and between alumni. There is no subject matter expertise provided except some webinars once in a while. In other words, customer retention isn’t being considered to put it in business terms. The efforts are left in the hands of the alumni to do whatever – and while laudable, it is ad hoc and from a business standpoint for the DFC is minimally valuable, though certainly helpful for the alumni.

Things to be done

So what can be done by the DFC to make itself visible as the world-class institution that it already is?

1. Stop being so humble. Obesity is an issue that hurts millions of people. This is likely the most effective program in the United States, maybe the world. The results are measurable. The value immeasurable. Tell people this.
2. What #1 means for marketing. If you have programs like the NFL Retirement program, get a well known player who has been through the program to endorse it.
3. Build an outreach program through a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter. Participate in user forums and other social channels as subject matter experts in groups specific to medical, healthcare, wellness, obesity, and other appropriate topics.
4. Continue the webinars but as a series rather than a random group of events and experts. Get the word out via your outreach program and via more traditional media.
5. Build a community for your alumni and for guests who are exploring who you are and what you do. This is a community you control, not a Facebook page. It should be a place where alumni interact and renew old acquaintances; where the staff participates and comingles. The staff also should be available at specific times to be subject matter experts (SMEs) who (within reason) will answer questions that community members have. There should be content available on site and a link library for people that takes them to valuable information. Make this both a nurturing virtual community and a community center where important knowledge on diet and fitness, obesity and other conditions is aggregated.

Aside from one or two events, I’m not sure that I have ever done anything as important or valuable for my health as attend the Duke Diet and Fitness Center. Aside from me endorsing it, which I wholeheartedly and without reservation, do, there is a strong CRM story to be told here that I think not only can benefit the center but benefit any company that has a great story and provides a benefit, and as is often the case in especially the non-profit sector, they are too humble to tell it and forget as often as not that they are a business – albeit one with a purpose that benefits people, more often than that. I trust that there is something here beyond just my personal journey – and that the DFC and the institutions like it can take this and start their own journey.

You rock, DFC

.

CRM Musings, Miscellany and Doings

CRM Musings and Miscellany: Short Bits

Every now and then I get a hankering to just do these short, pithy (there’s no lisp involved here) things rather than my usual long-winded posts.  This is the result of one of those hankerings.

CRM, BPMonline, Kiev

For those of you that don’t follow CRM Idol, shame on you!!  Actually, that wasn’t what I wanted to say, but what I was thinking. For those of you who don’t follow CRM Idol, BPMonline is a company, owned by UK-based Terrasoft, that was one of two winners in 2011, our first year. They are a company that has grown dramatically since then, being recognized by Gartner, Forrester and other analyst firms and individuals as a player in the CRM space. They also are an exceptionally warm and friendly company, run by Katerina Kostereva, co-founder and CEO and ably supported by a terrific young staff. 

Recently, I had the great pleasure of helping them celebrate the opening of their new office in a 7-story glass building in Kiev (they own it) with an incredible rooftop view of that historic (more than 1100 years old) city.  I was there for both an advisory day and to speak to customers – roughly 250 or so – who came from multiple republics in and around Ukraine (by the way, NOT “The” Ukraine. Ukraine). Even though I had a massive recurrence of an upper respiratory infection (long story) the night before, here is the speech I gave for your listening…pleasure…or pain if that’s the way you want to be about it.

The Onion on the Cloud

What can I say? I love this video.  No disrespect intended to HP (by me anyway. I can’t speak for the Onion) but this one is AWE…some! And about at the level of knowledge contained in a buzzword.

HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About'

HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About'

Salesforce Acquires EdgeSpring: News Almost Lost in the Marketing Cloud

I think you have a cogent idea of what I thought about the acquisition of Exact Target, salesforce’s marketing cloud acquisition that had the airwaves – social and traditional - buzzing and at times stinging. Lost in that – almost, since nothing salesforce.com ever does get actually lost – was their acquisition announced the following week of analytics platform startup EdgeSpring.  Note something here. I say analytics platform, not application or cloud service.  This is an important distinction for salesforce.

