One technique that I tend to use a lot in management meetings and consulting engagements involves the use of two slide types. The purpose of these slides is often to help the management team get aligned and make a critical decision about some set of issues.
The first slide I call the "Seeding" slide. The second slide I call the "Facilitating" slide.
The objectives of the "Seeding" slide are to articulate the general problem statement area and enable the management team to voice issues on specific areas within that vicinity. Note that in these situations, the exact problem statement may not be known or agreed upon. As such, it is often useful to research and include some frameworks or metaphors on the seeding slide that enable the management team to "warm up" and express issues from multiple perspectives.
The objectives of the "Facilitating" slide are to help the management team move forward and begin the dialogue of exploring potential solutions to the problem at hand. Is is often helpful to do some research on answers that can help seed the solution-exploration process. Research can take the form of best practices, case studies, academic solutions, etc. The meeting lead must work hard to apply their best facilitation skills on this slide – when to use open-ended questioning, when to analyze, and when to steer to closure require good judgment calls.
The pictures below are examples what "Seeding" and "Facilitating" slides might look like. The case below involves understanding and facilitating analysis of how two product development practices (within a merged software company) might be better integrated.
What challenges do have in facilitating management meetings and decision-making? How do you address such situations?
The introduction of new product or service lines into an existing customer base is a challenge that companies often face with new business development. Sometimes the opportunities can be readily quantified using traditional financial analysis (e.g., using net present value, scenario, and waterfall buildup methods). At other times, there may be hazards of trying to quantify an opportunity too early in the process before conceptual alignment of the stakeholders. For example, people can simply get stuck “in the weeds with the numbers”.
In this post, I share a method that I have sometimes found useful as a first step in framing and getting alignment among parties (especially when looking at new product development situations involving platforms upon which multiple products or product lines can be built). To be honest, I am not sure if there is a name for the type of chart I describe below, but I call it a “frontier chart” (which is derived from investment portfolio theory from finance).
The basic idea is that there are a set of lower risk projects out on the left side of the chart which have more known (potentially lower) expected returns. In contrast, projects on the right side might have higher risks but also higher, expected returns. So as an example of a project on the left side, a software company may have early customer engagements with a straightforward, add-on product that it directly developed (say a GPS mapping tool). As an example of a project on the right side, that same software company may be looking to introduce new platform capabilities such that indirect, 3rd parties can develop applications (e.g., Apple’s “there’s an app for that”). The later project venture is more risky, but the payoff could be larger than the former project.
A key benefit of using a frontier chart is that it can help to get buy-in on the high-level things and projects that people tend to agree with. There will be plenty of time later to put on our “propeller hats” and get bogged down in detailed numbers and execution tactics.
The ability to facilitate a company’s management team to move forward is priceless, and sometimes facilitation can be more difficult when introducing new products or services (which is outside of the core, day-to-day business). Consider using frontier charts and thinking about platform strategies (the latter which may be topic for another post).
In the past year I ran into a situation (mid-project in the capacity as an independent consultant) where the client was incorporating materials from my deliverables plus information from one of the major, worldwide strategy consulting firms that was also working in the same area as I was. In this case, I think it was beneficial because it is a high-stakes strategy area which requires mutiple perspectives, innovation, and cross-checking.
Yet it made me recall some other situations where other consulting firms had been used in closely-related or overlapping areas. Highlight memories include:
Bringing in a partner consulting firm to round out industry-specific knowledge to complement our functional knowledge expertise
Having an internal consulting group monitoring the progress of a larger, external consulting firm
Having an adjacent room on the client site to a "competing" consulting firm
Getting the consulting firms to work out and remove overlapping work areas by request of the CEO
Having the consulting groups to exchange, provide feedback, and critique the other firm's deliverables and engagement progress
Setting up the upstream consulting firm (e.g., strategy) to complement that downstream consulting firm (e.g., IT implementation)
Although there are many trends by companies to try reduce the number of suppliers (even in the professional services area), there are benefits of using multiple consultants. Some tradeoffs and considerations:
Getting the consultants to cooperate
Inefficiency created by overlapping work
Benefits by factoring in best perspectives from each firm (similar to the way some of the most innovative firms use a larger network design architects to feed ideas)
Keeping each of the consulting teams on their toes
What are your experiences and thoughts about using multiple, management consultants and/or consulting firms?
Competitive intelligence (CI) is an activity done by a wide range of professionals ranging from marketers to product managers to consultants to strategic planners. Now I’ve held back for many years on posting on the subject of conducting CI ethically. I tend to be more on the conservative side, and by posting my thoughts on this subject publicly, I’ve had concerns that some clients and future employers would see me as too soft on the issue. Would a client shy away from hiring me because I was unwilling to go the “distance” to get a job done?
In spite of my concerns, I’ve decided to address the issue here. In my experience with the business world, I’ve seen the topic of ethics (in the context of CI) discussed much less frequently than I would have expected, and that should change. Here I’ll provide some examples of bread and butter methods and more infrequently used methods for conducting CI. People should feel free to comment on other methods they have used. I’ll also provide some examples of activities that I either think are questionable or outright unethical.
