Simplifying The Corporate World Using Random Emails

I subscribe to a couple of email circulars that have nothing to do with my day job in an effort to keep an open mind and keep an eye on how the rest of the non technology focused world lives. One of these is my daily update from The Browser. At the bottom of their daily email there is a “Video of the Day” which I try and watch (so long as it’s less than 5 minutes). On a recent trip to California I was pretty jet lagged and so ended up looking at the following video at about 2AM. I thought it was brilliant, both the song and especially the video. I saw that the video was created by a guy called Christophe Throckler, and it turns out he actually lives in France. For no particular reason I decided to send him an out of the blue email to tell him that I really liked his work. He responded almost instantly and said he was very flattered and happy to receive such positive feedback. It was a simple and enjoyable exchange of views with a complete stranger. Christophe makes video. Aidan likes video. Aidan tells Christophe he likes video. Christophe thanks Aidan for saying he likes his video he made. I was reminded of this simplicity when I received a comment from my uncle, via my Dad, on a previous blog posting in which I tried to explain my working world. Uncle Ed essentially said, “Oh my word, that is so complicated… I am a bee keeper, I sell honey”. He’s right. I think about the ridiculous number of hoops we go through in the corporate world and I wonder if there isn’t a better way. I now think there might be…

About 18 months ago I remember being in a training course. A very smart chap, who I found very impressive in a noticeably understated way, led it. Amongst other things he had been an advisor to the board of directors of Disney Pixar (and had therefore worked with the late Steve Jobs amongst others). I remember him saying that many companies today develop matrix organizations (where people essentially belong to at least two groups at all times) to deal with the complexity of the business world today. However I am increasingly thinking that this is a cop out.

An article I read last week, my experience in EMC over the last 9 months of building offerings by way of creating virtual teams and then SWAT teams of ring-fenced individuals, and my general belief in libertarianism and meritocracies, means that I am increasingly convinced that what Haier are doing could be the basis of a much better solution for the future of the corporate world. In short my idea runs something like this…

The big boss sets out the strategic direction. People are then encouraged to create projects to help achieve that objective. Once the initial project idea has been approved, (you can decide on how high or low you want to set the bar – i.e. you can determine how well defined the idea has to be before it gets executive approval), people in the organization are then allowed to choose which projects they want to be a part of. Given that people typically want to be associated with successful projects, people will naturally gravitate towards those team leaders and projects that they think will be most successful. This will actually force communication, collaboration and the building of networks across the whole company. People who lead well will also rise to the top. Clearly any company wanting to work like this would need to put in place top-notch remote working facilities e.g. Telepresence suites, collaboration tools and high speed internet connections etc., and I still don’t know exactly how this is funded and tracked from a P&L perspective.

I wonder if it could work in a similar way to school vouchers i.e. funding would move with the individual…employees effectively choose how they spend their personal time (and budget) on the understanding that they will be asked at the end of the year to show the results they have achieved based on their decisions about where they have spent their time…People would feel more in control of their careers and would gravitate towards work that interested them (people are always more productive when they are doing something they enjoy). More senior employees would be expected to show a greater return given that their budgets (cost) is higher; people would start to be more aware of how much they and their time actually cost which would likely reduce time spent slacking on the job; project leads could not just accept new team members regardless because as investment into the project increased, the overall project would be required to demonstrate a greater return on investment; people who no team lead feels would add sufficient value to their projects would naturally get weeded out. Such a funding model could also even lead to increased collaboration with outside groups who would effectively represent extra hands without having to have additional internal employees commit their personal budgets – i.e. a project lead could achieve a greater potential return from a project for the same (internal) input.

I feel an unsolicited email to the CEO of Haier coming on… 

Happy Apple

On a recent Air France flight to the US the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. It took a full 30 minutes to be brought back to life – considerably worse than the 8-9 minutes it used to take my Microsoft/Dell laptop to start up. However after less than two weeks with my new Macbook Pro with its instant boot up/down capabilities and infinitely longer battery life, I can confirm that I’ll never go back to Microsoft. Although I’m still a very basic Mac user, I have to say I’m enjoying it immensely. I would have loved to think that Air France would make a similar shift soon…although given their recent cuts and job losses, I doubt that change will happen any time soon. 

Working 9 (CET) to 5 (EST)

The postings dried up again after we got back from holiday. That in no small measure was due to work being very busy. Let me tell you a little about what I’m doing at the minute, before sharing with you some of the key lessons I’ve drawn from the last 9 months or so. 

I think most of you are aware that I work in the services department of an American technology product company. The culture of the company is unashamedly sales focused and quarterly driven (when introducing themselves people often quote their tenure in terms of quarters survived rather than years served). It is a macho culture, especially in the US, and products rather than people are of primary importance. Traditionally the services business has been viewed as a necessary evil – we have provided services because the products were missing features e.g. auto-installation or configuration. The services group has also been viewed with suspicion in the past, and accused of “slowing down product sales” and making sales cycles longer than 90 days thereby negatively impacting a salesman’s quarterly bonus (bad). Our CEO and Chairman also has a certain percentage threshold in his mind of how much of our revenue should come from services as opposed to products (this has a direct impact on our share price as a technology stock). However our products are increasingly complex and more often than not clients require the integration of many of our products. This means that the services group has an increasingly important role in the organization, if we can just overcome certain legacies, and work out how to interact with our product brethren in a constructive way…our greatest challenges are often internal rather than with customers! 

