All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

A funny thing happened on the way to the future — it ended up looking a lot like the present, only more so.

Information technology is trend city. Those of us who write about it are always looking for the Next Big Thing. The problem is, there are far too few NBTs to fill the space we need to fill every week (about 800 words in the case of Keep the Joint Running, including ManagementSpeak).

Since I’ve been in the field, the list of NBTs that turned out to actually be big is pretty short:

  1. Personal computers and everything that runs on and attaches to them.
  2. Database management systems.
  3. Graphical user interfaces.
  4. Local Area Networks.
  5. The Internet, World Wide Web, and electronic mail.
  6. Object-oriented analysis and programming and services-oriented analysis and programming.
  7. Visual programming.
  8. Open source.
  9. Virtualization.
  10. Smartphones.

How about tablets, the cloud, big data, and social media? Maybe.

Tablets are entering the workplace but aren’t (yet) transforming it, except for a few specialty areas. Cloud computing? It’s almost entirely the same old stuff only on someone else’s servers — there’s little or nothing in the cloud that’s new and interesting.

Big data? Few organizations even have medium-sized data; fewer yet have a culture that supports the sort of data-driven decision-making that warrants big investments in data warehouses and analytics (which is why, other than “visual programming” which includes report-writers and similar technology, these don’t make the list).

How about social media? Socially, very interesting. For businesses? LinkedIn matters for recruiting. Twitter has mostly replaced the press release. But most companies that have Facebook pages more or less reproduce their corporate website there — they haven’t cracked the value code, and it isn’t at all certain there’s a value code to be cracked.

All four are, that is, potential NBTs with varying degrees of promise.

So we have ten proven Next Big Things, with roughly four years between appearances. Miss the next one and you’ve blown it. Spend too much time chasing NBTs, though, and you’ll miss something even more important — day-to-day business.

Look, Apple is known for its breakthrough innovations. Justifiably so. And yet, how many successful ones have there been since the second coming of Jobs? The iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, iPad, and maybe the App Store.

Five at most. Everything else is incremental improvement — day-to-day business that leverages these five breakthroughs.

Follow Apple’s lead. Keep your eye out for breakthrough opportunities (which are also deadly threats if one of your competitors takes advantage of them well ahead of you) because all it takes is one to give your company an enormous advantage in the marketplace.

But spend most of your time on the fundamentals, which are:

  • Support for personal technologies: Keeping employees operational with their PCs, smartphones, and occasional tablets, and helping them become more sophisticated in their use.
  • COTS support: In most shops, IT’s bread and butter is installing, configuring, integrating, and extending commercial, off-the-shelf software.
  • Application development: While most IT departments do a lot less of this than they do working with COTS packages, they still do quite a bit of it, and yet, for some reason, no matter how many times we analyze the business, design a database, and create screens to add, delete and change records, the next time we do it, it’s still hard.
  • Project management: Whenever you’re trying to make tomorrow different from yesterday, project management is the skill you need. Without good project managers … and the project management culture they need to be successful … your company will be trapped in its current configuration, unable to adapt to anything.
  • Software quality assurance and change control: Yes, in principle, SQA is embedded in COTS support and application development. In practice, it’s a separate, independent trade within IT, with more affinity for change control than anything else. SQA and change control are how you make sure COTS and in-house-developed application changes don’t mess up …
  • Operations: The Rodney Dangerfield of information technology, operations gets no respect because the only time anyone even knows it’s there is when something goes wrong. Otherwise it’s invisible, and keeping it invisible is the single most important responsibility CIOs have. Not the most strategic, but definitely the most important, because in this day and age, when systems are down, the business is down.

These are the basics — the blocking and tackling the business needs from you, day in and day out.

Which is why I call this blog Keep the Joint Running.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Ron Erickson, CEO of the Holiday Companies, explained, “This is why we’re in business.”

The context: Erickson was returning to the United States from Canada in a private jet. A useful privilege when you travel that way is avoiding long customs lines by re-entering the U.S. in such places as Fargo, North Dakota instead of a larger airport.

A potential inconvenience, though, is that if the local customs and immigration agent takes an interest in you, there’s no line to keep moving. So it was that the agent in question entered the jet and asked, “Are you Mr. Ronald Erickson?”

Not knowing where the conversation was going, Erickson answered briefly and in the affirmative. Nonetheless, the official continued his inquiry.

Except it wasn’t an inquiry. It was a sincere and effusive thank-you, to Erickson, for opening a Holiday Station Store in the area, telling him how much difference it had made for a lot of people.

A Holiday Station Store might not seem all that important, but to this guy it had become the place to take his son Sunday mornings to get pancakes, and to a lot of other people in the Fargo area, it was a place to go, get coffee, chat, and buy gasoline. In these and a dozen other small ways, the Holiday Companies had made a big difference in the community.

Which is why Erickson told the story to a meeting of his top store managers, who heard him explain, “This is why we’re in business.”

It’s worth noting that Erickson is a shrewd businessman, not a touchy-feely sort. He has no interest in the limelight but a lot of interest in the arcana of the petroleum industry.

The Holiday Companies is a keep-the-joint-running kind of enterprise — it started as a single grocery store in a small Wisconsin town and wins by being better than anyone else at the fundamentals: Choosing the right locations, optimizing its merchandise mix, keeping its operating costs under control, and hedging fuel costs to maximize margins.

And it innovates, constantly refreshing the whole concept of what convenience stores should be and how they should be run.

So when Erickson didn’t say that the point is to maximize profits — it’s to make a difference in the communities it serves — he wasn’t just grandstanding. He was explaining that this is how the Holiday Companies stays profitable.

Speaking of retail, my wife was shopping at a JCPenney not too long ago, when, after just a bit of small talk, a sales associate provided quite a sophisticated account of new CEO Ron Johnson’s ambitious and controversial strategy to redefine and reposition the chain, reducing the number of coupons, promotions, sales, and other special events that meant nobody ever entered a JCPenney otherwise.

Johnson, the sales associate explained, had decided that relying on an endless stream of gimmicks instead of solid merchandising was, in the end, a losing strategy, so he had to try something bold and different.

We have two CEOs, with very different styles and facing very different situations, who understand that being smart is never enough to lead a large organization. Not by itself.

Making sure everyone is smart about what matters. Making sure that everyone understands what you’re trying to accomplish, and why you chose a particular path … that’s what makes the difference between leading people and dragging them along.

Johnson probably faces the tougher situation. JCPenney has to redefine its customer’s expectations. That isn’t an instantaneous process, as Netflix found out last year, even if your strategy is the right one … and nobody ever knows if it’s the right one until hindsight has had a chance to replace foresight. Meanwhile, you’ll inevitably disappoint your customers in the short term. Which is why every sales clerk needs to understand why.

But Erickson faces the trickier challenge, because “Yes, of course we want strong profits — that’s why I want every employee focused on making a difference in our customers’ lives and communities, not on just making a buck. And no, this doesn’t mean you get an unlimited budget for it,” is a pretty subtle message.

Subtle, but smart, because for most people most of the time, knowing they’re making a difference is a lot more energizing than knowing they’re making one more dollar for the company.

Your take-home: If you hold a leadership position, think through how you help employees connect the dots between what they do and something that matters.

It helps, of course, if the company you work in does something that matters. Which it probably does, even if the company’s top executives have lost sight of it … something that, sadly, happens far too often.

And if it doesn’t do something that matters, I have a question:

Why are you working there?

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