March 2009 – Stephen Shu, PhD

March 25, 2009

If I Was A Brand (Marketing Collage)

When one is thinking about developing a brand identity from a marketing perspective, it is best to think broadly so that a cohesive system and set of principles are built to support the underlying cause. Dr. David Aaker (e.g., in his book "Building Strong Brands") puts forth a system that challenges practitioners to decompose the way they think about brand identity (both core and extended) along several dimensions, including "Brand as a Product", "Brand as an Organization", "Brand as a Person", and "Brand as a Symbol".

Although I leave the terms above undefined here (because they are defined more rigorously in Dr. Aaker's book), it is a useful exercise in some marketing and brand management classes to have students build a collage as if "they were a brand" by clipping pictures from magazines. The visual imagery is intended to connote some aspects of your core brand identity (some of your "essence") along multiple dimensions (e.g., quality, personality, attributes, skills).

Here's an example that I pieced together for myself (note: first draft, essentially unreviewed). What do you see? What does it tell you about how I see myself? If you know me, does it fit with what you know about me? What consistencies or inconsistencies do you see?

March 18, 2009

Corporations Are Learning About Social Media Faster

A lot of people in Twitter circles characterize that twittering feels like the days of early majority blogging, for me circa 2004ish with an even less mature toolset (I am being generous). With respect to business use, it seems like everyone needed more help back then, as not everyone came out of the gate running. Here Dave Sify summarized the state of the corporate blogosphere in 2004. How few the companies were. Later at the beginning of 2006 and indicative of a forthcoming early majority, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel were motivated to publish their book, "Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk With Customers. Well, it's 2009 now, and we're in a large recession. But it seems like businesses are smarter this time around in the use of social media like Twitter. I recently ran across an article on Corporate Twitter Accounts worth following. Seems like we skipped the whole convincing phase this time around. Much less of the skeptical talk time this time around.

Kudos to those companies that are able to build brand, improve customer service, and potentially lower costs (latter less widely known) using Twitter. How often is it that companies are able to get marketing and customer service to sync up, let alone talk? It seems that we are making progress, even if it means we'll all have to learn the best practices of communicating in 140 characters or less.

Update (3/20/09): Not business-centric, but here's an article that indicate social networks more popular than email (see CNET article regarding Nielsen Online study)? Not sure how this was measured, but I don't think it is intuitively true for me, even though I consider myself a moderate blogger.

Update (3/23/09): Steve Rubel has a good post entitled, "Customer Service is the New PR". I like his post because it ties together some of the concrete stuff going on in the social media space (along with references to some of the more esoteric, forward-looking items).

March 16, 2009

A Damning Exhibit Concerning MBAs and Business Schools

Nail in the coffin. Perhaps not, but I'd have to agree it's a bad case. The New York Times portrays a tough canvas of MBAs and their responsibilty in the economic crises in the article entitled, "Is It Time to Retrain Business Schools?". The article starts off:

JOHN Thain has one. So do Richard Fuld, Stanley O’Neal and Vikram Pandit. For that matter, so does John Paulson, the hedge fund kingpin.

Yes, all five have fat bank accounts, even now, and all have made their share of headlines. But these current and former giants of finance also are all card-carrying M.B.A.’s.

Couple of interesting points which I had not seen before and probably should be thought out further:

The notion of professionalization and stewardship
The emphasis on shareholder value as an underpinning to finance, entrepreneurship, etc. instruction

But I also have some off-the-cuff thoughts (* indicates based on the Organizational Behavior 4th Edition text [2008] by Dr. Steven McShane and Dr. Mary Ann Von Glinow):

Which investors or Boards reward something other than shareholder value? Are these groups in a minority?
Although socially responsible companies have been brought to light over the past decade or so, do they get widely-known, superior returns? Do youth and business people value them? Do kids (or adults) worship Bill Gates as part of Microsoft or as part of the Gates Foundation more? Where is the balance?
In most surveys, when asked about the most important characteristic employees look for in a leader, most say honesty and ethics (*). What does that say about our ability to hire qualified managers and executives then?
95% of the Fortune 500 companies in the US have codes of ethics (*). Enron also had a well-developed code (*).
Is it that business school students are neither trained in risk management nor tragedy of the commons systems structures? Or is it that personal performance plans and reward structures do not align? Other?

If the problems stem from business-, company-, or world-cultures, then how will we get educated and make amends?

March 15, 2009

An Example of Consulting Engagement Workstreams

The term "workstream" is often used in consulting, but offhand I cannot think about where it is defined for new consultants to reference. A workstream is not a fancy concept, yet it is an important construct that often has ties to consulting proposals, engagement management and division of labor, and processes used with the client. Note that not all consulting firms will characterize workstreams the same way that I describe them here, but I have found similar structures used in a number of consulting organizations that I have worked with.

