deal architect

Game On!

Verne Harnish at Fortune talks about 5 ways to close big deals – now.

• Help the deciders earn more
• Quantify the cost of delay
• Get them to put skin in the game
• Submit three proposals
• Hire an Influencer

And it took me into the locker rooms in New Orleans this week. It is so easy to game plan on a chalk board.

I would love to have Fortune turn that into a more dynamic simulation

• where the buyers have their own influencers
• where the buyers have ethical guidelines on using corporate purchases for personal gain
• where the buying team has procurement and legal barracudas who have been hustled countless times to buy NOW!
• where the competition submits not 3, but 4 proposals each
• where the surest way to fast track a proposal is to show overwhelming payback from whatever is being sold

That would be fun to watch – and I would likely add to my list of 10 stupid salesperson tricks :)

Let the game come to you

I had one New Year’s non-resolution: Don't even try to compete with the 2012 New Florence 750+ post record.

No Olympics or Presidential elections in 2013 to support that volume. Need to work on next book, and more consulting and speaking this year. Need to take Margaret on 2 cruises. More resolutions I do not want to bore you with.

Well, without trying too hard, January had 63 NFNR posts.  Spooky, but that’s over 750 annualized!

I believe Phil Jackson, the legendary coach, likes to say “let the game come to you”. You know what, I am going to follow the Zen master’s advice rest of the year.

It’s difficult to be thirsty when you are sitting next to a firehose of innovation that we are all part of in this New Florence. Enjoy the bounty.

Photo Credit

Blackberry: Ring in the Old?

It is a new day for Blackberry – the rebranding of RIM, the new 10 Smartphones

But I am more struck by the management team that CEO (since last January) Thorsten Heins has been building. These are alums of Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Verizon, Vodafone. They scream telecom and enterprise. While they may be in layers below, I would have thought he would be bring in a Scott Forstall or a Hugo Barra who helped build the massive iOS and Android ecosystems.

No wonder this Z10 reviewer laments the continued paucity of apps

I scoured BlackBerry World (formerly App World) for the apps I use the most often on my iPhone. eBay? Nope. CNN? Forget it. Pocket? Uh-uh. Netflix? Notoriously, no. What about stuff that ties into my gadgets, such as Eye-Fi, Nike+ or Jawbone's UP app? Nada, zip, zilch. Okay, how about productivity-related apps I use for work, including Trello, Campfire and Expensify? Not a one. Even Pulse, a news reader I use religiously and has a simple HTML5 base, isn't there. 

Apple as competition? See how the BBC badgered the UK MD this morning and could not get him to acknowledge it (thanks to my friend David Terrar in London for the pointer).

Well, maybe they are going after a different demographic than Apple or Google. They are targeting two influencers they are most comfortable with – those that reflect the background of their executives

Telcos  

There are at least a few telco execs who would like the clock reversed. As I wrote in my book “Prior to Apple introducing the iPhone, carriers paid device manufacturers just enough for “planned obsolescence,” and subsidized those devices to consumers. This allowed them to lock customers into another long-term contract with the new phone. There was little device loyalty. In fact, carriers like Verizon had the marketing slogan “new phone every two years.The iPhone is a platform with frequent software updates and an application ecosystem. So it has a much longer brand commitment. The device used to be the commodity in the equation. Now as Apple expands its carrier choices—AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint in the United States—the mobile service becomes the commodity in this changing business model.”  Well, Blackberry may give telcos that wedge.

CIOs

The corporate and government market used to be RIM’s most lucrative. In recent years, RIM’s problems and BYOD strategies at many companies has dented that loyalty. That is where the enterprise management focus comes in. As the WSJ reports

“RIM has responded by offering incentives aimed at getting CIOs to give BlackBerry 10 a try, including free software upgrades for the new operating system, a free phone for customers' IT departments and training to IT departments to help ensure a smooth transition. RIM also rolled out its upgraded phone-management software earlier this month, which now allows companies to manage BlackBerrys and other smartphones.”

Samsung has already shown Apple is not invincible in the enterprise. Blackberry could follow a similar script.

Blackberry may never (again) win the mobile features or the ecosystem wars, but if it can get the telcos and CIOs back in its camp, that is a sure way to survive and may be even thrive.