I took on a new role in the Services group in February of this year. The services group created a new team called “Portfolio” based out of Boston. This team is responsible for defining the new services offerings (think of them as services products) we take to market around the world. My area of focus is “big data”, one of the three key pillars of the company strategy. The way I have interpreted my role is to define big data services offerings in such a way that they help resolve a client’s problems, yet also maximize the sale and delivery of our technology products; the archetypal “win-win” scenario. I also always seek to include multiple technologies in any solution within an offering. This enables us to be able to turn around to multiple product groups and say to them that we as a services organization are bringing them new opportunities that they could not achieve by themselves as a solitary product division. 

When I first took on the role my widget focused management asked me for a list of offerings that I was going to create. I felt strongly that, especially because there were so many big data widgets one could create, that widgets for the sake of widgets made little sense, and if I just created a set of independent SKUs, then these would be difficult for the sales and delivery teams (who are still struggling to understand what big data is) to absorb and either sell or deliver effectively. I felt it was worthwhile investing time in developing an overarching vision, story or narrative that would give our sales and delivery teams, and clients, an understanding of the wider context. My management disagreed, but thankfully they had much bigger fish to fry. So I spent 3 months or so talking to people all around the world and built my vision. I then sought to build out all the sales and delivery materials required for the first offering that is designed specifically for telecommunications firms. The months of June and July were spent reviewing the new offering with experts from all parts of the firm (both products and services), with some friendly clients, and with external research agencies. Most of the conversations since I got back from holiday in the summer have been related to how we take the offering to market in the Americas, EMEA and APJ. I’ve sought to make the offering as comprehensive as possible yet as simple to understand as possible as well. And for those of you who have worked with me before, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve spent quite a bit of time ensuring that the presentation materials look professional… The good news is that the feedback from all parts of the firm has been exceptional, and now, in parallel to getting the Telco offering out into the market, I’m also getting support for building similar offerings for other industries and disciplines e.g. oil and gas, marketing and IT to name but three. 

So you can now probably understand a bit better why I’ve been going to the US every two weeks, and why the blog postings have been a little less frequent than last year. Some of the key things that I’ve learnt over the course of the year are as follows… 

1. The simple fact of creating a new group and giving it an exciting and important charter e.g. redefine over the next two years what we take to market and how we go to market, does not automatically change a company’s culture. As much as we in the Portfolio team are allowed to think further out than the immediate quarter, the rest of the organization continues, most probably rightly, to focus on the next 90 days. Our great visions need to be able to align with this cadence and culture not the other way round, at least in the first instance. 

2. Having a good idea about how to answer hard challenges in a particular industry in which you’re not an expert and being able to document it clearly is one thing, but actually being able to lead a whole organization through the change required across both sales and delivery (new skills), services and product organizations (new collaboration models), in multiple geographies (watch out for different cultures and ways of working), is absolutely not simple and does take time. Getting to market isn’t something that you can do in a flash. Especially because it’s not as if we’ve done this before… 

3. That the ideal type of boss, (if you can find them), for me at least given the fact that I always seek to think things through in their entirety before starting, is one that gives you air cover when you need it, yet gives you the space to do what you think is necessary. I recognize that’s something that's not easy for either party. 

4. The first offering is good and compelling, but in honesty I think the most important thing has been having the tenacity and ability to pay sufficient attention to detail to create a genuinely comprehensive set of materials. All I’ve really done is to codify the examples of where our group of experts have done similar type of work before. The really remarkable thing is that I’ve been allowed to do this in a firm (like so many others) that is notorious for its short-term focus. 

5. That people remain people, and that people still love a good story. Even in our company with its relentless focus on the next 90 days, the feedback I get from the vision or overarching story which I use to “set the scene” before going into the detail of the offering, is amazing. The sales community in particular has started to feel a lot more comfortable about where they go next after an initial sale. 

So lots of good progress and interesting conversations from around the world over the last nine months, but definitely lots still left to do.

Biting the Silver, Apple

I’ve had a big Apple desktop at home for over a year now (the dirt on the keyboard before I cleaned it yesterday testified to this). I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I really wasn’t exploiting its full potential nor getting much better in my mastery of all things Mac. So after lugging my oversized Dell PC to the US and being ridiculed one too many times by my American colleagues, I decided to ditch Microsoft and go all-in on Apple. I received my new Macbook Pro earlier this week. It was wonderfully prepared by our IT department up in Paris, and despite it’s beauty I had already prepared myself mentally for 2-3 weeks of reduced productivity. In actual fact as soon as they told me I’d have Outlook and PowerPoint for Mac, then I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be using the virtual machine with the Microsoft operating system that I’d asked them to install for me any time soon. And so the first few days have been pretty pleasant. I miss a couple of features such as having multiple time zones in the Outlook calendar on Microsoft (really useful when you’re in the US every other week), but overall I am delighted to have made the change. My only concern now is that seeing the new horrendous iOS 7 on my iPhone, I wonder if I’ve backed the wrong horse…