Here are some examples of ethical, secondary research methods for performing CI:
Pulling annual reports and shareholder presentations on competitors from the web
Analyzing securities and exchange commission (SEC) filings and financial statements
Gathering marketing collateral information from trade show booths of competitors
Obtaining industry reports from investment banks and/or financial institutions
Reverse engineering the positioning focus of competitors from marketing collateral
Searching through LinkedIn to analyze salesforce profiles and reverse engineer likely go-to-market methods
Analyzing resumes of employees of competitor
Using Google satellite to analyze geographic profile and size of competitor facilities
Using Crunchbase or Techcrunch to analyze private companies
Using Compete, Alexa, and other web services to analyze web traffic
Analyzing advertising copy and positioning
Purchasing third-party reports (e.g., Gartner, Forrester, Parks Associates) to round out research
Looking through job postings by the company on the web
Here are some examples of ethical, primary research methods for performing CI:
Interviewing a distributor that has experience with competitors and asking questions whether client’s proposed offer would be competitive
Asking distributor to describe any non-confidential information that they would be comfortable sharing about either the competitor or distributor’s relationship with competitor
Visiting retail outlets of competitor to infer go-to-market methods, assess general profile of locations, etc.
Directly purchasing a competitor’s service or product
Surveying salespeople within client organization to get their feedback on what they’ve run into with respect to selling against the competition
Conducting focus groups with general customers to get their feedback on competitor’s products versus the client’s prospective offerings
Obtaining general information by calling into a competitor’s call center
Finally, here are some examples of questionable or unethical methods of performing CI (and these topics come up somewhat frequently in my experience):
Misrepresenting oneself as a potential customer of competitor in order to get pricing information not made generally public
Asking a current distributor or employee of competitor to share proprietary information about competitors and violate non-disclosure agreements
Interviewing a competitor’s employees for the sole purpose of gathering competitive information as opposed to intending to consider such people for direct hire
One problem that I see organizations run into is that they can get focused on one single issue. For example, they may say “I must know exactly how competitor XYZ is pricing”. This type of logic can be dangerous because it tends to lead to one solution. It may also tempt one to try to take unethical shortcuts. If the problem statement is reframed around “getting a better picture of whether my client’s market offer is competitive”, then this can lead to more flexible and varieties of solutions. Tools like conducting customer focus groups, surveying salespeople, etc. then become possibilities for solving the real problem at hand.
As a closing note, in a framework I alluded to in a prior post, one way to think about activities are to classify them in two dimensions: (ethical – unethical) & (legal-illegal). The other framework that I use for weighing ethical issues is to determine how I would feel if my activities were plastered all over major press outlets. Would I be embarrassed by my team’s or my personal activities? Posing that type of question is often a nice litmus test for good behavior.
One of the projects I have been working on recently with a partner involves helping an incumbent software vendor explore new business opportunities and facilitating strategy direction with the leadership team. The project involves research & planning with culmination of a key phase being a go/no-go and a commitment of money for development. Innovation and business development engagements can be tricky to facilitate due to the cast of characters and specific nature of innovation problems, so I wanted to share some experiences with facilitating these types of situations.
First, here are some examples on how these projects can die out (e.g., before getting funded):
Innovation is more radical and not incremental, and the primary decision-maker needs "numbers" as a first step to prove out the case for innovation (too much analytical, left brain early on)
The team is diverse but cannot effectively develop a set of innovative solutions that range from incremental to more innovative (on either or both dimensions of technology and end-user meaning and associations)
If the team can develop a range of solutions, the method of managing the portfolio is ineffective or mismatched with the type of innovation area (e.g., incremental innovation areas not researched in enough detail versus radical innovation areas not given enough breathing room)
The method for more fully developing the innovation solution does not balance (based on the type of innovation) gathering information from current end-users versus a larger, ecosystem of industry players and participants beyond end-users
So we have the following as potential backdrop: a mix of left-brains and right-brains and a diverse team that may address primarily incremental innovations but that recognizes the need for more radical, game-changing innovations. Wherein lies the risk tolerance of the leadership team, we cannot yet articulate in concrete terms. Yet the goal is to get everyone on the same page and committed.
A common method of attack that I use for facilitating these types of engagements is to work from common ground to more specific ground and from right-brain (creative) appeal to left-brain (analytical) appeal and then back to teamwork. So the storyboard presentation for getting on the same page with respect to an innovation project may be:
Review industry trends (facilitation strategy: developcommon ground)
Get on the table the high-level, company situation (e.g., via strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats -> SWOT matrix) (facilitation strategy: develop common ground)
Portray the potential innovation projects on a canvas that shows the current situation versus the potential future (facilitation strategy: develop common ground, but more targeted to right-brain)
Portray the innovation projects on a conceptual frontier of risks versus returns (e.g., like here), sort of like an investment portfolio (facilitation strategy: develop common ground with segueway to left-brain)
Provide deeper-dive summaries (e.g., ROIs where possible or at some more numeric info if that's all that can be done) on specific projects (facilitation strategy: develop more targeted to left-brains but provide offshoot points for open discussion with right-brains)
Provide summary on the roadmap for tying everything together, identifying unknowns and open issues, and providing governance for individual innovation projects (facilitation strategy: develop trajectory for people to start working together before passing judgment on all projects)
In a prior post, I talked about the importance of articulating and rearticulating problem statements. That principle still applies, but in many strategy projects, there's also an element of facilitating a diverse set of people that cut across left- and right-brain problems. As consultants and managers, we need to think about that aspect as well.