Companies do not innovate. People do.

Rob Preston at InformationWeek picks on an annual list of innovative companies from Boston Consulting Group:

“Meantime, show us the seminal innovations in 2012 from the likes of No. 17 Coca-Cola (caffeine-free Diet Cherry Coke?), No. 18 Dell (a nice consolidation of its market position, but …), No. 20 Wal-Mart (more everyday low prices?) and No. 30 Anheuser-Busch (Bud Light Lime?).

BCG's top 50 ranking is heavily skewed toward just four industries: top heavy on technology and automotive, plus industrial products/processes and consumer/retail. No pharma, no healthcare, no agriculture, no logistics.”

I agree such lists of companies are flawed, but for different reasons.

Apple is Apple because Steve Jobs brought together an amazing team with Tim Cook, an operational genius, Jonathan Ive, a design genius, Ron Johnson, a retail genius, Philip Schiller, a marketing genius and many more. Apple is Apple because it leveraged the innovations created by people at Corning, Foxconn and countless other suppliers.

Innovation happens at a cellular level than “company”. If I had focused on a company based list in my last book, I would not have profiled:

• “Non-Companies” like Roosevelt Island with its smart parking and tidal power or the country of Estonia with world leading civic services like electronic ballots and medical records
• Projects like the hyper efficient Facebook Prineville data center or the various innovative projects that came together in the Boeing 787 (yes, they are still innovative in my eyes even with its battery issues)
• Business models like those of Valence Health and the varied ones Apple brought to music, mobile and books with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad
• Products like the Lexmark Genesis and the Virgin America high-tech cabin
• Designers like Robert Brunner and Yves Behar who have designed some of the most innovative products of the last decade

Digging for innovation in all corners of the enterprise makes it messier to catalog and it takes lots more pages than a list takes. It also disappoints many who are fans of “silver bullets” and hope to  learn about innovation from just studying Apple or Google.

Oracle’s expanding Cloud

I am glad I was part of a (virtual) fireside chat yesterday with Mark Hurd and Thomas Kurian on the Oracle Cloud before I read Bob Evans’ indignant post on Forbes which has the tone of “when is the world finally going to credit us for a cloud that supports 10,000 paying customers and 25 million users?”

Mark and Thomas marched through a series of offerings in the Oracle cloud including some that have been talked about for a while

• Database of choice for many SaaS vendors 
• Fusion apps available in cloud deployment mode

and several growing areas

• ‘burst capacity” via its Infrastructure as a service
• platform – database  and Java – as a service
• growing network of cloud data centers around world
• social and marketing apps

During Q&A I asked Mark if he was concerned about the market perception that larger vendors are “cloudwashing” when their cloud revenues and their cloud infrastructure capex are still puny. Posts on this blog in the last couple of weeks provide some examples.

I asked him if Oracle would report more comprehensive cloud numbers any time soon given the investment and traction represented in the bullets they had discussed. He was non-committal beyond the “cloud software subscriptions revenues” number which Oracle is already disclosing.

I understand taking that step would mean more definition statements of what is “cloud” , auditor signoffs, showing of comparative numbers from previous periods etc.

But think how much more impactful they would be than claims of 25 million users. And think of the pressure it would put on competitors to disclose similar numbers.

More Innovation

On the New Florence log

The Harbin Winter Wonderland

E-Cigs

The Pebble smartwatch

Silicon Prairie

Sundance – now technology to support the indie filmmaker

Fragmenting Light to improve Solar Cell efficiency

The Facebook Graph

Cirque + Cameron = Cool as in Ice Cold

The end of the social enterprise?

Peter Goldmacher at Cowen and Larry Dignan/Dennis Howlett at ZDNet have painted in the last few days a bleak view of the social enterprise.

It is interesting to read their comments in a week which starts with the Connect event which showcases IBM’s attempts to reposition Lotus Notes as social, and ends with the Super Bowl, which for the last few years has seen social media extend the life and reach of an exorbitant 30 second TV commercial ( priced at close to $ 4 million this year).

You could call it “old” versus “new” social. Actually, better to see it as “internal”  versus “external” social.