What is a workstream, and where does it fit in the context of a consulting engagement? Let's start with the latter question first.

A consulting engagement is often framed around solving a specific problem statement for a client. In a prior post on articulating problems statements, I hinted that a consulting problem statement usually must be decomposed into smaller problems statements.

To answer these problems statements, the consultants usually need to put together a set of engagement activities that provide the frame for answering the overaching problem statement and subproblem statements. Engagement activities are often grouped together in coarse groupings often running in parallel. These coarse groupings are called "workstreams", and each workstream often has prime consultant and prime client point. The structure is pretty much in line with standard project management practices, but key adds from a consulting perspective are the problem statement and consultant-client touch points. See the figure below which has four workstreams covering strategy, technology, finance, and business plan development.

As additional context, the problem statement for the above engagement was to help the client develop a business strategy and plan for entering the market as a new entrant in the wireless network and applications provider space. So as an example, the first (top) workstream is geared towards helping the client determine what business model and applications should be investigated in more detail by brainstorming on services and looking at the competitive envionment for plausible and defensible openings.

To close off this post, I think that it's important to note that the cadence and regular review structure with the client (e.g., see milestones at bottom of figure above relative to workstreams) are important processes. See my prior post illustrating why in consulting the process is an essential part of the deliverable. Readers may also want to refer to an earlier post I had on engagement managers (who own the entire set of workstream above) and the essence of management consulting.

March 12, 2009

100 Best Blogs for MBA Students

Kelly points me to a list of blogs for MBAs. There's a mixture of new ones and older ones in the list (looks like this blog just made it on the page at #100). I'll have to check out the list (and add a few to my newsreader) as my involvement with various business school communities has been increasing as of late.

March 10, 2009

Leadership Is Innate (Part 2?)

Three years ago I wrote a post entitled "Leadership Is An Innate Skill?". In that post, I essentially avoided the core topic (because I didn't have an opinion), but I made some anecdotal points about how one could foster one's leadership style (which I thought was a more important point). My views on leadership haven't changed fundamentally since my original post in that I believe that some leadership skills can be learned, there are many different leadership styles, and contextual and organizational items play a role (e.g., can influence one to diverge from one's own leadership style or enhance it).

That said, reader Tom Hartly has brought to my attention a new book entitled, "Leadership Is Innate". I've not read the book, but one can peruse a bit online and figure out which side of the coin is being argued. The description reads:

Top CEOs will tell you that leadership traits come as "part of the package" and "can't really be taught". Scientists have recently begun to discover how genetic differences contribute to key leadership skills.

March 5, 2009

Anecdotes on Consulting Versus Interim Management

Whether to use consultants versus interim managers can be a bit of a loaded topic, and I'll choose not to address every angle in one post. Here I will just scratch the surface and paint some color by relating some anecdotal experiences. Depending on interest level, I may follow-up this post with additional discussion at a broader level.

To set the context, here's a couple of working definitions that I'll offer up:

Consulting – use of a third-party (potentially a team) to help a company solve a particular business problem (for example, evaluate business opportunity for offering mobility applications to consumers, provide an independent assessment of a failing call center)
Interim Management – use of one or more experienced individuals to take or play the role of a manager or executive within the company (for a limited period of time or trial period).

Now my deeper attention to the term "interim management" first started when I worked back in the 90s at the management consulting firm, PRTM. As context for those not familiar with PRTM, I characterized PRTM (back then at least) as firm that balanced strategy and operations engagements. As such, the firm got involved with both early strategic planning and later-phase, tactical design of business capabilities. At risk of oversimplifying, PRTM consultants were not just pure strategy guys, but they were often people with actual implementation and management experience. There used to be a firm motto that floated around to the effect of, "Results, Not Reports". This motto was essentially a shot at strategy firm practices of delivering stacks of analyses and reports that never had an impact. One of the partners (who had just rolled off an assignment as interim CEO) described to me his view on interim management something to the effect as follows, "Interim management is something [infrequent] that the firm only does for special clients. Unless approached correctly interim management can create a dependency between the firm consultant and the client that is hard to wean the parties off of. But interim management can offer a variety of benefits, particularly when a company wants to move forward with operational execution immediately."

Since then, here's a few examples I've heard from clients over the years which are indicative of a lean more towards use of interim management over consulting approaches:

"We don't have the management skill set internally, and we need to fill three management roles in finance, services, and technology pretty immediately while introducing more sophisticated practices that can be transferred to the larger organization as we grow."
"We are exploring this new geography for our products and services, and we need someone to help us as a general executive (covering all entity and operational requirements) to see if we can get things to pan out."
"Our marketing VP will be going out on parental leave, and we need someone to fill the role for six- to nine-months."
"We need someone that can fulfill the corporate development function with total dedication, but we need the option to release this person once we have met the objective of securing a beachhead in the North America enterprise market."