The reason is simple; they haven’t been able to compete with their larger industry brethren such as Oracle or SAP when it comes to analytics. That was the other great hole in the salesforce ecosystem. They have the Radian6 Insights Platform, which as cool as it is, doesn’t substitute native analytics that can be built to spec depending on what the purpose is.

That said, because EdgeSpring is coming out of stealth mode and has been immediately acquired, (run by a former salesforce employee now returning to the fold), its hard to say exactly what the quality of the platform is. I haven’t seen it, nor had I heard of it. But the idea is at least the right one for salesforce at this juncture. If the product has the capabilities, then salesforce continues to go down the path to becoming an all-encompassing ecosystem for customer-facing applications and services – which, for them, is what they need to do to fulfill their vision.

The Oracle-NetSuite; Oracle-Microsoft; Oracle-Salesforce Alliance

Everyone and their mother (if she is an analyst) had some hypothesis or speculative notion about this alliance. Here are some of the ones worth reading:

1. Frank Scavo, Constellation Research, On the Oracle/Salesforce “détente”
2. Dennis Howlett, Diginomica on the Oracle/Salesforce partnership
3. Stuart Lauchlan, Diginomica, on the Oracle/Microsoft alliance
4. Denis Pombriant on the Oracle/Salesforce deal
5. Larry Dignan, ZDNet on Oracle/Salesforce thing
6. James Staten, Forrester Group, on Oracle/Microsoft together at last
7. Esteban Kolsky, ThinkJar, on the whole Oracle-Microsoft-Salesforce-NetSuite shebang

These are good starts.  My opinion here would just be either corroboration of some of these or noise, so I won’t offer it yet. I’m also still thinking about the implications, some of which are not clear to me. So give me some rope (and time) to hang myself with. I’m sure I’ll speak to it at some point. Read these in the meantime.

Customer for Life:

Esteban Kolsky, one of the world’s leading analysts and one of my closest friends, and I had a discussion a few days ago on the nature of customer engagement and customer experience. Even though we have somewhat different metaphors that we present with, it is sort of scary how closely aligned our thinking is. Both of us had the same perception when it came to how to begin to think about engagement, experience and customers.  I’m going to give you all a short précis on what we discussed but please understand this is a mere representation of the richness of the subject matter. Maybe it will be my next book.  Then again, maybe not.

There is a strong tendency that companies, when they are planning their customer strategies and technology vendors when they are thinking about developing their enabling applications, tend to think about the customer engagement as a momentary one. That means that if I interact with a company about something and there is this intense emotional involvement, well, that’s engagement. Or, another variation would be if I talk to the company and finish the conversation (regardless of intensity) the “engagement” is over. But that isn’t the nature of engagement. In fact, engagement is characterized by the customer’s ongoing interactions with the company – an ongoing interaction that he or she (meaning, the customer) chooses to have. At any point in the life of that ongoing engagement, it can be intense or casual or intense and then casual, or something in between. The level of emotional involvement is the customer’s choice. The decision to continue the engagement is the key to it. The customer stays engaged because they want to have a relationship with the company that provides them with the results that they want to get from the company.  Keep that “ongoing” part in your head for a minute.

Customer experience suffers from the same kind of, though not identical, misperception. Most people think of the momentary experience – the one event driven experience that occurs as the interactions happen. It might be that it takes about 3 or 4 calls or communications of some kind for the event to start and end. That short-term experience is often what businesses are planning for and around.  That’s a limited approach and pretty much not the way to think about it.

