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It you work in a materials business like I do you probably have noted the emergence of eco-friendly or green products pushed in the marketplace. Working in a company that has had a eco-slant for quite some time now it is interesting to see the up-tick in awareness in green/eco. I am still a little cautious of green for green’s sake, but have had an awakening per se recently after listening the Ted Talk below. The talk in question was by John Doerr entitled “Seeking Salvation and profit in greentech”.

John Doerr is quite a legend in the VC community and has helped to fund many startups that are now in the common venacular (Amazon, Netscape, Google, and Compaq for instance) as a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. His Bio is is here is you are interested in learning more. He goes so far as to say that “going green may be the “biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.” His theme of the talk centers around the situation that our actions have put us in and that he absolutely thinks that we must correct the problems we have created in the past century with mismanagement of our environment. What is really refreshing in his talk is that he does not think that legislation alone will bring the change needed. He urges that the real solution to our plight is the combination of greentech and business acumen. Greentech that also saves money is the key to widespread adoption. He cites a few early examples of this. Listen to the talk and see what you think. Then analyze in what areas of your business can you create and sell solutions that not only make sense from a financial point of view but also from an environmental point of view?

Guy Kawasaki has a great interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer (Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University) related to his book What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management. What really struck me as interesting was how true some of sentiments rang with me. I few Questions and Answers that really hit home are quoted below.

Question: What can companies do to get smarter?
Answer: Companies learn just like people learn—by trying new things and seeing what happens. That requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.Second, it requires structured self-reflection—after-action or after-event reviews so that instead of having one year of experience repeated 20 times, people and companies actually accumulate learning over time.”

Question: What are the characteristics of a good work week and vacation policy?
Answer: We live in a world where ideas and innovation are paramount. But people can’t be creative if they are exhausted. And when people work when they are tired, they make mistakes. If we have learned anything from the quality movement, it is that the cost of finding and fixing mistakes is greater than the cost of preventing them. So, give people time off. And, by the way, the younger generations want a life as well as work. Work-life balance is a great way to attract—and retain—great people.

Question: What are the characteristics of a good incentive plan?
Answer: Incentives should be large enough to provide an occasion for celebrating success but not so large as to distort behavior. And incentives can include recognition and things other than money. Companies get themselves into trouble all the time by being too clever with their incentives.
Stock options did reward leaders for getting the price of the stock up—it’s just that it was often for a short period, and was accomplished by distorting earnings. Be careful what you pay for—you might just get it.

Question: What role should budgets play in the management of an organization?
Answer: Budgets should be general guidelines. As hard and fast rules, they become subject to “gaming.” People delay doing sensible things, push expenses around, hide sales, etc. And also, budgets often just reward the best forecasters and negotiators. It is possible to make “budget” as you lose market share and go broke, as long as the targets are set low enough.

Think about your organization and how these questions and opinions line up with what your company does or does not do? How would some of this advise go over at your company? Is it unconventional or down-right heresy? Have some of the effects mentioned by actions in these questions come true at your organization?

I was reading Endless Innovation (I find myself a regular reader lately) and read this post on Nokia’s Brand and Design Priorities.

If you don’t see the embedded slideshow the direct link is Here on Slideshare.net.I thought some of the excerpts were quite succinct and powerful.

Seth Godin has an interesting post called “One, a few, most or all” where he discusses about what he calls the 4 situations in marketing. He makes this distinction based on who you need to influence. As the un-initiated (aka, not a marketing guy) I know that you have to be aware of your audience and potential customer, but after reading this post it makes it completely clear that you have to approach each situation differently in order to succeed. Here are the situations:

1. One. When you need to fill a job or sell a house you only need to convince one person.
2. Few. When you want to be the hot local restaurant, or sell many copies of a book, or be a popular TV show you have to convince quite a few people.
3. Most. Some businesses only work when a large number of people participate: LinkedIN, Ebay, Paypal, YouTube for example, or a telephone company or the mail service.
4. All. When you need to convince all of a panel or group in order to win, for example to specific your product as an industry requirement, or you need the support of 51 senators to pass your bill, or you need a town council to approve your building permit.

Thinking more about this specific grouping, it is very evident that you need to know which situation you are in before you develop your strategy. Sometimes this situation will be determined by business model economics, while in other cases this might be determined be product maturity, % market share, or legislative situation. In all cases knowing your situation will help you to develop a strategy that is more aligned with your goal.

• C an you identify which of your potential product or service offerings might fall into these categories?
• How does your strategy for approaching and intereacting with a customer change with respect to what situation you are in?
• Do certain market segments always fall into the same marketing situations?

