Erik T. Ford

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Great piece from the Harvard Business Review.  A strong balance between leadership and business savvy proves to be a consistent trait in successful top management. I especially find enjoyment in the reference to dreamers like Steve Jobs, Francis Ford Coppola and the likes. Their ability to strongly balance essential details with strong vision and aspirations propel them to be great. There’s no question that the passionate wisdom for the complexities of their respective industries coupled with the hearts of lions set these guys apart.

As the adage goes, “Leaders manage, but not all managers lead.”

Ever have occasion to do an in-depth review of the academic and practical literature on leadership? I have — twice in the past five years. The first time was for a 2006 book with Jeff Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. The second time was for my new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss.

It is impossible to read it all.

Tens of thousands of books have been written on leadership and there are several academic journals devoted entirely to the subject, including The Leadership Quarterly and The Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies. Perhaps the most definitive review and integration of the leadership literature was Bass and Stogdill’s 1,200-page Handbook of Leadership, which was published in 1990 (and still does the best job of making sense of the literature, for my money). And if you really want a long book on leadership, you can get the four-volume Encyclopedia of Leadership, which at 2,120 pages weighs in at 15 pounds, and costs a whopping $800. Clearly, the task of reviewing the leadership literature — and acting on it as leader — isn’t to understand it all (that is impossible), but to develop a point of view on the few themes that matter most.

In my reviews of the writings and research, I kept bumping into an old and popular distinction that has always bugged me: leading versus managing. The brilliant and charming Warren Bennis has likely done more to popularize this distinction than anyone else. He wrote in Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader that “There is a profound difference between management and leadership, and both are important. To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial.” And in one of his most famous lines, he added, “Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing.”

Although this distinction is more or less correct, and is useful to a degree (see this recent interview with Randy Komisar for a great discussion of the distinction), it has unintended negative effects on how some leaders view and do their work. Some leaders now see their job as just coming up with big and vague ideas, and they treat implementing them, or even engaging in conversation and planning about the details of them, as mere “management” work.

Worse still, this distinction seems to be used as a reason for leaders to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they serve. I remember hearing of a cell phone company CEO, for example, who never visited the stores where his phones were sold — because that was a management task that was beneath him — and kept pushing strategies that reflected a complete misunderstanding of customer experiences. (Perhaps he hadn’t heard of how often Steve Jobs drops in at Apple stores.)

That story is typical. “Big picture only” leaders often make decisions without considering the constraints that affect the cost and time required to implement them, and even when evidence begins mounting that it is impossible or unwise to implement their grand ideas, they often choose to push forward anyway .

I am all for dreaming, Some of the most unlikely and impressive things have been done by dreamers. But one characteristic of the dreamers I respect — Francis Ford Coppola, Steve Jobs, folks at Pixar like Ed Catmull and Brad Bird — is that they also have remarkably deep understanding of the industry they work in and the people they lead, and they are willing to get very deep into the weeds. This ability to go back and forth between the little details and the big picture is also evident in the leaders I admire most who aren’t usually thought of as dreamers. Anne Mulcahy’s efforts to turn around Xerox were successful in part because of her in-depth knowledge of the company’s operations; she was very detail-oriented during the crucial early years of her leadership. Bill George, one of Jim Collins’ level 5 leaders, told me that, in his first nine months as CEO of Medtronic (a medical device company), he spent about 75% of his time watching surgeons put Medtronic devices in patients and talking with doctors and nurses, patients, families, and hospital executives to learn the ropes.

I guess this is one of the themes that I have written about before, especially in The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeff Pfeffer). But it is bothering me more lately, as I’ve had some conversations with project managers who have been assigned tasks by naive and overconfident leaders — things like implementing IT systems and building software. When they couldn’t succeed because of absurd deadlines, tiny staffs, small budgets, and in some cases, because it simply wasn’t technically possible to do what the leaders wanted, they were blamed. Such sad tales further reinforce my view that thinking about what could exist, and telling people to make it so, is a lot easier than actually getting it done.