Another way that customer experience gets shortchanged is when “the” customer experience is misidentified as being what I call a consumable experience.  A consumable experience would be the effect that the American Girl doll retail store has on your daughter when she goes there with her doll and gets her doll’s hair done, eats lunch with her doll, watches a play about her doll (or a doll in the American Girl line) and accessorizes her doll – for the price of about $400.00 for the visit.  It creates a memory for her that is unmatchable, no doubt, but it is only an aspect of the broader overall customer experience, as we have to think about it, if we’re building programs around it and strategies for it. The customer experience that goes beyond the event would include (for example inclusively but not exclusively):

1. The American Girl retail store experience (as outlined above) with your daughter
2. The storybooks and history and accessories associated with the doll which you can read about via print, or online and/or buy it in the store and/or online.
3. The ease of the transaction process for the “buyer” i.e. the parent
4. The type of customer service you get at the store, over the phone, via the web
5. The store associated interactions with you and your daughter that lead to follow-up activity of some kind – e.g. an invitation to an exclusive event related to the character of your daughter’s doll – and the history of your store visits.
6. The web presence of American Doll.
7. The availability of the products themselves when there is an interest in the acquisition (e.g. would you like to be told, sorry its out of stock – and available in two months – and then have to tell your daughter that?)
8. The ability of the tools to customize the experience (not the customization itself)

There is much more involved but you get the idea. This is an overall customer experience that in the long run leaves you with a feeling that you want to continue your relationship with the company – meaning buy stuff and do things for a long while to come. 

There is this saying (which I have to admit, I’ve had some responsibility in propagating) that “the customer’s experience is only as good as their last memory.” While that’s somewhat true, there are multiple nuances to this.  The most important nuance is this:

If your customer has had a long-term overall good experience or bad one, it will color the effect of the experience of last memory. Brush strokes color the pencil lines.  To put it in practical terms.

1. If I’ve had an ongoing excellent experience with the company and something bad occurs, I’m likely to forgive the problem or at least give it a lot of leeway without much impact on the long term as long as the problem is solved. If it isn’t solved, I’ll still be with the company
2. If I’ve had an ongoing average experience with the company, the issue is likely to carry more weight with my long term involvement than if #1 was in play. That means the problem better be solved or it will weaken my resolve to stay with the company.
3. If my ongoing experience has been poor, then the issue is likely to be the breaking point, even if resolved. Even if I stay, the slightest problem and I’m gone.

In other words same experience in the short term, very different outcomes due to the long term experience – which is the one that ultimately matters more.

Stuff I have going on

Just to keep you up to snuff and to get you going, some stuff I’m doing that I’d of course like your involvement with in some capacity;

