Archive for the ‘General’ Category

My last post celebrated a family milestone – my daughter’s graduation.

As I left Miami after graduation, I immediately embarked on another milestone – my first trip to Vietnam.  In my new job, our team has an office in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).  Part of my team is in this office, so I’ve been eager to meet them all.  I’ve spoken to the team on the phone and over e-mail, but was ready to see them face to face.

The journey to Vietnam was awfully long, since I was coming from Miami (rather than from Seattle).  I flew from Miami to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City – a little over 26 hours of travel.  I was surprised to realize a quirk in my scheduling: the three flights had departure dates of May 11, May 12, and May 13!  The trip felt like I was in transit for three days, even though I wasn’t.

I arrived in HCMC on Monday morning and, after checking into my hotel and showering, went straight to the office.  I immediately felt the energy, warmth and excitement of the entire team and that continued throughout the week.  Each day was filled with lots of meetings, while the nights were busy having dinner and celebrating with various co-workers (which provided a great opportunity to get to know them a little better, outside of the office).

The team is preparing to move to a new office, on the 14^th floor of the REE Tower near the current office.  The highlight of the week, for the entire team, was on Friday – a mini-party in the new space.  For most of the team, this was the first opportunity to see the new office (although the build-out was not yet complete).

I was fortunate, throughout the week, than my boss, John, was with me on the trip. John has spent lots of time in Vietnam, so I never felt like an inexperienced foreign tourist.  Whether it involved deciding where to eat, avoiding getting cheated by unscrupulous taxi drivers, choosing where to get a massage, or knowing how to get around, John had it all under control.   [Yes, we went for a massage, not once, but twice.  For those of us coming from the U.S., it's remarkably inexpensive - each massage cost the equivalent of US$10.]  I had one day (Saturday) to set off on my own, for some sightseeing (which I’ll discuss in a future post).

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

My first trip to Vietnam was a big success.  I look forward to returning soon (and sharing the experience with my wife on some of my future trips).  

This week marked a major milestone in my life – my daughter graduated from college, earning a BFA in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami.  My wife and I are incredibly proud of her and her achievements, matching the pride we have for her older brother who also earned a BFA in Musical Theatre from U of M in 2009.

Events like this give an opportunity for reflection.  As our daughter moves onto the next stage of her life, so do her parents.  For the first time in eight years, we’re not the parents of a college student.  [And we’ll have no motivation to fly from Seattle to Miami multiple times per year!] More significantly, for the first time in more than twenty years, we’re not the parents of any student at all.  Both of our children are now officially “adults”, by any measure, although we’ll still support them emotionally (and in other ways, if they need it).

Much of our reflection centered on looking backward.  We’ve raised our children well (he says modestly).  Though they’re both talented and seem likely to be successful in their careers, those aren’t the most important traits.  They are kind, honest, respectful, and principled.  Their instructors, their peers, and their colleagues frequently praise them, consistently respect them, and genuinely like them.  Those are the characteristics that we acknowledge, as parents, with pride.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Being a parent provides the greatest pride I’ve ever felt, reveling in the accomplishments of my two children.  

I wrote this post for the SDL corporate blog, but liked it enough to post it here.

Social media usage in business is exploding, but it hasn’t yet provided a “magic bullet” to help companies use it to improve their results.  Companies struggle to jump from social media monitoring and listening to taking actions that improve their business.  Marketers try to glean nuggets to help them make decisions from a flood of data, but it’s a challenge.

 Marketers (along with politicians, public speakers, corporate presenters) have long known that audiences connect more with stories than with bulleted PowerPoint slides.  If you present a compelling narrative that people can understand and let them connect with it emotionally, they’ll be more receptive to your message.  This is true, whether you’re seeking votes, trying to persuade co-workers to embrace your proposal, or selling a product.  We connect with stories (a fact which is true at a biological level[1]).

 When it comes to gleaning insights from social media conversations, marketers should learn from their own craft, treating themselves as the audience.  Statistics aren’t enough.  The fact that there is an increase in number of tweets about my brand doesn’t help generate more revenue.  Seeing a declining trend of “content tone” in blog posts about my product doesn’t give any real insights into customers’ buying behavior.

How can a marketer go beyond “just data” and deliver stories with a narrative that resonates?  It’s more complicated than simple social media monitoring.  There are tools (including’s SDL’s Customer Commitment Framework, or CCF[2]), that provide real insights from social media conversations.  With more sophisticated analysis, social media content can be correlated to the stages of a customer journey.  In addition, audience segments can be identified, matching specific profiles of buying behavior.  This rich collection of information reaches beyond just listening to social media posts, allowing us to elicit the stories that match the experiences our customers (or prospective customers) are having.