I am not rejecting the distinction between leadership and management, but I am saying that the best leaders do something that might properly be called a mix of leadership and management. At a minimum, they lead in a way that constantly takes into account the importance of management. Meanwhile, the worst senior executives use the distinction between leadership and management as an excuse to avoid the details they really have to master to see the big picture and select the right strategies.

Therefore, harking back to the Bennis theorem I quoted above, let me propose a corollary: To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done.”

When we glorify leadership too much, and management too little, there is great risk of failing to act on this obvious but powerful message.

Erik Blogging, Business Innovation, Leadership, Reader Shared Leadership, management, organizational development, strategy, vision

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What an invaluable piece that capitalizes on the detailed understanding of the process and associated objectives for campaigns. Establish branding, driving leads, optimizing conversion and outbound communication broken down with effective associated metrics to provide for the ultimate effectiviness in online campaign strategy.

The following is guest post by Paul Roetzer, founder and president of PR 20/20, an inbound marketing agency and PR firm specializing in search marketing, social media, content marketing and public relations. You can find Paul on Twitter @paulroetzer, and the PR 20/20 blog.

Conventional marketing pays for interruption and impressions, which means you buy everything, including: ad space, mailing lists, air time, printing and postage, in addition to agency costs (i.e. commissions, retainers and hourly fees). The basic theory is, “outspend your competition to gain market share.” This is an archaic and faulty process.

Inbound marketing, which is powered by content and community, gives underdogs and innovators the ability to grow faster and smarter by outthinking, not outspending, the competition, and by investing their marketing dollars in production, participation and performance.

But first you need a plan…

Enter the Inbound Marketing GamePlan

The Inbound Marketing GamePlan was first introduced by PR 20/20 in January 2010 as a free eBook download. In essence, the GamePlan is a more flexible version of a traditional strategic marketing plan, with a focus on shifting resources to more measurable and effective inbound marketing strategies.

The GamePlan is designed to adapt and evolve to changing market factors and business needs, and fully integrate brand marketing, website development, search marketing, social media, content marketing and public relations. To achieve maximum success and ROI with inbound marketing, these once separate disciplines must be planned and executed in unison.

When building your Inbound Marketing GamePlan, the general philosophy is, “less time planning, more time doing.” The goal is to set clear benchmarks and objectives, arrive at a consensus for the 12-month approach, approve budgets and allocations for first quarter activities, and then take action.

The best inbound marketers will always be testing and evolving, so don’t be afraid to take some chances and start learning through experience.

The GamePlan in Action

Our hope is that the Inbound Marketing GamePlan eBook serves as a resource for organizations of all sizes to take a more strategic approach, and tap into the full potential of inbound marketing to connect with all relevant audiences, generate leads and build loyalty.

Following is a recommended eight-step system to build and execute your Inbound Marketing GamePlan:

• STEP 1: Clearly define and differentiate your brand.

• STEP 2: Design and deploy a content-driven website.

• STEP 3: Go beyond prospects, and consider the impact of your inbound marketing efforts on all audiences (e.g. peers, competitors, employees, job candidates, vendors, media, prospects and customers).

• STEP 4: Establish measurable and meaningful campaign objectives designed to achieve the primary goals of generating leads and building loyalty.

• STEP 5: Build an integrated campaign fueled by core inbound marketing strategies of search marketing, social media, content marketing and public relations. The success of each strategy creates momentum that drives your organization forward.

• STEP 6: Establish dynamic budgets that can be easily shifted based on campaign performance and analytics.

• STEP 7: Define campaign timelines with milestones, tasks and responsibilities.

• STEP 8: Measure everything, and be willing to adapt and evolve.