1. CRM Idol 2013 – CRM Idol is now underway. We are evaluating the references of the contestants who, once again, represent multiple countries and regions.  We have nearly 80 extended judges representing influencers in the vendor, buyer, media and analyst world. We have those fascinating emerging tech companies that are willing to take a bit of risk to potentially be the breakout CRM company of 2013.  For more on this go to the CRM Idol site (duh.)
2. CRM Watchlist 2014 – Unlike CRM Idol, this is for any company that a. wants to take a shot at being recognized as an impact player; b. is willing to make an effort to do so; and c. wants me to track them in 2014.  The enrollment period is still open and will be right up to October 31, 2013. The submission period for the questionnaire is November 30, 2013.  If you are interested in contending, please send me an email requesting the CRM Watchlist 2014 questionnaire and in return you will a. get the questionnaire; b. get the 172pp CRM Watchlist 2013 Yearbook; c. start being tracked by me; d. be put in a Google+ group that will activate in the late summer some time and where I will be more than normally accessible. However, given how much I have to do, my expectation is that if you request the questionnaire you’re going to submit the questionnaire and not just do it as a ruse to have me track you. Please don’t disappoint me. My email is [email protected] if you want to be part of this. So far, I have 113 applications, well ahead of last year’s pace, which led to 173 requests and 153 submissions. I’d love to have you. The company size or state of being doesn’t matter. But be aware that this is an impact award and small companies without much of a history have a tough time winning. Though there are 4 or 5 each year that do – based on as much immediate potential as history.  Plus, if you enter, I do track you. If that means anything at all.
3. 3.    CRM Evolution, August 19-21 – As I hope you know, CRM Evolution, put on every year by InfoToday/CRM Magazine, has been the premier CRM conference – the one industry gathering where buyers, vendors, and influencers co-mingle in a given year.  The networking for varying purposes is outstanding and the content is good and the energy is always high.  I have had the honor of chairing it now for my fifth year and never, ever lose the excitement.  It’s a great place to be.  I’d love to meet you and if I already have, to see you again.  Come.  It’s in New York at the Marriott Marquis Hotel August 19-21.  
4. 4.    The 56 Group website - Truthfully, I haven’t ever really needed a website. I have been blessed with the good fortune of not having to really sell or work hard at promotion. But there are a lot of things I have always wanted to do that I haven’t been able to do because I haven’t had any place to “go” that was mine. I’ve been a nomad, residing on many other sites, getting friends to graciously allow me to squat on their land, letting me rest on their real estate for a little while as I continued my travels without any place to call my own.  However, that will be ending soon.  With the amazing work of DRI Global, one of my favorite CRM focused consulting firms (they are in Lisbon), I am getting very close to launching a site far too rich for one person but one that has a somewhat different purpose than the norm. I realized, as my nomadic life continued, that I don’t want a virtual house; I want to live in a skyscraper, a condo building with other people. So my website, built in Joomla (because I know how to use the administrative back end) will be a place where any person or organization that is the in the customer facing world will have a home. Among other things: It will have a community platform that will allow a CRMish person/company to have their own facilitated (by them) community on whatever topical area they want; Selected people will be able to have a microsite for selling their wares with their own catalog and payment system; there will be a loyalty program tied to my services and products with points awarded for not only buying stuff but for participation in the CRM industry and for being socially conscious and/or philanthropic.  The site will be able to aggregate content of all types – including videos, audio assets, slideshows, documents, links, you name it. There’s even the capability to take premium and free online courses – and I can write them from the back end of the site. So be ready. The site goes through a run through this week and then it’s a couple of months or more of populating it and then, welcome to your community, if you care to participate. If not, well, I tried.  If you are interested in hosting a community, let me know even starting now and let me know what it is going to be about. The rules are: follow the rules of the site and facilitate your own community. While it’s pretty open, I do have the right to reject it out of hand or shut it down. But I’m easy. I don’t know if it will work. There are some interesting questions that aren’t answered yet and won’t be until the communities start.  But all in all it should be fun.  Lots for you to do. Registered members of any community can accumulate points in the system for the loyalty program.  WAY more later but feel free to let me know you are interested in facilitating a community on something related to CRM now if you like. Contact me at [email protected].   
5. 5.    SEAT 2013 – I’m guessing that you never heard of the Sports Entertainment Alliance in Technology (SEAT) conference.  This is between 300-450 sports executives who gather annually to discuss how to optimize their use of technology in sports. It’s CIOs, CMOs, VPs, and Senior Directors of team after team, league after league, sport after sport. There is a substantial discussion of CRM (2.5 day track) and this year I have the distinct honor of being the subject of a keynote interview for the CRM track.  Russell Scibetti, one of the best CRM practitioners in sports (he’s the NY Jets guy) and one of my friends, will be the interviewer. I expect, since I love sports, it will be lively and fun.  Just wanted to tell you about it, because I think it’s really cool. 

 

My Boyfriend in the Cloud: Oracle’s Susie Penner Posts on The Cloud and…Relationships

PG Note: Susie Penner is arguably one of the most beloved people who ever met an analyst or influencer. A Director of Corporate Communications at Oracle, Susie is one of the best at her job, handling the independent analysts for Oracle focused around the applications side, especially CRM.  She is an amazing person, making sure that things get done that need to – a consummate professional and a warm human being that I’m proud to call a friend.