The deeper insights might indicate that prospective customers learn about a new product, but struggle to get it working when they download a trial from the vendor’s website.  They might show that buzz and excitement were generated when a Memorial Day sale was announced.  They might demonstrate that the upgrade that seemed to generate lots of volume actually created a lot of frustration with ease of installation and with customer support.  In each of these cases, the story helps drive understanding and action.

What does this mean for marketing professionals?  Through the stories that are produced, Marketers can identify specific actions they will take.  Maybe they’ll target an advertising campaign at a specific segment of customers.  Maybe they’ll adjust their web presence, tweaking the pages that are presented to website visitors who are already customers.  Maybe they’ll invest in improved customer service tools.  Maybe they’ll offer discounts or run a sale, to attract cost-conscious buyers.

The important, valuable, difference is that they’ll be making these choices based on factual, reliable information – information that provided through a story.

This post continues a series discussing the handling of some major organizational changes at my company.

We had identified seven candidates for our managerial openings: five internal and two external.  We still were uncertain as to how many positions we were going to hire – at least two, possibly as many as four.

Our interview process for the internal candidates was a bit unusual.  We had five very strong employees interested in the positions.  We already knew we liked them, we knew they were good at their jobs, and we knew we wanted them on our team.  We recognized that we were immediately setting ourselves up to create disappointment for several of our strongest employees: each of them, naturally, hoped to get one of the new manager roles, but there weren’t enough roles to go around.

During the interviews, I made a point of discussing this openly and directly with each candidate.  I emphasized that the worst case outcome would be that they’d have a job they liked and were very good at, for a company that appreciated them.  Based on follow-up discussions with each candidate, that honest and candid approach was helpful.

Following the interviews, we had a “group debrief” meeting, with all six members of the interview team participating.  I like this approach and prefer it to the “have each interviewer send feedback to the hiring manager” method.  It allows each interviewer to hear and consider the pros and cons identified by the other interviewers.  It also allows for discussion of the priorities for the position and comparison of the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses against those priorities.

In this situation, the group debrief meeting also allowed us to determine how many positions we were filling.  We decided to add two managers, leaving ourselves the option to grow further as our team adds more headcount.

In the group meeting, we reached consensus fairly quickly.  One internal candidate and one external candidate stood out above all the others.  In addition, the other external candidate was deemed a good fit for our team, but not in a managerial role.  We decided to offer him a position as a Senior Consultant.

Next step: communicate the decisions, both to the candidates and to the rest of the team.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Proceed carefully when interviewing internal candidates for a new position.  You likely disappoint the candidates not chosen and you want to make sure you don’t alienate them in the process.

This post continues a series discussing the handling of some major organizational changes at my company.

We had determined that we needed new managers within the Consulting team.  Looking at the size of the team, we had determined that we needed at least two new managers and as many as four.  These positions would report to Rene, Director of Consulting.  We decided to search for those new managers openly, considering candidates from within the company and from outside.

Initially, we had considered identifying the most promising internal candidates (chosen from our project managers) and simply offering promotions to them.  However, we quickly realized that we wanted to better understand the strengths (and interest levels) of those candidates to make sure we made the best choices.

Together with our H.R. department, we drafted a job description for the new manager roles and posted that job description both internally and externally.  We weren’t surprised that there was quite a bit of interest within the existing team – five of our consultants and project managers applied for the job.  Meanwhile, the recruiters in H.R. identified about half a dozen strong candidates from outside the company.  After phone screening, those were narrowed to the two best candidates.

Our interview process is fairly traditional and, in my opinion, very effective and fair.  We create a loop of six interviewers, including people from multiple departments: Consulting (of course), Engineering, and H.R.  We want to ensure that we get a broad perspective of the candidates and that (especially for outside candidates) they get a good overall view of the company they’d be joining.

We organized all of the interviews to take place during one week in April.  Rene (whose home office is in Dallas) traveled to our corporate office near Seattle for the week.  We arranged for each of the candidates, both internal and external, to fly out for a day of interviewing.  Over the course of four days, we interviewed our seven candidates.  It was exhausting (for both the candidates and the interviewers), but it was important.

Next up: the interviews.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

When new positions are created, post them publicly and allow qualified internal candidates who are interested to apply and interview.

This post is the fourth in a series that I started at the end of May, discussing the handling of some major organizational changes at my company.

Once we had the interim organization in place, we assessed our situation for several months.  Our approach was very traditional, starting with taking a look at our current needs and the strengths of the team.  We tried to anticipate what our needs would be over the next twelve months.  Comparing the two, we wanted to get the most out of the existing team’s skills and identify holes we would need to fill.

There are two main components of the team – Managed Services and Consulting.  The Consulting team does implementations of our software products, along with custom report development and other consulting work.  Managed Services provides remote management of our customers’ environments.  The organizational decision for Managed Services was fairly easy.  The team has about a dozen people, all distributed around the world with multiple home offices in the U.S. in addition to India and the U.K.  We concluded that this team would not be changed.

