I have spent much time over the last few months digging deep into the business processes that support business development management. I was surprised to learn just how prime this space is for innovation as so many of the “accepted practices” utilized by people focused on business development for their organizations are arcane, inefficient, and lacking the advantage of effective supporting technology. There seems to be limited discussion and effort focused on “next practices” in this area, which is itself a tremendous opportunity. Glaringly, one commonality I have observed is the struggle by the business development community to force CRM tools to work in support of their efforts. Universally, I have heard of much pain around this effort. Another commonality is a belief in the power of social media and open networking, but limited knowledge or experience in how to do this effectively.

This all compels me to  propose the development of “business development radar” (BDRadar) as a tool that truly supports business development management (or BDM), and that integrates a priority set of functionality in support of open networking/marketing/business development goals. A tool that is accessible via the web, and is perfectly designed for easy use on mobile devices, that is cost effective for the soloist, independent, or smaller organization that realize the value of collaborative networking,  and that seeks an alternative to the limitations of a closed enterprise tool. Essentially, a tool that can surface business intelligence, visual network maps, and patterns whenever and wherever we need it, and that is seamlessly integrated into the networking and business development workflow. From one unified interface, a tool that provides:

- Open, collaborative network mapping
- Custom profile building with selective sharing
- Intuitive filtering and sorting
- Concise management of next actions with automated minding
- Unified contact management integrated with tools already in use
- Support of open networking/social CRM/CRM 2.0

No, LinkedIn does not do this.

The key differentiator from closed network CRM tools is that BDRadar would be designed at its core to support the open networker, and enables the creation of massive, mapped, searchable collaborative networks. It would support co-marketing and collaborative networking opportunities in support of business goals outside of the organizational firewall. I strongly believe that this is the future of business development, and to my knowledge the tool to support this does not yet exist. Driving the need for this BDRadar are critical key obsessions, and competitive necessities for business development professionals and marketers:

- Effectively determining context of opportunity
- Freshness of information
- Speed to intelligence

I have explored an endless array of tools to support and automate the addressing of these obsessions. What is required is an open tool that not only manages information, but that can recognize the patterns that identify opportunity, and supports the sometimes collaborative liberation of that opportunity into real business with individuals and teams outside of your organization. I’ve cobbled together a series of mostly freemium tools that I maintain. Tools that automate contact management, opportunity profiling, social media search, and network mapping. These work, but the inefficiency of moving between different interfaces, difficulty in easily sharing information, and the lack of integration compels us to create a better solution, to design something that REALLY works, and that we can easily share with others.

Stay tuned.

An appropriate follow to my previous post. The diagram above does an excellent job visualizing not only the elements that comprise design strategy, but also gives some detail on how this strategy could be applied to ideas as actionable steps. You can learn more about this diagram from Ralf Beuker and Erik Roscam, and also download a larger file that makes the detail easy to read.

I’m one to flog motorsports analogies to help make a point. The image above is one I’ve used often in presentations to help businesses understand how a team comes together in support of their goals, and that success is determined by the ability of this team to work together and not by the talent inherit in any one individual. This is as true for designing buildings as it is for designing websites. The team is much, much bigger than the sum of it’s parts. When talking about this, I’ll often say something to the effect of:

“If our client is the driver, the car is their business, and the track is the competitive marketplace, we want to create, lead and support the best team to help our client win.”

I know, it’s a bit excessive. But it works. There’s something about a Formula 1 pit crew, as pictured above, that makes this clear and that everybody gets. First, races are often won or lost based on how well the pit crew can execute the pit strategy, and the pressure to perform is intense as they typically have between 4-8 seconds to change tires, refuel, and make important adjustments. Each member of the crew is very highly accomplished not just at their specific task, but in their ability to seamlessly integrate into the larger event of a pit stop. Each crew member must intuitively understand where they fit into this precision drill, and understand their physical relationship to the other crew members, the vehicle, and the crew leader. It’s exciting to watch a team in action, and with Formula 1 racing the best spectating is often just watching the different teams execute their pit strategies.

And so it is in business, design, architecture, marketing, advertising, and anything else that depends on people working together for success. Henry Ford was right, putting effort to team building and understanding, to learning how to work well together, is success itself.

Update: A friend sent on the image below to further beat the pit crew analogy to death. It’s a great image, and adds some clarity to the six second chaos we spectators witness when the racing cars enter the pits.

