June 2004

Highlights from the last few weeks on my weblog...

Entrepreneurs: Relationships come first

There's a good article at the Knowledge@Wharton site - "Why Global Business Needs Kinder, Gentler Entrepreneurs and Leaders". Reporting on a panel session of entrepreneurs, it suggests that collaboration and relationship building get more attention than a hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners stereotype.

Panelists emphasized less the solitary aspects of the entrepreneurial life than the social ones. Forget genius, they said; what really counts most is building a strong network to turn to for help and advice, treating people with dignity, and serving your customers well.

Several bits of this resonate with me. For instance, it challenges the Big Idea fallacy of business:

One element that seems to be overrated is the so-called big idea. “In most settings, there is either someone who will pay to get it faster, or someone who will pay to get it cheaper. You don’t have to invent Xerox or the PC in order to be an entrepreneur,” said one panelist

The flaws of focus groups

I found a witty and well-observerd article by Leapfrog Research: on how clients behave while watching focus groups. Bascially it observes that clients often pay good money to sit behind a one-way mirror watching customers in market research group discussions... and then pay no attention.

It identifies these patterns

Viewing facility as business centre
Friends reunited
The empty room mystery
The private reality TV show

You can download this short and pithy article direct from my website.

The story of branding, told by narcissists

In this short entry on my site, I take a crack at how branding is misrepresented by experts with their own interests at heart... and suggest that its a more organic, emergent process.

The tyrrany of the explicit

I think that business suffers from the tyranny of the explicit.

Its desire for measurability and proof makes it focus on the explicit element of what happens in human relationships. There's quite a lot of evidence that this is like the bit of the iceberg that shows above the water... interesting, but very far from whole story. More on this, and some interesting survey findings...

Responsibility + Helplessness= Abuse

I reflect on some powerful ideas from Richard Farson's book, Management of the Absurd. He contrasts training on the one hand...

Training... leads to the development of skills and techniques. Each new technique implicitly reinvents the manager's job by adding a new skill requirement, a new definition of the task, and a new responsibility... but because techniques don't work well in human relations, the manager is often unable to adequately discharge these new-felt responsbilities... when people feel responsible for handling some situation in which they are, in fact, largely helpless, a dangerous combination of feelings is created: responsibility plus helplessness leads to abuse.

with Education, on the other

Education, because it involves an examination of one's personal experience in the light of an encounter with great ideas, tends to make people different from each other. So the first benefit of education is that the manager becomes unique, independent, the genuine article.

More thoughts on this...

CEOs lose faith in Marketing Directors

A recent article from Harvard Business School charts CEOs' disenchantment with marketing and speculates about why. I chip in a few thoughts of my own about how this relationship becomes dysfunctional, in this post.