The GamePlan Elements

Whether developed by your internal team, or outsourced to an inbound marketing agency, here are some key foundation elements to create as part of the Inbound Marketing GamePlan:

• 12-month strategy outlook in brand, web, search, social, content and PR.
• First quarter activity chart with a detailed plan that includes: tactics, task lists and timelines, as well as resource allocations of both time and money.
• Buyer persona profiles.
• Keyword analysis to identify and prioritize search terms.
• Quarterly content marketing calendar, including: prioritization, budgets, abstracts and timelines for blog posts, case studies, videos, white papers, eBooks, webinars, articles and more.
• Media and blogger database as the foundation of your media relations and blogger outreach efforts.
• Internal publicity calendar, highlighting planned press releases, feature story pitches, editorial opportunities and associated events.
• Social media dashboard of priority forums, groups, networks and blogs for target industries and buyer personas.
• Speaking opportunity database for company leaders highlighting potential engagements throughout the year.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing is driving the convergence of traditionally separate disciplines, specifically brand marketing, website development, search marketing, social media, content marketing and public relations.

Organizations have the opportunity to achieve new levels of efficiency and effectiveness by integrating these areas into a single strategic plan, and running dynamic campaigns that continually re-allocate resources based on performance.

Free Download: Marketing Data: 50+ Marketing Charts and Graphs

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I’m concerned that although there is a certain demand for the masses to have an all-in-one/ everything client, the functionality does not reflect the the potential when pulling in these various networks. What happened to do one thing well? At an Enterprise-level there just cannot be the same offerings. The necessity for analytics, for nothing more than ROI purposes and tying to objectives makes these all-in-one suites less favorable. How will Co-tweet (backed by the likes of Guy Kawasaki) incorporate the necessary components? It’s standard issue to have an API these days, but APIs must do more to connect with automation and analytics.

Popular cross-platform social app TweetDeck is announcing an update to its desktop client this morning which will add Foursquare and Google Buzz to its arsenal of supported streams which already includes Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook. In addition, the version 0.34 update will allow for the addition of any Twitter-compatible APIs, including WordPress, StatusNet and Tumblr, as well as a slew of other features such as global filters and scheduled posts. The company will also announce financial news this morning, confirming that it has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding.

Read the whole post at ReadWriteWeb >

Join the conversation about this story »

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There’s just not enough of these valuable tidbits out there. As the web continues to evolve, so will content delivery and what users are looking for. Naturally, you are looking at a screen, and as the capacity and capability of technology grows limitless, why would we be bound to just reading information. Experience is the new knowledge.

In lieu of our usual lunch time chart, let’s have a go at this cool infographic, via Good, showing the biggest news stories of the year:

click for interactive graphic:

Hat tip Neatorama

Erik Reader Shared 2009, 2009 summary, graphic, news, trends, visual depiction, visually

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Incredible focus on Organizational Sustainablilty from Fred Nickols. Understanding operational organization at a visual level characterizes the essential ingredients at a interactive base. Great piece content!

Nowadays there is a great deal of talk about “sustainability” as it relates to organizations. Yet, for all the talk, it sometimes seems like wishful (or wistful) thinking. I think it’s an eminently practical concern. In this post I’ll set out what I see as the two key elements of sustainability – the Yin and the Yang as it were. They are Fit and Fitness (see Figure 1).

Sustainability, simply put, is the capacity to endure, to keep on going. The Fit and Fitness of an organization are the key elements of its ability to endure; and, more important, to not just survive but to also thrive. Consider the diagram below in Figure 2. It depicts a rather high level view of an organization as an open, adaptive system. In the course of reviewing it we’ll get at the notions of Fit and Fitness in more detail. Take a moment to look it over.

Figure 2 – The Organization as an Open, Adaptive System

As the diagram in Figure 2 indicates, organizations receive inputs which they transform into outputs by way of transformation processes (e.g., manufacturing). Organizations obtain the inputs they require by way of transaction processes (e.g., payments to suppliers, salary and wages to employees, and return to investors to name some of the more obvious ones). Organizations also exchange their outputs via transaction processes (e.g., goods and services to customers in return for revenues). It is this ability to carry out transactions – to import inputs and to export outputs – that makes the organization an “open” system.

An organization’s transformation or production processes and its transaction or exchange processes cross over the boundaries of typical organizational functions such as sales, manufacturing, research, HR, finance, etc. The organization’s executive cadre is ostensibly “above the fray” so to speak and in a position to ensure that cross-functional squabbles and boundary disputes do not impair these vital cross-functional processes.