I read a great post by Jeff Jarvis, himself building on a post by Fred Wilson, that neatly ties together many things that I’ve been thinking and writing about. Together they talk about how the crisis we are experiencing is a catalyst for a fundamental restructuring in a number of industries. More specifically, and to my own perspective going back more than a year, this crisis is forcing tremendous change by shaking out irrelevant business models and challenging the depth of relevance in others. We are quickly learning what matters, and what does not. The obvious markers of this struggle are the American automobile industry, airlines, and the newspaper publishing business, these being shaken to their very core and with the very distinct possibility that they could go away altogether as we know them.  They probably will, and as much as that hurts it might be necessary. At some level, though, all businesses are being challenged, and there are countless other companies, as well as entire industries, that are coursing the abyss. It’s scary, and for those that stand to lose their jobs it is indeed sad, but this is happening because events have changed the realities that these businesses operate in faster than they have been able to manage, anticipate, or address. In many cases, this is the result of avoidance on the part of leadership in the hopes that things would improve, that they would be relevant again. It ain’t gonna happen. Denial’s a bitch.

This is not all bad, though. Yes, companies without connections to customers, without a compelling message and value to their audience, and with antique business models are realizing that their days are actually coming to an end. This is the cost of stasis, of the inability to change, or to innovate. But to Bruce Nussbaum’s point, we all face a call to transform business, industry, and our very activities. Fortunately for all of us there are many companies who are, and have been, doing just that. They’ve been transforming and changing how business is being done. They’ve been changing what matters. As Jeff Jarvis states, out of the economic downturn will come a focus on companies that can build “networks atop platforms”. Presently, many people are the victims of circumstance, and that is definitely an awful place to be, but there are countless others who are hard at work in spite of events, and very determined to be successful. This gets me pretty excited as I know that the result is going to be some astounding innovation and opportunity. That’s motivating. The challenges of this crisis have changed the things that get our attention, focused organizations on reinvention, and created an alignment that has thrust new business models and ways to think about business out into the open to serve as positive indicators for the future, and the very real reality that we’re going to make it through this and be all the stronger for doing so. Stronger companies, stronger business models, and stronger industries.

You can substitute relevant for stronger.

Mary Meeker, an internet analyst at Morgan Stanley, gave her annual view of the world and the technology industry at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week. Flipping through the slides I found them enlightening, and the indicators she highlights paint a somewhat ominous reality for the coming year. She points out the connection between technology and advertising spending and GDP growth, and growth is obviously trending down. No surprises there, though.

You can view the slides from Mary’s presentation above or download them here.

via TechCrunch

“People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Thesis 11

Dan Wieden, founder of Wieden+Kennedy, said that line about being stupid when asked about his job by Polly Labarre of Mavericks at Work. I believe that the full quote was “My job is to walk in stupid every day.” His point is that there is no way he could know everything, that he is aware of the obstacle of expertise, and that he will not always have the best ideas. So, coming into work “stupid” keeps his mind open to ideas from anywhere, and open to valuing them when they happened. Clearly, that strategy has worked well for Dan.

I read that Dan Wieden quote at Mavericks at Work a few days ago and have been thinking about it over the weekend. I believe it is a very powerful attitude about how we could approach our work and maintain important perspective. I think there is tremendous value in, every day, going to work ready to learn, anxious for surprises, and anticipating the new. In coming to work looking for change, for improvement, and to challenge convention. We need to go to work knowing that ideas can come from anywhere, and should, and that those ideas should be acknowledged, encouraged, and supported… arriving every day with the intent of building this, of making it happen, of not standing in the way. Every day we need to know that somebody, somewhere is better than us… and that is totally cool because we want to learn from them. We need to come in every day hopeful, hungry, and focused on being in a different place than we were yesterday, on being in a different place this afternoon than this morning. We need to spend more time listening than talking, more time trying to understand and see from alternative points of view and work to avoid reaction and to lessen our reliance on instinct and instead give ourselves the time to own our decisions, and be thoughtful about it. We should spend as much energy on building our team as we do building our careers, and realize that our team is better when it is made up of people who just might be, and probably need to be, smarter than us. Instead of adopting the persona of an expert, we should try that of a student. Being a student was fun, everything was about newness and possibilities. Being an expert is limiting.

We all see the well-worn grain of company “culture” begin to show in ourselves and the others we work with. We see the behaviors that are counter to doing things better, to doing them the right way, and we allow this to happen. We see people who have stopped learning, people who no longer have wonder and curiosity and no longer have passion and drive. This is a form of giving up, or retiring from what is important. This is not an option. Dan Wieden nailed it.

In a similar vein, I found an excellent, direct and honest speech by Dan Wieden on the W+K London blog Welcome to Optimism, which I have followed for a long time. Both the speech and the blog are totally worth reading.

