Strategy and Tactics – Page 192 – IS Survivor Publishing

Internet strategy or business strategy? (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Last week, as I paid for my lunch, the cashier asked me, “Didn’t you co-author a book on the Internet?”

Celebrity is where you find it. My cashier friend is in rarified company, since the marketing for Selling on the ‘Net (NTC, 1996) has been, shall we say, spotty.

Nonetheless, since I wrote a book I must be an expert, which means I’ve had occasion to talk to business and IT leaders about the Web. Although almost everyone has a Web presence by now, many tell me they “… need to develop an Internet strategy.”

Strategy is good. Substitute any other tool for “Internet,” though, and you’ll immediately spot the problem (“We need a circular saw strategy”). “We need a strategy” is a defensive statement. The last two words of this sentence – “I guess” – remain unvoiced, but they come through loud and clear.

Even though the World Wide Web has been visible to business for about five years — and has been the focus of an extraordinary outpouring of creative energy, not to mention some cash — business leaders still don’t understand how to think about it. And while few dispute the future success of Internet commerce, we have to survive until the future gets here.

Businesses succeed on the Internet the same way they succeed in any other area: By deciding to succeed and understanding what success means. It’s a matter of clear, realistic thinking and deliberate planning. And as with most aspects of business planning there’s no tensor calculus involved.

Creating a Web site has more in common with publishing than with any other mundane endeavor. Like any publication, successful Web sites start with a clear focus and purpose, because if you confuse visitors to your site they’ll leave. Creating clarity takes hard work.

You’ll be in the middle of this discussion, so be prepared to lead it if the conversation gets squishy. Here’s an approach you can use if you decide to take charge:

Step 1 – Establish your business model: A business model states a cause-and-effect relationship in specific terms. Right now, the most successful model is enhancing customer relationships by improving service. Another good model: Suggesting new uses for your products to increase consumption by current customers.

Step 2 – Profile your target audience: An audience profile describes who you want to attract and what they want when they visit. Reading Web demographics and figuring out how to attract “that kind of person” is a trap. You want prospects and customers, not visitors. If you sell office furniture, you may want to attract architects and facilities planners who want advice on office design – teenage surfers are a distraction. If you sell acne medicine, architects and facilities planners are the distraction, unless they have pimples.

Step 3 – Define measures of success: Good measures come from your business model. Although not every cause-and-effect relationship lends itself to direct measurement, avoid simply falling back on measuring what is convenient, such as hits. Measure what’s important, not what’s easy to measure. Anything that doesn’t test your business model is pointless.

Step 4 – Perform a reality check: Is your target audience really going to exhibit the behavior you need? This may come down to arguing or it may involve market research. Just watch out for the we’ve-reached-consensus-so-we-must-be-right fallacy. Automobile makers did this successfully, rejecting online purchasing and instead helping buyers research car purchases.

Now comes all the real work – these four steps are just the start, and don’t ensure success.

In a competitive marketplace, nothing can.

Yet more reasons the network computer is worthless (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Let’s play Connect-the-Dots.

Here’s a direct quote from Ray Lane, president and COO of Oracle Corporation, reported in the January 1st issue of Solutions Integrator: “The NC (network computer) is worthless without Oracle8.”

Dot 1: The network computer, a great new platform that’s supposed to free us from the tyranny of the so-called “Wintel Duopoly” by being fully buzzword compliant — open, scalable, thin-client, and all the rest.

Dot 2: Only it isn’t really open, since you can only develop applications in a single language, namely Java.

Dot 3: It isn’t thin-client no matter how you define the term, since the NC executes whatever code the server sends it, fat, thin, muscular, anemic, or bug-laden.

Dot 4: Scalable? Sure, if you’re willing to scale your network to colossal data rates and invest in ever-bigger servers.

Dot 5: Ray Lane, speaking for the company that first articulated the concept of the NC, saying it won’t work without Oracle8. I guess that “open” thing is a goner, too.

What Lane meant, of course, was that Oracle8 is a fine server platform for NCs, not that it’s the only one. What he told you is something more: Oracle invented the NC for one reason and one reason only — to sell Oracle’s server products. He also told you that Oracle is willing to, shall we say, engage in a wee bit o’ puffery in accomplishing that mission.

No surprises here. Anyone who thought Oracle’s Larry Ellison had any other reason for developing and articulating the NC lives in the kind of dream world where we all just get along and predators eat garden greens for supper because carnivory causes prey to feel too much pain.

The world of commerce resembles a complex, multi-player chess game. Some participants play deeper games than others. Bill Gates, like Bobby Fischer, is a master of the combination, while others (pick any MBA-run company you like) employ positional strategies.

You’ll benefit by evaluating your personal situation with the same conceptual tools. You have goals — programs you sponsor and want to complete, career aspirations you want to satisfy, proteges you’re helping succeed. Your colleagues — managers, peers, service recipients and staff — all have the same.

You’re all playing the same game. You may play audaciously or with caution. You may play forthrightly or with guile. You can no more avoid playing the game, though, than you can find a place with a different gravitational constant — choosing to not play simply means playing blindly and at random.

Even if you prefer to just do your job, you still benefit by playing connect-the-dots with your colleagues. Evaluate what each player says and does, and figure out how they benefit from the results.

There’s nothing wrong with assuming your coworkers are motivated by self-interest rather than the good of the company. Two decades ago, Richard Dawkins wrote a book titled The Selfish Gene, which demonstrated that at a deep evolutionary level, organisms are a gene’s way of making more genes. In part, he justified this perspective by applying game theory to how genes can succeed.

Like Dawkins’ organisms, companies are simply convenient, ephemeral constructions that exist in order to transfer wealth to their owners and employees. Your “selfish” coworkers, like Dawkins’ selfish genes, are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do, and the theory of games applies to them (and you) too.

As a result, alignment between stakeholder benefits and company health is far from automatic. If you work in a place where they do align, you’re lucky — you can advance your career the easy way, by doing what’s best for the company.

Regardless, maintain your sense of personal integrity, provide value for the company’s customers, and help your employees succeed, because that’s the right thing to do and it’s personally satisfying. But like it or not, you’re still playing the game. And because you are, you may as well play to win.