The Consulting team was different.  Even before we started making changes, the management of this team was fairly thin.  We had two directors (Kelly and Rene) plus two managers – one with responsibility for the team in India and another managing a team in our office near St. Louis.  Everyone else on the team (about 20 consultants) reported directly to either Kelly or Rene.  We had temporarily moved Kelly’s team, but now we needed a long-term solution.

In addition, we decided that having several functions report directly to me wasn’t practical.  I still had all my Engineering responsibilities, as well as cross-functional demands (helping with sales opportunities, working  with HR and Marketing, coordinating with the other Engineering team, etc.).  Therefore, we needed to identify a “leader” for the entire Consulting Services team that would report to me.

Our conclusion:

• Expand the level of managers, reporting to the director level.  Previously, we had two; we decided to add at least two more.  We would look both within the company and outside the company for candidates.
• Consolidate that level of managers, along with our project managers, to report to Rene.
• Hire (from outside the company) a new General Manager of Consulting, to report to me.

Once we decided on that organizational structure, we “socialized” the idea within the team, looking for reactions.  We wanted people to get used to two key ideas: bringing in new management from the outside and promoting existing employees to management roles.  In the next several posts, I’ll explain how the team responded and how we accomplished both of those changes.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Gradual transition can be beneficial, as long as you make consistent progress and keep people informed.

This post continues a series that I started on May 29^th, discussing the handling of some major organizational changes at my company.

At about the same time that Jan announced her retirement, Kelly, one of the directors who reported to her, moved into a new role.  That left us with about a dozen people who needed to move to a new manager immediately.

Our initial hope was that we’d put The New Organization in place fairly quickly and move everyone just once, but it quickly became clear that we wouldn’t be able to do that.  As noted in the previous post, we had decided not to replace Jan immediately with a new VP.  Instead, we split the leadership responsibilities between two existing VPs within the organization.  We agreed that the Support team, which had moved temporarily under one of our Engineering functions, would stay there.  The rest of Jan’s team – Consulting, Managed Services, and Customer Training, would report to me.

With those decisions finalized, we needed an interim solution for the 12-person team that reported to Kelly.  As a temporary fix, we moved Kelly’s team to report directly to Jan.  Was this optimal?  No, for two main reasons.  First, Jan already had a full plate of responsibilities and this added more to that burden at exactly the time that we wanted to begin gradually ramping down her responsibilities.  Second, it guaranteed that we would have to move all of those people to a new manager at least once again (since reporting to Jan was not the long term plan).

However, although it wasn’t optimal, it was far better than leaving Kelly’s team in limbo.  We wanted to make sure each individual had a manager even in the midst of our corporate transformation.  We clearly communicated to everyone that this solution (reporting directly to Jan) was temporary and that more changes would be coming.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Even though a temporary reporting structure isn’t ideal, it’s far better than having no structure at all (even temporarily).

I haven’t posted here for about six months, in large part due to some new career responsibilities that I plan to discuss in the next several upcoming posts.

Last fall, one of my colleagues, Jan, announced her upcoming retirement.  She’s been the VP of Professional Services for our company for more than ten years, so her departure leaves a big gap to fill.  Our CEO decided that, rather than directly replacing Jan with a new VP, we would split her organization between two of the existing executives.  With that change, I took on the responsibility for our consulting department – a team of almost fifty employees.

Jan’s announcement gave us plenty of time for an orderly, thoughtful transition.  Her retirement is effective at the end of June, so we’ve been working through the organizational changes over the past six months.  The changes are nearly complete and, for the most part, I think we’ve handled the process very effectively.

Through the entire process, we worked to ensure that we communicated effectively and appropriately to employees – those in the consulting team who are directly affected as well as those in the rest of the company, all of whom are indirectly impacted by these changes.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll write a series of posts describing the challenges we faced, the options we considered, the choices we made, and the new organization we’ve created.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Major organization changes provide both risk and opportunity.  The challenge is to minimize the former and maximize the latter.

What is a ‘Celebrity CEO’?  When I use the term, I mean “business CEOs whose names are widely known to the general population.”

In my last post, I observed that (at least today, at the largest American-based companies) celebrity CEOs seem to be more prevalent among high-tech companies.  Is there something about high-tech that makes it fertile ground for celebrity CEOs?  I think there is, but it’s more a matter of timing (and today’s business climate) than something inherent in technology companies.