This is about a recent post from Guy Kawasaki about his experiences in starting a new site based on use provided content. The basic premise is the stats on his new site truemors.com. The biggest shock to most people was that the total cost of the site was around $12K to set and get operational (as Guy call this credit card magnitude debt). There is a whole list of 26 stats and an accompanying slide presentation. The last stat caught my eye in that it was the 4 things that Guy learned from this experience:

1. There’s really no such thing as bad PR.
2. $12,000 goes a very long way these days.
3. You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.
4. Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

I would say Guy’s success is certainly quite a bit different from the average joe that might try the same thing as he has a extremely popular blog from which he could launch this site.   So the amount of traffic and the speed to grow a base of users may have been faster than what a less popular person may have been capable of.

On the other hand the low cost of entry was quite eye opening as he was able to implement his concept to a usable and growable state with the funds that are within reach of a large portion of the industrialized world.

So what idea for the web do you have that could be launched or at least prototyped for this kidn of money?  

The team over at iinnovate.com always surprise me with the quality of their guests for their interviews. This latest interview with Carly Fiorina formerly CEO of HP is no exception.  Min Li Chan and Min Liu ask some very good questions which dig out some great answers and advise from Carly.

Carly gives some really great perspectives in this interview.  Here are a couple of my favorite questions:

When asked asked what element of being a CEO was most challenging at HP she Carly stated:

“The most challenging part about being CEO of HP was that we had to transform the company. It was a great company with a great history, but it was also a company that was lagging further and further behind when I arrived. ….. <stats on missed financials, lack of innovation , etc>… We had a great deal of change that needed to be done, and change is always very difficult.  It [change] is always resisted and particularly difficult with a large, tradition-bound company like HP was.   But that is also frankly the challenge and joy of leadership. Leadership is always about changing things. ….”

When asked how to preserve innovation and a sense of entrepreneurship in corporate America as companies  grow above 10,000 employees mark she stated:

“… So it is a challenge for every company.  The pressure for Corporate America boils down to the fact that the  focus on profitability sometimes causes people to cut costs as opposed to investing in innovation.  This is where leadership is so imporatant.  If the leadership doesn’t decide that innovation is a value worth celebrating then eventually it will whither.   If leadership doesn’t decide that instead of cutting that expense, they will make that investment in the future, then the investments won’t get made…..   I think it is about the culture of a place. Whether risk-taking is really celebrated and rewarded, and if you are going to celebrate and reward risk taking, you have to let people make mistakes.  Not every bet is goign to pay off and you have to deal with that…. There is no silver bullet, but it starts with a believe that innovation is the life-blood of a technology company….”

When asked about the trend of startup aquiring as the major source of innovation for a tech company and whether this was dangerous she replied.

“I think it is a trend which offers some advantaeges to startups…. It is dangerous when taken to extreme…. Every company gets to a place where the old answers don’t work anymore and then the only thing that works is for people to be creative and try new approaches to old problems. If you have outsources all your creativity, all your ability to take risk, all your ability to think about a new idea, then you are not going to be able to solve the problem you need to solve….”

Her talk on how medieval studies (college major) helped her and what a CEO is suppose to do she stated:

“That set of studies, more than anything, taught me how to think…. It [particular class in her major where she was required to read thousands of pages and condense them to 2 pages every week] taught me that to really undestand something you really have to go through all the detail of it, but then to be able to communicate something, to be able to prioritize action around something,  you have to get it down to the essence.   It taught me how you distringuish between the truly important and the merely interesting….”

When asked why she thought that anyone wanting to be a CEO should take on a sales role as some point in their career she stated:

” I think the human dimension of business is really important…. but beyond that, what selling is really about, if it is done well, is talking to people in a language they understand, that is meaningful to them.   If you are going to be successful in selling something to someone else, you have to speak to them in language that is familiar to them and in terms of things that are important to them….. Those are skills that any executive needs to have: How do communicate effectively. How do  speak to people in language they understand.  How tp speak to them in terms that are important to them….”

Interesting insights on some relevent topics to anyone in business. There is much, much more in the interview, well worth the listen.

Over the last two days I was pointed to two interesting on-line moneymakers. They were interesting in how they make money. One sells something that is ubiquitous and in most caes considered a nuisance, while the other harnesses the power of a distributed crowd to provide a service at a very low cost.

The first example is http://www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com/ where Linda Katz of Garden City, Kansas sells, you guessed it, tumbleweeds on the internet. The original post I ran across is over at Unusual Business Ideas That Work. This excerpt from the linked article pretty much explains the origin of the business.