One thing she hasn’t done, until now, is write. But recently, she penned this piece, My Boyfriend in the Cloud, a whimsical, light-hearted yet excellent metaphor for looking at the cloud from her perspective – which should help a few of you understand the different nuances better.  As always, these opinions are hers, since I’m married I can’t even think about the cloud that way. Yvonne, my wife of almost 32 years, might not be too happy. But I do have to think about the cloud. So, let’s look at this charming approach to the contemporary software and services delivery.  I never thought “charming” and “software and services delivery” could be in the same sentence, but Susie did it.

Take it away Susie!

 

My Boyfriend in the Cloud

by Susie Penner

Oracle Corporate Communications

 

Yep, you read that correctly.

Being a divorced woman in her not so 30s with a high-tech career, I have come to a conclusion that choosing software deployment is much like dating the second time around. Let me walk you through my thinking here:

On-premise

Description - known as “the husband” or “permanent boyfriend”. He lives there all the time. He won’t leave unless you tell him to leave. Hardware maintenance, upgrade process. Live-in consultants – these are all requirements to get value out of this implementation.

Benefits

• Waking up to him every morning.
• Knowing he’s there for you when you want him (sometimes even when you don’t).
• Personal attention.
• Someone to take the trash out when you don’t want to do it yourself.
• Commitment – he’s made a personal investment in the partnership.

Challenges

• Dense up front training support (aka the honeymoon period).
• Painful upgrades.
• Live-in consultants.
• Not as flexible or dynamic, once it is installed changes are very difficult.

Hosted

Description – This is the guy who you know isn’t “the” man. This is the 29 year old “just for now” boyfriend. Low or no commitment. He sometimes lives even a state or coast away. Sometimes he’s married and you don’t know it. Sometimes he’s stupid and silly. But most of the time, he’s a good time. With 99.999% availability, also good to know he will be there when needed (mostly).

Benefits

• Convenient.
• Lightweight.
• Easy exit.
• Mostly available as needed or required.

Challenges

• Basic functionality, you may have met on an online dating site, an industry conference or at work.
• No real depth.
• No customizations, no training.
• Typically, his longest relationship doesn’t extend beyond the life of a tube of mascara.

Enterprise-Ready Cloud

Description – Designed to be simpler for the deliverer, but sold to the recipient. The “One”. He’s solid, he’s independent, grounded and reasonable. He understands your need for independence and balance. He’s there when you want him and not, when you don’t. He wants a partner, not a mother. There’s trust, strength and mutual respect in life in general. This is the guy who will come walk your dog and water your plants when you’re traveling. He’ll also draw you a hot bath while he watches a football game. He gives you space when you need it, but most of all he is an independent man.

[Caution: Be on the lookout for the red flags, he could be the guy who has two teenaged kids with a demanding ex-wife, he has two jobs to pay for alimony and child support (possibly your current baby daddy) and just tells you over coffee he wants to go back to school to become a doctor or a performance artist (as long as you’re there to support him in this journey.)]

Benefits

• Open dialogue.
• Realistic approach from the beginning.
• Scalable to something more or something less.
• He can be the creative type, up for almost anything.
• He can be an idealist, but not much a realist.

Challenges

• Rare.
• Slight tendency to be high maintenance, messy and complex if you aren’t careful.
• Require that you know yourself and not lying to your own face each and every day.
• The biggest inhibitor is ‘YOU”.
• You understand that it can’t be all easy or doesn’t have to be all hard.

Next up: End-user agreement…

(Special thanks to @ekolsky @MeganMurray for their edits and of course, the most supportive and kind person in this business @pgreenbe)

Truth In Advertising? How about Joy In Advertising?

This is an ad…for a bank.  As an ad, it is clever and straightforward and…an ad. It was done by the Banco Sabadell in Catalonia, Spain on its 130th anniversary.

But, for once, this transcends what it is and gets to a moment of actual human, inspired joy. Just watch the faces in this plaza in Catalonia outside the bank while 100 people from the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, the Lieder, Amics de l’Òpera and Coral Belles Arts choirs play and sing the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – the Ode to Joy. One of the greatest pieces of music that has ever been written. The connection of the crowd to the players and the music is a perfect expression of why we all should feel blessed that we are on this earth, that we owe it something and, that the human species is fundamentally good.