Internal social has been somewhat disappointing the last few years. As I have written often, the Enterprise 2.0 category has been long on volume and short on value. But if you look beyond vendor happy talk, and see what creative companies are doing, there is definite reason for hope. GE has used the Facebook App, BranchOut and LinkedIn to cut out headhunting fees for the majority of its 25,000 openings. That’s real payback.  Toyota has extended social to the Internet of Things by using salesforce Chatter as its platform which connects its electric vehicles, customers and dealers. Both the GE and Toyota use cases are being applied in a number of other industries.

External social is far more exciting, though not  necessarily for the software tools. As I saw in during the Republican convention last year, my city enjoyed an impressive improvement in positive perceptions.  But it relied on BarkleyREI to set up a social media command center with tools like Radian6. My city did not invest in buying those tools. Larger brands are similarly expecting their agencies to do much of the social monitoring.  The role of an agency is expanding as companies try complex campaigns across “all three screens” and print and physical world. We will see plenty of that this weekend as this article says “Super Bowl ads provide that opportunity from having people post their ideas and videos for an ad like Pizza Hut is doing to unveiling the ads on social media to having contests or promotional codes that drive people to a social media site to having the conclusion of an ad on a social media site”

Lots of exciting social, high payback stuff is being done by many customers. It would be a mistake to use quarterly results of software vendors to give up on social.

Making More Money Selling Less Of What People Want

Ashlee Vance at  BusinessWeek uses the title to describe IBM's recent financials.

But the title could apply to so many companies that are reporting numbers these days. It is a painful reminder that the reality is the inverse of the TV commercials and noise from the fan boys who want you to believe 80 to 90% of their revenues come from innovative, new products.

Customers write them the checks, don't they?

Yes they do, but many with a Fxxx you than a Thank you note. They are often what Fred Reichheld calls "Bad Profits" - "whenever a customer feels misled, mistreated, coerced or abused; profits from that customer are bad"

As Fred also says "accountants can't distinguish between good profits and bad"

Apparently neither can most "influencers" - so voices like Ashlee's stand out.

The Forest from the Trees

I enjoy Chunka Mui’s work (it helps when you have spent a little time in person with an author) but I was dazzled by his Forbes piece on the broader implications of the Google autonomous car

In fact, the driverless car has broad implications for society, for the economy and for individual businesses. Just in the U.S., the car puts up for grab some $2 trillion a year in revenue and even more market cap.  It creates business opportunities that dwarf Google’s current search-based business and unleashes existential challenges to market leaders across numerous industries, including car makers, auto insurers, energy companies and others that share in car-related revenue.

We are all fascinated with the Google car. But at CES this year, Toyota and others showed off their own versions. And the Toyota angle was less gee-whiz but more on next-generation car safety. At least some cities are thinking through the implications of such cars on red lights,  as I blogged here.

As Chunka points out, city budget officers better be thinking about the impact on traffic fine revenues. Insurance companies on what it means to premiums.  In the transition, there will opportunities for startups like The Climate Corp, founded by Google alums which uses advanced analytics to provide farmers crop insurance.

Analysis like Chunka’s may seem hyped because of the financial numbers he throws out, but a very useful reminder we get bogged down in feature/function of so many technologies and don’t think through broader, longer term implications.

The missing element in Enterprise Clouds: Capex

Listen to any IBM or Verizon or SAP cloud pitch and somewhere, somehow the old bullet “We will turn your capex into opex” will show up. The elephant in the room is “Where do that customer capex disappear?” It should move from the customer’s balance sheet to the vendors, but has not to date.

Being earnings season you get to read Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook financials. These companies spend billions on data centers and infrastructure. Even Microsoft has for its Azure cloud. And that for mostly consumer  functionality.

For enterprise grade, industrial strength cloud computing should not IBM and other enterprise vendor have massive amounts on their balance sheets? I asked Verizon once, and they brought me a number for all their capex – FiOS, cell towers etc. When I asked them – only for data centers, they said they do not break it out. Hmmm…

Maybe they are doing an Apple. Remember when it was under construction, Apple’s massive iCloud data center would not even show up on Google Earth? So, maybe the enterprise vendors are hiding both the financial and physical presence of their pyramids

But as a customer, I would ask an enterprise salesman “How will my capex disappear?”

Get ready for a show that would make Penn and Teller proud:)