A Sign That It's Time To Discard Your Elegant, Sexy, but Wrong Business Strategy

You're so proud and happy.  You've just decided on an elegant, sexy strategy that's easy to explain.

But, what if it is wrong?

For example, Yahoo's strategy to automatically fire the  bottom 10% of every department.  It sounded good.  Easy to explain, decisive and, didn't Jack Welsh practice this when he was at GE?  Well, Jack Welsh has since stated that he was misunderstood.  He never advocated the simplistic approach of summarily firing the bottom 10%.

In the case of Yahoo, there have been many articles written about how this was one of Marissa Mayer's biggest mistakes at Yahoo and the one that lead to a big loss of morale and a brain drain.

So when should you know to discard a strategy?  When enough holes and serious problems emerge, and you are having to apply multiple bandaids to repair things.

At that point, you are like an elderly person who is forced to take new medications to counter-act the side-effects of your main medicines.  Or a group of construction workers desperately trying to shore up a collapsing house–when they really need to tear down the foundation and start over.

In the case of Yahoo, the problems started to emerge when people stopped collaborating with each other, since they felt they were in competition to stay out of the bottom 10% and keep their jobs.  People hoarded information.  The smartest people in the building avoided collaborating with each other so they wouldn't be ranked against other smart people.  Average people were penalized as being in the bottom 10% when they were teamed up with stars.

Yahoo tried bandaid approaches to boost morale and get people to collaborate, but they didn't see that the strategically simple, robust solution was to recognize that their strategy failed and needed to be replaced.

Bottom line:  You must have so much self-confidence and belief in your worth that you can pull an idea or strategy that has proved itself a failure–without resistance or with a bruised ego.

February "Chicago Business Journal" Column: The Innovative New Medical School In Champaign

In my "Chicago Business Journal" column for this month, I wrote about the innovative new medical school at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign campus.

It was opened by the department of computer science and stresses collaborative research / bioengineering.  http://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2017/02/13/university-of-illinois-new-medical-school

Lyft and Medical Trials: When You're #2, Find Niches to Serve

Yesterday, I saw an article in Crain's Chicago Business that Continuum Clinical, a company that recruits patients for drug trials, is launching a partnership with Lyft to transport patients to/from trials.

This is an example of innovation called win-win collaboration.

Continuum and the drug companies benefit because they need to make sure that patients make it reliably and safely to participate in the study, and not miss any treatments - which could affect the results.

Using a ride company makes sense since many drug trial volunteers are low-income or too sick to drive.

For Lyft, which is #2 behind Uber, this is their push into the health care niche.  They will set up a special call center with trained people to assist the drug trial participants.

If you are not the leader in your wider field, it makes sense to take over and become #1 in sub-fields since, over time, leaders benefit from a positive feedback loop and distance themselves from the competition.

Thus, as Uber pulls away from Lyft for general rides, Lyft can stay around and be profitable because it can pull away in it's selected niches.

Important CEO Lesson from This Year's NFL Super Bowl Coaches

Last weekend's Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on the head coaches of the four remaining NFL teams (of which two, the Falcons and Patriots, will now play in Super Bowl LI).

Out of the four coaches, three of them were what the article called "CEO coaches", by which they meant that the coach did not call offensive or defensive plays.

All head coaches in the NFL get hired based upon their proven performance as a defensive or offensive coordinator.  But, as super-coach Marshall Goldsmith has said "What got you here, won't get you there."

In the article, former Ravens coach "Brian Billick said that being a play caller and head coach is like having two 24/7 jobs." The article went on to mention statistics that the head coaches who were previously hotshot offensive coordinators, and continued to call plays, saw their offensive stats fall.

This leads to one of the most important lessons for success as a CEO or senior manager.  It is also, in my 27 years of experience, one of the most important lessons for driving innovation:

You have to get out of the weeds or, stated another way, see the forest from the trees.

A leader and/or innovator needs to get away from focusing on details in one area, and be able to see the whole picture.

As I learned from super-consultant Alan Weiss, the way to move your perspective up is to ask "Why?", while you move down by asking "How?".

HGTV Now #3 Among Cable Channels–Implications for Innovative Marketing

Recently, HGTV (Home and Garden Television) passed CNN in the ratings, to become the third most-watched cable channel (after Fox News and ESPN).

Why did this happen?  Has everyone become a house-flipper?  The answer is no.  Instead, the channel operates as a form of "comfort food" at a time when people are overworked, anxious, and burned-out on global channels blaring bad news 24/7.

What are the lessons for innovative marketing?

Well, as I mentioned in a post last year, we are no longer in the Information Age.  We are now in the Age of Attention Scarcity.  People are bombarded with data and noise and a lack of time.

I said that the Art of Marketing can be boiled down into: "Give so much value that they can't ignore you".

HGTV knows it's audience and gives it tons of value:

1. They dropped the more far-out shows (like astrology-based real estate) and focus on plain vanilla "fix 'er up" shows.

2. While other shows concentrate on house-flipping in extravagant homes on the coasts, HGTV (based in Tennessee) shows many homes from the heartland between the coats.

Thus, for marketing, businesses need to think of themselves as a channel such as HGTV or Food Network. They can't just give value in the form of data–they also need to package it in an entertaining  way.

Using WWII Guerrilla Tactics For Medical Innovation

Last year, I read an interesting book called "Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America's Shadow War".

It was about how, during WWII, the OSS (precursor of the CIA), British, and exiled French intelligence services parachuted operatives into German-occupied France to organize the Resistance.

They organized regular people into guerrilla units.  They couldn't fight head-on against the German army, but they did things like bomb bridges, sabotage railroad tracks, etc.

They had two main missions:

1. When D-Day started, they had to delay German reinforcements from reaching Normandy from western and southern France.

2. After the Allies were winning control of France, they had to delay German units from escaping back to Germany (where they could regroup).  At the very least, they had to force them from traveling by back roads and village-to-village, so they would have to use the highways, where they would be siting ducks for air attacks.

Today, I got to thinking that this might be a useful metaphor for medical and drug research.  For diseases like certain cancers, we now have multiple drugs on the market, and they seem to make incremental improvements in survival rates.

Maybe, as an innovation, drug companies should also start to look for "Jedburgh" drugs.  Drugs that don't combat cancers directly, but aid the drugs already on the market.

In other words, what if we look like drug vs. cancer as a war.  For example, maybe a drug is targeting a certain protein that the cancer needs.  Why isn't it finishing off the cancer?  Is the cancer replicating itself too fast (getting replacements) that it can keep ahead of the loss of protein? Or is the cancer taking counter-measures and releasing some other chemical to protect the protein?

Maybe they can then create a drug that slows down the replication, or a drug that reduces or eliminates this secondary chemical.  By itself, neither of these drugs would be effective against cancer but, they might enhance the success of the main one.

"If innovation is an accident, then we need to make employees more accident prone."

- Praveen Puri