Watch it and you’ll understand why I am so utterly, unambiguously enchanted and happy to be alive.

 

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” truly lives up to its name.

Lessons from and for 21st Century Leaders

Last October, I had the honor of speaking at the 2012 Pivot Con, a conference hosted by my dear friend and key social influencer Brian Solis. This conference held annually, is an affordable laid-back event built around intellectual conversation, without some of the more recent attendant pretense of, say, TED. Its more of a social business, social world focused conference with a technology bent and as a result of that, I got to hear some amazing stuff, and meet some amazing people and greet some wonderful friends. It’s not too shabby a deal. This conference has been on my bucket list for a long time so when I was asked to speak, and the circumstances worked out that I could, I did it, entirely at my own expense. Which is something I NEVER do – except if you happen to be a bucket list event of mine. And a friend named Brian Solis asks me if I would speak.

In any case, my topic was “Leadership in a Social Age” and I got to do it with Stowe Boyd, an eminence grise of the social world (meaning he’s a baby boomer with some golden thinking on the subject). I had met Stowe at Enterprise 2.0 a couple of years back and we got along just famously. That camaraderie continued when we re-met at Pivot.

To prepare for our 20 minutes on Leadership in a Social Age, which kicked off the conference, Stowe and I conversed for a while on how we each viewed it and on our thinking on each other’s views, which coincided without being identical. For example he had this concept of the “post-normal” (see both just below and the video of our presentation below for a more concise definition) – and I didn’t.  I do know we were well received.

That discussion benefited me a great deal and has had me thinking ever since. So I’ve decided to publish some of what I said at the conference, what Stowe said at the conference, and what else I heard at the conference and what I’ve been thinking since the conference, simply because I think there is merit in it. At least for me, its been eye-opening and made me think beyond my customer-focused stage to a larger stage. If you watch the video and I hope that you do, you’ll realize that some of Stowe’s work is incorporated into this thinking, as are other things that we didn’t present or hear at the conference. You’ll also hear/see some of my more time honored concepts, but the context is a little different this time.

I’m not laying claim to any fabulously original thinking or breakthroughs on how to be a leader in the 21^st century. I’m aggregating some of the better thinking and putting it into context and giving it a rudimentary container – I don’t want to call it a framework – so that it can make some sense, in part or in all.

Here we go:

Reasons for the Change

1. For the last decade we have been engaged in a communications revolution – how we communicate has transformed – the devices we use, the expectations we have, the formats that now exist to communicate, who and how we trust.
2. Our ability to communicate in a much broader way and with more choice in how we communicate and the technologies that we use to do it have triggered a transformation in now we create, distribute and consume information.
3. The amount of information available to us is both growing and its value is shifting. We are at a stage where the velocity of the information is an important a characteristic as the volume. The value of the information is most often contextual and timely, not universal or generic.
   This leads to a demand for insight, because people are expecting much more from the individuals and the institutions they communicate with. They expect more individualized treatment and their behavior is geared to getting that when it comes to the interactions they have with those individuals and institutions.
4. The difficulty for those institutions is that this is being done on a scale never before seen. So, in effect, Citigroup’s 250 million customers are each expecting personalized treatment. They want to be addressed as individuals, not demographics. They feel, because they are communicating with peers who they perceive are like them, that they can because that’s how they view those peers – even when they don’t know the individual they communicate with via the devices and channels they have.
5. Thus, we are seeing one of those rare transformations of an era of human history. The digital era replaces the industrial era, which replaced the agricultural era. Technology becomes a driver almost as much as an enabler. IBM’s Institute for Business Value (IBV) in their 2012 Global CEO study: Leading Through Connections found that 71% of their 1700 respondents saw technological change as the most important external factor impacting their organizations for the next three to five years. That means IT of course, but also biotech, nanotech and other technologies that are disruptive to existing business models, organizational schemas, and operations. Social technologies also are top of mind. “The view that technology is a driver of efficiency is outdated; CEOs now see technology as an enabler of collaboration and relationships – those essential connections that fuel innovation and creativity.” This leads CEOs to see that the three most important areas for creating sustained economic value are (in order) human capital, customer relationships and products/services innovation. We are seeing the beginnings of more distributed organizations to handle these transformations.
6. Stowe Boyd calls this era post-normal which he defines as an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (for more watch the video below).
7. But even with all these changes, we haven’t seen the elimination of hierarchies in business nor will we. As long as companies are governed by public laws and regulations, there will be people who are responsible and accountable to see that their businesses are compliant with those laws. Also, while all humans are created equally, they don’t perform equally nor have the same specialties. Even Marx’s tenets acknowledged that not all are equal – “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” Capitalism as it has evolved has provided the opportunity to either embrace that positively or exploit that negatively.