The most obvious class of celebrity CEOs is the Visionary Founder.  Generally, these are people who, through their innovations, have transformed an industry (or created one).  In many cases, their transformations have been much broader.  Following are the famous CEOs people think of in this class:

• Bill Gates – Microsoft
• Steve Jobs – Apple
• Jeff Bezos – Amazon
• Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

Looking back to the list I posted last time, a few of the high-tech CEOs on that list also fit the Visionary Founder description:

• Michael Dell – Dell
• Larry Ellison – Oracle
• Larry Page – Google

I think the Visionary Founder is most often seen in industries that are new or are evolving quickly.  When new companies grow explosively from humble beginnings to huge influence, their founders often become the face of that new sector.  That’s true of high-tech today and has been true for several decades.  The earliest examples included William Hewlett and David Packard, founders of Hewlett-Packard. 

That kind of growth is less common in other sectors today.  However, looking back 100 years or more, we see that a similar pattern of Visionary Founders in the emerging industries of those days:

• Andrew Carnegie – Carnegie Steel Company
• Henry Ford – Ford Motor Company
• Conrad Hilton – Hilton Hotels
• J.P. Morgan – J. P. Morgan and Company
• John D Rockefeller – Standard Oil

We can find similar examples from the second half of the 20^th century:

• Mary Kay Ash – Mary Kay Cosmetics
• Ray Kroc – McDonalds
• Ralph Lauren – Polo and Ralph Lauren
• Ted Turner – CNN
• Sam Walton – Wal-Mart

Today’s celebrity CEOs aren’t isolated to new business sectors.  We’ve seen quite a few others in recent years:

• Giorgio Armani – Armani
• Howard Schultz – Starbucks
• Phil Knight – Nike
• Richard Branson – Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways and dozens of others
• Oprah Winfrey – Harpo Productions and Oprah Winfrey Network

All of these CEOs founded and built companies that transformed their industries.  Next time, we’ll explore some of the other “categories” of celebrity CEOs.

For now… I’ll leave you with this thought:
 
Visionary Founders can become famous as their companies grow. 

That’s common (but not limited to) in emerging industries, which is why we see so many today in high-technology companies.

Do you know who these people are?  I consider myself fairly well-read about business, but (without getting help) I could only identify the blue ones.

1. Michael T. Duke
2. Rex W. Tillerson
3. John S. Watson
4. James J. Mulva
5. Michael J. Williams
6. Jeffrey R. Immelt
7. Warren E. Buffett
8. Daniel F. Akerson
9. Brian T. Moynihan
10. Alan R. Mulally
11. Meg Whitman
12. Randall L. Stephenson
13. James Dimon
14. Vikram S. Pandit
15. John H. Hammergren
16. Ivan G. Seidenberg
17. Robert H. Benmosche
18. Samuel J. Palmisano
19. George S. Barrett
20. Charles E. Haldeman Jr.

How about this list?  Again, the ones I knew are highlighted in blue:

1. Meg Whitman
2. Sam Palmisano
3. Michael Dell
4. Steve Ballmer
5. Tim Cook
6. John Chambers
7. Paul Otellini
8. Greg Brown / Sanjay Jha
9. Larry Ellison
10. Larry Page

The first list shows the CEOs of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies.

The second list shows the CEOs of the ten largest U.S.-based technology companies (ranked by 2009 revenue).

I recognized 80% of the second list, but only 25% of the first list.  Why is that?  Are Celebrity CEOs more prevalent in the technology industry?  Are there other factors involved?

I’ll explore possible explanations in my next post.

For now… I’ll leave you with this thought:

Celebrity CEOs seem to be more common for technology companies.

Here are the complete lists, with company names.

1. Michael T. Duke – WalMart
2. Rex W. Tillerson – Exxon Mobil
3. John S. Watson – Chevron
4. James J. Mulva – Conoco Philips
5. Michael J. Williams – Fannie Mae
6. Jeffrey R. Immelt – GE
7. Warren E. Buffett – Berkshire Hathaway
8. Daniel F. Akerson – General Motors
9. Brian T. Moynihan – Bank of America
10. Alan R. Mulally – Ford
11. Meg Whitman – Hewlett Packard
12. Randall L. Stephenson – AT&T
13. James Dimon – J.P. Morgan Chase
14. Vikram S. Pandit – Citibank
15. John H. Hammergren – McKesson
16. Ivan G. Seidenberg – Verizon
17. Robert H. Benmosche – AIG
18. Samuel J. Palmisano – IBM
19. George S. Barrett – Cardinal Health
20. Charles E. Haldeman Jr. – Freddie Mac

1. Meg Whitman – Hewlett Packard
2. Sam Palmisano – IBM
3. Michael Dell – Dell
4. Steve Ballmer – Microsoft
5. Tim Cook  – Apple
6. John Chambers – Cisco
7. Paul Otellini – Intel
8. Greg Brown / Sanjay Jha – Motorola
9. Larry Ellison – Oracle
10. Larry Page – Google