kevin donaldson

In an era where products comoditize very quickly, its important to think even more creatively about pricing strategies for your products.  Expecially in established industries and markets where there are long standing models and 'ways of doing business' (channels, buy patterns, standard offerings),  there is room to innovate not only with the products and services you offer but also with pricing.  Here is a nice manifesto that summarizes 5 rules of pricing to help think about pricing strategy.

Great concise post on HBR by Scott Anthony (@ScottDAnthony) on something I fully agree with: Don't Confuse Passion with Competence.  Both are necessary for success.

Couple of powerful lines that sum up the article for me:

• <Quoting Mike Tyson> "Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face."  Passion is necessary to keep pushing when the punch inevitably lands.
• Passion only matters if it leads to an innovation that delivers impact, whether that impact is measured in revenues, profits, improved process performance, or something entirely differently.

Nice article from McKinsey Quarterly on how leaders can kill meaning at work. 

Click here to download:

How_leaders_kill_meaning_at_work.pdf (220 KB)

Decent manifesto on stimulating innovation inside the organization.  A few specific nuggets I took away:

•  Watch out for a culture of ‘yeah but…’ instead of the more desirable ‘what if…?’

•  There is no question that limited resources can stifle innovation, but all too often this becomes an easy and convenient excuse for not doing the critical and creative thinking required to push to the next level—the place where elegance is found.  Do people in your organization see limitations as invitations to ingenuity and opportunities to differentiate or excuses for why it can’t be done?

•  People don’t lay down their lives for a job. They don’t give the totality of who they are to line shareholder’s pockets. But, they will give everything they’ve got to play a role in changing the world.

• The fact is, you can’t innovate without experimenting and you can’t experiment without making some mistakes….By giving people permission to fail, gutsy leaders give them permission to try new things.   When was the last time you rewarded someone for an intelligent failure?

I particularly like the idea of an "Intelligent Failure" award where colleagues nominate and award each other for stepping out and trying a smart experiment that failed and what was learned from it.  

A set of brief segments from an McKinsey Interview with behaviorial economist Dan Ariely on the topic of irrationality in the workplace.  My favorite clip from this set is on the topic of 'When to trust your Gut'.  Basically you can trust your gut if with lots of experience AND if you can control all possible influences that might impact the outcome of the decision... his point being - experimentation is the key, and he asks a great question - why don't companies do more experimentation?  We should always be testing leaps of faith.  Organizational agility is the mindset needed to support this type of continuous experimentation.  Agile software shops understand it.  Yes, there are costs to experimentation but the early learnings more than outweigh any of the costs.

Ariely has written a couple of books on irrationality.   One that I have read is Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions -  a really entertaining and worthwhile read. 

Like any type of business the tactics for managing and executing a startup are evolving.  Here is a new presentation by Steve Blank from SXSW 2011 on the topic.  Focusing on 3 topics near and dear to me: Customer Development, Business Models, and Lean Startups.  While the primary slant of this presentation is on software (and also a primary focus of the Lean Startup) these concepts can be applied in any startup environment.  Its more about having the right mindset.

A facinating post entitled The Connected Company by Dave Gray (Xplane) focused on the concept of building companies like cities.... I am still digesting...  I especially like this comment:

Although we tend to design companies like machines, we instinctively and intuitively understand that companies are not made of cogs, levers and gears. In the end, they are made out of people. For top management, it would be wonderful if we could put our business strategy into the machine, push a button and wait for the results. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to put your strategy into people if you want to get results.

Music an amazing form of art and creativity.  I have always been told I have a good ear for tones.  When I was young, I used to help tell a friend of mine who played guitar replicate music from our favorite band.  I could always tell if he was hitting the right note to match the song.  The funny thing though is that I have never really played an instrument myself (beyond classes in high school).  Its one of those things on my life to-do list.  I feel called to play some type of instrument, and listening to this wonderful piece of art today on a 4 string Hawaiian ukulele makes you realize how creative humans can be with instruments.

I recently finished a great book by Randy Komisar and John Mullins called Getting to Plan B:  Breaking through to a better business model.  I originally got turned onto this book from the Startup Lessons Learned Conference in spring of 2010.  While the book has become a must read for startups, and in fact does focus a lot on starting new business's the core aspects of the book can be used across any business that:

• is starting up a new business unit
• carries out new product development
• is developing new service offerings
• is looking at evaluating new business strategies

... so pretty much any modern business that wants to stay competitive will get some benefit from the book.  The title is a good summation of the book:  Always be looking for and testing plan B, C, D etc.  To do this the authors focus on 3 main principals:

1. Analogs:  Don't re-invent the wheel.  Analogs to your idea are successful predecessor companies that are worth mimicking in some way. Portions of others ideas which can be borrowed and/or adapted to you to help understand economics and other aspects of your idea.
2. Antilogs: Be Different.  Antilogs to your idea are predecessor companies compared to which you explicitly choose to do things differently.
3. Leaps of Faith:  Ask the right questions.  Anilogs and Antilogs help you reach conclusions about some things faster with at least some level of certainty, but there will be questions that cannot be answered by historical precedence.  Leaps of faith are the beliefs you hold about the answers to your questions despite having no real evidence that they are actually true.  Therefor you must experiment.

These leaps of faith must be tested, and measured via a dashboard.  This can essentially create the framework for a simple yet effective management framework.  The book has many great examples but I will use one of my own for this post. 

I support and have been involved since the early days with a startup non profit called Create Common Good.  Create Common Good provides training and employment to refugees and others in need through experiential programs that transform lives and enrich communities  One of our programs is a farm program where we train refugees in farming techniques but also use the proceeds from the farm to support our efforts.  One of the ideas that we have had is to create a mobile lunch truck that serves up international cuisine made by refugees based on food from their native homeland using in-season local produce produced at the farm.  In addition to some Anilogs and Antilogs found for mobile food trucks, here is a sample Leap of Faith Dashboard to describe how it can be used.  (results listed below are fictitious:)

Many companies try and create complicated sets of metrics and dashboards, but often they are just patting themselves on the back with metrics that already prove what they know to be true.  Next time try innovating and exploring some leaps of faith in your business using this simple tool to test and measure.

Another great RSA clip overlaying a discussion by Sir Ken Robinson on Changing the Educational Paradigm.