Principles of Leadership

This digital era requires new qualities of leadership and new approaches to leadership because expectations have changed, as have behaviors.

The Leadership Perspective: “Stubborn on the Vision, Flexible on the Details”

From the standpoint of the longest view of a company, Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon says it best. The success of Amazon is due to the fact that Amazon has been “stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details.” This is a leadership perspective that is defined by both a profound idea on the direction and character of a company that is unbending, but at the same times retains flexibility because of the leader’s knowledge that the world and circumstances are always changing and require new and different approaches – though the long term outcome is never altered. This has been the hallmark of salesforce.com’s focus for well over a decade. They started with the idea that they were going to be the platform upon which all “your” business apps would be run. The changes in the world and circumstance dictated a change in the form that this would take i.e. a social business but the original vision never changed.

Customer Focused at all Levels

A.G. Lafley, the wildly successful now-retired CEO and Chairman of Procter and Gamble made a clear point that while there is a link between the inside and the outside, the results come from outside. So, a leader has to define what he called “the meaningful outside.” His mantra for that was “Consumer is Boss.” Twenty-first century leaders who are cognizant of the era that we are now in are aware that the customer both impacts and is impacted by business decisions and thus their conversations have to be around how that impact works in all domains of the business. The participation of the customer at multiple levels of the business is the mandate of those providing real leadership.

For example, Lafley created the structures at P&G that allowed customers to not only be an intimate part of the business processes of at the company but to co-market and co-create new initiatives with the company. He also required all aspects of the enterprise value chain of P&G to be “customer centered.” So for example, there were customer-centered supply chain KPIs such as pricing from the shelf back. There are customer communities such as VocalPoint, a community of connected alpha moms (each with a social network of other moms) that participated in P&G’s research. It has been so successful that is was spun off as a private company that now does the social research for many companies. There also is the Connect and Develop program for those customer and other innovators who wanted to collaborate with P&G on research issues and problems and even beyond that, there is FutureWorks (now called  P&G Corporate Platforms – a program for customers and others to co-create new initiatives, and if they are good enough, take them to market. That is what I mean by leadership that takes customer-focus to the core of business.

Value….and Values: Leadership Predicated on Mutuality

One of my mantras for the last nearly decade I’ve labeled the first law of CRM but it also reflects the approach of a 21^st century leader. It goes:

“Value and values are given and in return, value and values are received.”

What it means is that the basis for value for a company: revenues, profitability and pleasing the stockholder and the basis for value for customers - feeling valued, while the basis for value to a company and its customers, is not enough. A leader has to provide a set of values to the company that permeates everything it does at the primal level – imbued in the individual employee and “felt” by the individual customer.

Wichian Mektrarken, the CEO of AIS puts it this way – “its important for the employees to see the company’s values as a reflection of their own. Values are at the core of the social contract between the company and the employee” But in this post normal era, the values have to provide a foundational stability to the individual employees and customers in a time that is uncertain and volatile. In effect, the leader has to be the embodiment of those values and see that whatever infrastructure is needed to support those values is provided.