Matt Dickman recently conducted a really interesting reader poll over at his blog Techno//Marketer to get a sense of what people felt the most influential medium might be. The results are presented in the graph above. I believe it is a safe bet that his readers skew massively to the internet, but I believe they are still representative of the paradigmatic changes that have occurred in the greater media landscape. The broader theme here, that the ways in which people interact with information is changing, is something I am actively exploring myself. What is absolutely not surprising from Matt’s survey is the incredibly low performance of newspapers and radio. The EBITDA of newspapers has been trending down for years, and many historically prominent rags are facing irrelevancy to their audiences. Audience preferences and expectations with regards to how they engage information is changing, this interaction is very fluid, and while some struggle to adapt to this reality others have been slow to respond and are suffering the consequences of a dwindling subscription base and shrinking advertising revenues. That spells doom for those newspapers. The same is happening in radio, and the EBITDA of radio is tracking similarly to that of newspapers. At the heart of this is the reality that we are increasingly moving away from having things pushed at us, and increasing moving toward technologies and mediums that allow us to engage media and information in ways that are dynamic and customizable to our preferences. Also, there is an informational frequency issue and newspapers, especailly, have struggled to compete with the 24/7 nature of the informational engagement model of the web. Those that have moved to a comprehensive web strategy have struggled to find an appropriate revenue model, especially one that can scale. We are watching media evolution and the survival of the fittest, of the most innovative.

Going back perhaps a decade, many newspaper publishers failed to appropriately survey the landscape for strategic risk to their organizations. As a result, they missed important opportunities to substantively investigate and innovate their business models. The web has moved incredibly quickly and efficiently in becoming pervasive in our society, in our culture, and many publishers now face the incredible challenge of trying to change a business model when it is absolutely too late.

There are several components of varying complexity that make up any business. It is the quality of these components, and their unique combination (hopefully), that provide businesses with a competitive advantage in the marketplace. From the investment side, understanding the quality of an enterprise is very much tied to understanding the business model of that enterprise, and how it contrasts to its competitors – what advantages that business model creates for the business in the marketplace, and how those advantages will scale over time. Additionally, there is tremendous value in understanding at a deep level that the framework of a given business model gives an edge as companies survey the competitive landscape for strategic risk, and the opportunities inherent to that risk. It is common for businesses to take a very haphazard approach to analyzing, understanding, and building the foundation of their own business model, it is also common for businesses to miss the opportunity of conducting the same analysis of their competitors. This oversight with regards to understanding their own context in the marketplace is most likely due to myth of complexity as it relates to “putting the pieces together” and taking a hard look at the constituent components of the business in question.

I was excited to find the slideshow above, and the related posts, by Alex Osterwalder. Alex has put forth a model for analyzing, understanding, designing, and contrasting business models that is easy, straightforward, and, I believe, incredibly valuable. He provides detail for what actually makes up a business model here. There is a lot of writing in business pubs right now about business model reinvention and business model innovation due to the nature of the economy and the competitive environment of different industries. This is all good, but often what is missing are the practical matters of creating an effective baseline from which to engage in exercises and experiments into innovation and reinvention. I believe that Alex succinctly provides us the tools for creating this baseline in a way that is quickly revealing of problems and opportunities, and tied to creating understanding.

Take a moment to review the slideshow and then read Alex’s latest post at his blog Business Model Design and Innovation.

Click on the image above to enlarge the graph to make it more readable. It paints a picture that is probably not that surprising, but definitely attention grabbing. The United States faces a very different reality in the world today than it did toward the end of the 1990’s. Today we face a diverse spectrum of new players who are incredibly competitive, players who are in some cases much more disciplined, ambitious, and intensely focused on innovation. The elephant in the room is China which, again, is no surprise. China has been nothing but resurgent over the last decade and nothing tells that story as well as the graph above. China’s rise over the other 33 nations in the survey demonstrates a much changed world economic landscape in technology. Note also the ascendancy of Mexico, South Korea, India, Singapore, and Taiwan. We all owe Thomas L. Friedman of the NYT’s a small bit of deference on this matter.

The graph is the result of a study conducted bi-annually by the Georgia Institute of Technology that measures the technology standing of 33 countries based upon four key technology focused factors:

1. National orientation toward technological competitiveness
2. Socioeconomic infrastructure
3. Technological infrastructure
4. Productive capacity

From the intro to the Georgia Tech report on the study findings:

“…China may soon rival the United States as the principal driver of the world’s economy – a position the U.S. has held since the end of World War II. If that happens, it will mark the first time in nearly a century that two nations have competed for leadership as equals”