“It all started as a joke,”says Katz, 49. She asked her son to build her a family Web page so she could communicate with friends and give it the tongue-in-cheek name Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Never mind that she didn’t even live on a farm, but in a subdivision. Nevermind that you can’t cultivate tumbleweed, which spreads its seed as it tumbles in the wind. For authenticity’s sake, Katz added a price list ($35 for a big weed, $25 for a midsize one, $20 for the small economy model)

So tongue-in-cheek or not, Katz created a business when she wasn’t looking for one. It turns out that her buyers range from people looking to decorate their houses, to movie studios, to academic researchers, to people in love with Westerns, and even for tumbleweed Christmas trees (picture at right by erissiva). Seth Godin has a comment on this site on how this site emerged totally from organic search engine traffic.

The second site is www.pickydomains.com where they have an original take on making money off the domain name trade. Most people make money (some say a lot) by speculating on domain names. Some companies can hire consultants for thousands of dollars to come up with a catchy and traffic-driving domain name. Pickydomains takes the “power of the crowds” approach. As a person/entity wanting to use their service, you pay $50 and a list of requirements for your domainname. For example you would provide the basic site type, hyphens/no-hyphens, .com or other, mandatory keywords, etc. Pickydomains would post this to their list of users, a large list. The users would submit possible solutions. If the users’s submission is chosen, pickydomains shares half the $50 fee. PickyDomains also can buy any ones the customers don’t want, but they think are worth something. If they don’t provide something you are interested in, they refund your fee. This is a great example of having a crowd solve a problem that it is difficult to solve as an individual or a small group. Interesting business idea. If you do to the site you can see some exmples of successful wins. The one comment I have is that this service is too inexpensive. Just like the previous post Here, people expectation are linked to evironment and pre-text.

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on an experiment by the Washington Post. (original article) It seems that they took a world class violin prodigy playing a $3.5 million dollar violin and plunked him down in a subway station acting like a street musician. Dressed in regular clothes and a baseball cap with the open violin case at his feet he played some of the worlds most challenging violin pieces. So what was the result? So how much did he earn? Keep in mind that he usually sells out concert halls for $100 bucks a seat for the good ones? He made a staggering $32… (chech out the video on the Washington Post site)

Besides being a pretty good experiment on how context affects people’s perception, it is a good learning experience for marketers. You can have a world class service of product, but if you are selling it in the wrong place to the wrong crowd, you will be sorely dissapointed. How many times have we heard “Why isn’t this selling, it is the best performance product on the market?” Maybe you are trying to sell it to the wrong crowd or in the wrong context. Maybe your prospective customers are like the subway patrons that have no use for entertainment as their sole objective when they encounter the service  is getting to work.

A second take on this is to consider the fact that there was probably a subway musician in the same subway system that morning that cleared more than $32. Why was he more sucessfully financially while our virtuoso would be hard pressed to pay for a day of parking  in the downtown area?  Was it the tailoring of his music and “act” to the audience at hand? Did he play music that was recognizable to his audience? Did he “ham it up” for the audience to provide a laugh on the usually stressful trip to work?

• Where in your business or industry does context and experience affect the profitability or sucess of your product or service?
• Are you unsuccessfully trying to sell a product or service designed for one geography or context into one that isn’t as receptive?
• How do you use context or experience to increase your profit on a product or service?

Guy Kawasaki has a good post on TrendHunter Magazine (warning, some content not suitable for work on there). Guy’s post gives some great examples.   Also look at the Science category and the Art and Design Category. This is a mix of the weird and strange mixed with the  insightful and coo .    As with anyone that is a trendsetter they are usually on the fringe which is extremely evident from the links above. You can see the tongue-in-cheek in this publication, but take a look at the about trendhunter page and the associated list of publications at the bottom.

An Example of one trend post is the M3 Heliodisplay from iO2 technology.

So how do you use Trendhunter? Where are the gems there you can develop? Are there some common threads on there that would make the basis of a trend you could ride and tailor your products to? Can you market to a fringe customer base? Should you?

On a related subject Phil McKinney has a great podcast over at Killer Innovations that deals with the “Trend Safari.”  Well work the listen.  The transcipt is also there for the podcast/mp3 challenged.

I saw this video the other day on YouTube and some links from other places. It is pretty profound if you have not seen it.

It really brings into question what kind of expectations we are setting in the media. Check out one of the Dove sites if want to learn more. If you take a different slant on this, what business expectations do some companies strive for and are held to that are unrealistic for a given market segment? Is there a similar complex in business to assume that every industry is capable of supporting X return on investment or Y profit margin?