But so far, what I’m speaking about can be a content-empty vessel. Remember, the values have to be in response to the era that the company operates in. The lack of a value system at the company can be disastrous. The values need to reflect the requirements of the times.

For example, one of the most important components of 21^st century business – and one of the most talked about is transparency. We constantly hear and say that the customer is demanding transparency – which I’ve always defined as the providing enough information to make an intelligent decision on how someone wants to deal with an institution. But there is an inherent emotional aspect to this – doing this makes the company a trustworthy company – one that you are willing to deal with because you can trust them. Trust is the key currency for the 21^st century leader.

For example, Sandvik, an equipment manufacturer based in Sweden has been voted the most trusted company in Europe more than once. They are given that honor because they have something called the Power of Sandvik.

The Power of Sandvik is a value statement that is embedded into the deepest part of Sandvik’s DNA. It is not only a mission and vision statement, but it is a code of conduct and system of values that has specific operational and rules-based actions that are part of everything that Sandvik does for every single person who touches the company in any way, whether they are customers or not. At its most fundamental it is a leadership screed that says, we will be fundamentally visible to all persons and honest to a fault in all our dealings with anyone whatever. The leadership of Sandvik is driven by this and subject to it as well. So for example if you care to see what kind of money an executive is making and how they got to that – its available to you. Fundamental, straightforward transparency carried down through time by the leadership of the company and fairly distributed and openly available.

If you think this kind of credo and code don’t have a business benefit, think again. Sandvik has been one of the most profitable companies in Europe for years and during the midst of the recession, doubled their sales.

The role of leadership in this because it is such an important and mature part of the operations of the company is to in a way not only propagate this but enforce it.

Leaders have and create partners

There has been a well documented and certainly constantly intoned refrain about entrepreneurs – they are unable to give up any control of their businesses – and that is usually what prevents them from truly growing.

True leaders promote the concept and live the idea that employees, suppliers and customers are partners, not subordinates nor are they of a different species. Business leaders encourage collaboration among the disparate groups. Even more importantly to some extent, they empower employees to provide customers with answers and “things” they need, without having to deal with the chain of command and approvals process. They are trusted to to work with customers – regardless of what they do.

That means that employees can be empowered to make decisions on the spot in how customers get handled, nominate other employees for rewards, participate at some level in the discussions around strategic decisions etc.  For example, NASA treats its 18,000 employees as collaborators and allows them, through the use of internal collaboration tools, like wikis, etc. to participate in knowledge-sharing and decision making.  Here’s an excerpt from an IBM Institute for Business Value Case Study about NASA’s approach.

“NASA leverages wikis extensively to support and facilitate internal collaboration. Other internal collaboration tools include ExplorNET, which enables the creation of shared user profiles and launched 61 communities in its first 45 days of use. A Twitter-like tool for employee communication  has also been enthusiastically received. A growing number of mobile apps for NASA-only audiences are distributed centrally by the Center for Internal Mobile Applications (CIMA). By providing employees the means to collaborate at scale, NASA has made it easier to share success stories, locate expertise and increase productivity across the agency.”

They are talking about the tools but the tools are there to support the leadership decision to get that 18,000-strong collective brainpower involved in NASA’s continued evolution as an agency that serves the future of the United States. When your employees are your partners, they are imbued with the mission and the vision of the company because they feel as if they are part of it (get it? part-ner) not subordinate to it.

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That’s all for Part I. Part II will follow on the heels of this one. In that we’ll look at the idea of leaders of a lean open organization and what they do and what that means; adaptability in times of uncertainty; the willingness to take risks; what employee empowerment means; why hierarchical organizations in general aren’t going away, despite the occasional edge case – and why that doesn’t mean we are doomed to old forms of organization that can’t function – it’s a leadership question – and many other areas.

For now, you’ll have to live with this and watch this video of me and Stowe Boyd at PivotCon in New York in October.

Stowe Boyd and I Discussing Leadership in the 21st Century