I don't often point to comments in other blogs, but Ian Brodie shares some good perspectives on consultants using Twitter (link). It is worth a read if you are a professional consultant and trying to update your perspectives on Twitter usage. I'd agree with a lot of Ian's writeup with two adds for me that Twitter allows me to 1) interact with a wide demographic of people, and 2) experiment with ideas more frequently (albeit more limited) than other social media mechanisms. There is also perceived lower risk given the transitory nature of tweets. Characterizing it from a somewhat different angle, for me Twitter is more about exploration as opposed to exploitation.
Earlier this year I had heard from sources at various business schools that given the recession and slower consulting and investment banking hiring, a lot of MBA graduates were looking to careers in business development. This is a great development, but in my experience the term "business development" means quite different things to different people. Here's a paraphrasing of some of the types of statements I've heard in the workplace:
"Business development is about new customer acquisition and sales."
"Sales personnel are divided into existing accounts and hunters. Business development looks for breakthrough, strategic sales."
"Business development handles strategic partnerships & deals."
"Channel sales are the primary focus of the business development team."
"The VP of Business Development works financing, acquisition, and strategy activities."
"Business development establishes the cross-promotional marketing deals."
"Business development focuses on strategic initiatives (whether partnership, financing, product) identified by the Board."
"The business development team is facilitating design of a new product with XYZ company and our development team."
"Business development sells product to the channel."
"Oh. You handle a mixture of finance, marketing & sales, strategy functions. You're business development."
"Business development folks are jacks of many different trades."
"Business development is about getting larger partners to commercialize on brand extensions that you may not be able to handle on your own."
"The sales team does that. You want to know what business development does? We need to talk about that in my office. Come on in, and please shut the door so we can have some privacy."
There is an element of truth in all of these statements. Business development can be all of these things. It really depends on company. In my mind, however, the role of business development is to find new strategic opportunities for the company and start the company on the path to execute (incubation). It is not uncommon for business developers to have a combination of strategy, marketing & sales, finance, legal, and operations background.
Based on my experience in business development, here's the flavors I've run into (roughly from more to less common):
Partnership development
Strategic market development and sales
Strategic marketing
Mergers, acquisitions, and financing
New business line exploration
Channel sales
New product development
What are your experiences with business development professionals? To what extent is it a well-defined function within your business? What types of issues have you run into?
Recently I found myself describing (in somewhat abstract terms) how a particular consulting engagement should come together. The upshot of my argument was that given a particular statement of work, there are a number of "ways to skin a cat" and get an engagement team to gel. In this particular case, my feeling was that an engagement approach would be equally valid if the team shifted the basis of consulting towards one of the three prototypes I describe below (even if it meant shifting away from another). The three prototypical styles of consulting are the following:
Research-centric consulting– Key, detailed frameworks from brand management, business strategy, pricing, statistics, finance, etc. often form the backbone of the approach, and the consulting team can piece together a storyboard that tees up hypotheses, finds supporting or disconfirming evidence, and builds a case towards strategic options and recommendations. In this type of consulting, domain and industry expertise are somewhat less critical because a structured problem solving methodology underpins the approach. In terms of situational use as a pure style of consulting, this type of consulting may be prevalent in cases where a client lacks a rigorous approach or in cases where new businesses are being explored but where there are few role models.
Expertise-centric consulting – In this type of consulting, a consultant brings to the table either or both domain and industry knowledge. For example, has the consultant helped to launch a mobile virtual operator before? Or does the consultant specialize in an expertise niche such as optimizing cross-media spending for mega brands using econometric approaches? Or has a consultant worked in brand litigation and expert witness cases related to marketing? Can the consultant bring forth an engagement structure that has been tested before in another situation?
Facilitative consulting – In this style, the consultant brings value to the table by bringing personal experiences and skills to the table. The consultant may also bring third-party perspectives which also add value. But the real value is in weaving together the consulting team and client team to solve the customer problem statement. For example, the consultant may conduct client interviews with separate functional groups within the client organization and with client customers. The consultant then organizes and normalizes information from the various interviews and develops strategic options and skeleton structures that can be used in iterative client meetings to refine & finalize strategy (e.g., by tapping into client expertise and having the consultant help with any subsequent research, analysis, and support). In my mind, the facilitative approach is akin to combining the skills of a general manager with a project manager. For more on the facilitative approach, please see a prior post of mine here.
The prototypical styles of consulting that I describe above are not mutually exclusive. Often engagements will have multiple aspects, although I've seen valuable engagements that are more pure within one prototype. I think that many consultants, general managers, and project manager types could benefit by understanding the consulting prototypes better. In some sense, they are like the primary colors for setting the tone and custom mixing a consulting engagement.