Fit comes into play in the context of the organization’s alignment with its environment. Is it producing goods or services that are a “fit” with customer expectations and requirements? Are its prices competitive or does it have a particular feature or benefit that supports premium pricing? Are its sources of inputs secure and reliable? Is it attractive to investors? Can it attract and retain the talent necessary to its ongoing operation, expansion, improvement and innovation? Can it accommodate and adapt to economic ups and downs? Does it perform better than its competitors? These questions and many more like them can be used to assess the Fit of an organization with its environment.

Fitness comes into play in the context of what goes on “inside” the organization. Are its processes productive and efficient? Are its people engaged? Can it flex and adapt to meet changing internal circumstances? Does it continuously improve upon how it does what it does? Most important, does it keep track of and manage both its Fit and its Fitness?

As Figure 2 also indicates, in addition to its transformation or production processes and its transaction processes, there is a third set of processes – those that focus on the organization’s ability to align itself with its larger environment, to adapt to changes or maintain that alignment, and to innovate – to drive changes internally and externally. These processes ensure Fit and Fitness on an ongoing basis. Thus they ensure sustainability.

Again, the executive cadre comes into play. It has the primary, direct responsibility for the alignment, adaptation and innovation processes. It relies on internal and external intelligence as the basis for driving the changes needed to ensure alignment, adaptation and innovation. In this way, the executive cadre is also responsible for the sustainability of the organization. And that is as it should be.

So there you have it – sustainability in a nutshell. Fit and Fitness are the keys and, ultimately, it falls to the organization’s executive cadre to see to it the organization’s alignment, adaptation and innovation processes ensure its sustainability. Sounds simple enough, eh? Well, actually, getting started is simple enough; all you have to do is ask yourself a couple of questions and work hard to get good answers to them:

1. What provisions (e.g., policies, standards, procedures, processes) do we have in place for assessing the quality of our organization’s Fit with its environment and the Fitness of its internal arrangements?

2. What do we have and what do we need in the way of intelligence, processes and change management capabilities that focus on alignment, adaptation and innovation?

If you have really good answers to those two questions then you’re probably in pretty good shape. If you don’t, you might want to dig a little deeper to see just how sustainable your organization really is.

About the Author: My name is Fred Nickols.  I am a writer, an independent consultant and a former executive.  Visual aids of one kind or another have played a central role in my work for many years.  My goals in writing for SmartDraw’s Working Smarter blog are to: (1) provide you with some first-rate content you can’t get anywhere else, (2) illustrate how important good visuals can be in communicating such content and (3) illustrate also the critical role visuals can play in solving the kinds of problems we encounter in the workplace.  I encourage you to comment on my posts and to contact me directly if you want to pursue a more in-depth discussion.

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A recent catch via The Art of Manliness, I find these tidbits of wisdom and guidance some of the quintessential factors that drive a life of integrity-

Energetic  Men

We love upright, energetic men. Pull them this way, and then that way, and the other, and they only bend, but never break. Trip them down, and in a trice they are on their feet. Bury them in the mud, and in an hour they will be out and bright. They are not ever yawning away existence, or walking about the world as if they had come into it with only half their soul; you cannot keep them down; you cannot destroy them. But for these the world would soon degenerate. They are the salt of the earth. Who but they start any noble project? They build our cities and rear our manufactories; they whiten the ocean with their sails, and they blacken the heavens with the smoke of their steam-vessels and furnace fires; they draw treasures from the mine; they plow the earth. Blessings on them! Look to them, young men, and take courage; imitate their example; catch the spirit of their energy and enterprise, and you will deserve, and no doubt command, success.

From Readings for Young Men, Merchants, and Men of Business, 1866

Erik Leadership, Personal Development

Google CEO Eric Schmidt projects a much different internet in five years, with extensive Chinese sites/ content + social media, concentrated over high speed broadband in real time. Today and for the future, figuring out how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age,” Schmidt said at last week’s Gartner symposium in Orlando.

Highlighted comments include:

- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

- Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

- Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

- “We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.

- “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”

- There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

- “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”

- It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Erik Digital Trends, revolutionary technology ceo, content, eric schmidt, google, ranking, real time, rt search, search, social content

I caught this one via the #hillarious hashtag on twitter earlier and had to share!

Watch the exclusive Crush It music video. See Gary Vaynerchuk chest bump Mott, train Rocky style, and roll with his Wine Library posse to the club thumping Clabo rap. It’s performed by Clabo, the Crush It music video was Directed by Mark Fitzpatrick. Music Produced by Andre Betts and China Black. You can Buy the Crush It – Jet Club Mix charity song here.  Apparently one song download feeds 6 people-

You can grab Crush It! from Amazon (affiliate linked) here while they are still running the promotion!

The link for the site is here

Product Description

Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, readers will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern business.

Erik social media charity, Crush It!, social videos, videos gary vaynerchuck

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It will not be long before phone numbers are extinct, and the more comprehensive offerings of google voice continue as the face of voice based communication in the future.

Google Voice is a great way to manage phone hell by giving you a single phone number that automatically rings your mobile, home, work and other phones based on your choice of rules and settings (who’s calling, when, etc.). But people are still stuck with their legacy phone numbers, and moving completely away from them is difficult.

I solved the problem by simply porting my mobile number away from AT&T over to Google Voice, a feature that Google says will be launched more broadly eventually.

Others solve the problem via the Google Voice application on various phones. But even then, if someone calls your old mobile number and leaves a message, you have to deal with it separately.

Not any more. Tonight Google is launching a third option, a new feature that allows mobile users to move their voicemail away from their carrier and over to Google Voice. The benefits: your mobile voicemails go into your Google Voice inbox along with other voicemails and text messages, plus you can create custom greetings for callers and your voicemails are all automatically transcribed (sometimes hilariously).

There are a few steps that have to be completed that vary based on the carrier and phone that you use. But if you are really trying to move over to Google Voice, it’s worth it. When it’s all set up, voicemail messages from people who call your mobile number (not your Google Voice number) will be taken over by Google Voice. That makes them much easier to listen to, or read.

And yes, it even works on the iPhone.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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This is the icing on the cake for those especially focusing on emerging cloud technologies. With the storage services and now database cloud, Amazon offers killer solutions to keep businesses that have mission-critical data happy.

Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite of services available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, instances are easily created and available almost immediately. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale specification, and is available now on the AWS site.

Unlike completely elastic hosted DB services, which abstract a large-scale cluster into a shared environment for customers, the Amazon model is to step up or down through tiers of service based on requirements. The tiers of service (with names that seem to be inspired by a fast food restaurant menu) and pricing are:

You also have to provision a set amount of storage, which is charged at $0.10 per GB-month (pre-provisioning means that you can run out of disk space, it wont grow out). Requests are charged at an additional $0.10 per million requests.

Backups are available (full, snapshots etc.) and backup space equivelant to the provisioned storage space is available for free. Additional space is $0.15 per month. Data transfer is charged at the standard AWS rates, with no charge for data transfers between AWS services (ie. if you have your web server at one host, and the DB with AWS, you will be charged for all the traffic between the web server and the DB).

AWS offer a large range of services, and full RDBMS hosting seemed like an obvious service to offer. AWS has the existing SimpleDB service, which is a key-value based data store.

My initial take on the new RDS service is that it seems that it involves pre-defined and pre-configured EC2 instances with MySQL running. This makes the task of creating and starting new DB instances easier, but does not mean that your resource allocation will automatically grow and scale with resource requirements. There are existing third-party services, such as Fathom, that are built on AWS and use EC2 to create and manage DB instances.

Your application will have to recognize that more resources are required, and make the appropriate API calls to either step up or down along the tiers of instances available. RDS, like most AWS services, provides building blocks for developers to use.

Update: Amazon has now officially announced the service on the AWS blog.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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