All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Bing has, according to comScore, plateaued.

Yes, comScore appears to have confused the number of searches with the number of searchers. Still, there’s no evidence suggesting Bing has much growth left, probably because there’s no evidence Bing does a better job than Google. While absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, without a good reason to switch most users will continue to use what they’re accustomed to using because why would they do anything else?

Speaking of Microsoft failing in the marketplace, any number of industry pundits have declared Apple to be the winner in the tablet marketplace, writing Microsoft off.

Any number of industry pundits are wrong. Not only isn’t the game over, it hasn’t even started.

Not that I have a lot of confidence in Steve Ballmer’s judgment in this area — he did, after all, kill the Courier, which would have been a game-changer, in favor of an it-must-be-Windows approach that pretty much guaranteed two or three years of sitting out the dance.

It’s just that the corporate tablet marketplace is wide open.

Back in 1999 I presented a formula for IT product success. It listed three determining factors: What the product will do for its customers; its affordability or lack of it; and how much disruption it causes.

A product that doesn’t do anything interesting isn’t going to get very far in the enterprise marketplace. Even if it does, if it’s expensive, few companies will risk spending a lot for something that’s unproven.

And please note: So-called “disruptive technologies” don’t succeed because they’re disruptive. They succeed if they can find a niche in which they aren’t disruptive. That’s where they mature. When they’re ready for the big time they then emerge to disrupt the older marketplace.

Marketplace, that is, not the IT architecture. Products succeed that integrate into the IT architecture, not that have no place in it.

The original Windows tablets failed at two out of three. They cost a lot more than equivalent laptops, and their poor touchscreen integration meant they didn’t do very much that was interesting. All they had going for them was their non-disruptiveness — not much of a sales pitch.

Will Windows 8 tablets be more interesting? They certainly could be. The iPad, as has been mentioned here numerous times, is designed for information consumers … for entertainment. Microsoft software is designed to support actual work.

Pricing? Here’s a place Microsoft fails repeatedly. If Windows tablets are to succeed, Microsoft will have to change its licensing so that MS Office in particular is attached to people rather than devices. If one license lets an employee use Office everywhere it will run, that keeps the cost where it needs to be.

But wait … it gets better. The iPad really can’t serve as a laptop replacement for most employees (if you disagree, look here), but a Windows tablet probably can. So instead of tablets being an additional expense, they suddenly become an economical alternative.

That leaves disruption, and there’s no doubt at all that Windows tablets will integrate far better than iOS and Android tablets. At least, there’s no doubt at all among those who have tried to move documents back and forth between any of the tablet office suites and MS Office.

But how about the dreaded “first-mover advantage” so beloved of industry pundits … the supposed insurmountable advantage that comes from being the first in a marketplace?

The answer is, what first-mover advantage? Here’s a challenge: Name a single product that currently dominates its category in IT that was the first to appear. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any, and in fact there aren’t all that many that continue to be credible contenders.

Heck, even many second-movers are either irrelevant or entirely gone … WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 come to mind.

The near-complete lack of imagination on the part of Android tablet manufacturers probably does mean Apple will continue to dominate the consumer tablet marketplace. But the corporate marketplace? It is, at the moment, wide open.

Given MS Office’s status as the de facto standard file format and its extensive SharePoint integration, the game is Microsoft’s to lose. It “just” has to get the pricing right, and the technology right enough.

The view from here: Until Windows 8 tablets appear, master “bring your own tech.” It takes no CapEx budget, takes away any pressure to set a long-term direction, and encourages end-user innovation.

And, it keep your tablet options open — a good choice for a game that has yet to begin.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Human beings are nature’s superior communicators.

That’s the theory, at least. Watching how often and how persistently we misunderstand each other, we can only be jealous of honeybees. They admittedly have less to say to each other (mostly, the subject is where to find food), but they’re able to ask and understand the answer with perfect precision.

Our hidden assumptions just might be the biggest barriers to understanding each other. When they differ, what you say and what someone else hears can be radically different.

And when the “someone else” is the CEO, it really doesn’t matter that the root cause was different hidden assumptions. The problem is yours.

Last week we explored four types of CEO — competitors, mechanics, referees, and economists — each of which makes very different assumptions about what “business benefit” means. It matters to you because if you work for, say, an economist … a CEO who thinks of the enterprise as an asset whose value must be maximized  … then you aren’t going to get very far proposing investments intended to (for example) reduce time to market for new products.

The issue isn’t whether you disagree. If you both understand that you disagree you can have a productive discussion about it. It’s when your hidden assumptions disagree that you get into trouble.

To improve your odds of spotting these crossed assumptions, this week we look at three more types of CEO: explorers, servants, and players.

Explorers are red-ocean/blue-ocean sorts of people, and probably embrace my friend Adam Hartung’s Phoenix Principle as well. For explorers, competition is for other, less imaginative people who aren’t able to find brand new, unexplored territories to colonize. Or, even better, territories others who aren’t very good at colonization have discovered– an approach at which the late Steve Jobs was superb; likewise Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and, prior to his retirement, Bill Gates.

Servant leaders … a concept first codified by Robert Greenleaf … think of themselves as “humble stewards of their organization’s resources,” to quote the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Businesses run by servant leaders are wonderful environments. It isn’t at all clear how they fare when faced with a competitor, though. Being the steward of a resource isn’t necessarily correlated with obtaining maximum competitive leverage from that resource. Servant leaders will have a lot in common with mechanics — in the end, their view is internal. Where they differ is that where mechanics focus more on processes, servant leaders focus on the people.

No CEO taxonomy would be complete without the player. Players see business as a game. Not as a game among businesses, as competitors do. As a game among individuals, which they intend to personally win. For players, the business is the playing field, not the point, and so long as they win, they’re happy.

Players are the CEOs most likely to encourage conflict among the executives who report to them. They do so for two reasons. One is that this is how they see the world. They’re competing against everyone else, and look how well that thought process has worked for them. So of course everyone else should be doing the same thing.

That’s the first, more benign reason. The second is more manipulative, but just as clear: By pitting the executives in the next level against each other, each is kept politically weak enough that none pose a threat.

Players are, after all, very good at playing the game to win.

Every one of the seven CEO perspectives presented here and last week are just as valid as the others. While each is incomplete, they all accurately reflects a very real aspect of organizational dynamics: Companies do compete in the marketplace; they are collections of processes organized to get the work done; they do consist of individuals whose self-interests aren’t in perfect alignment; and they really are assets, too.

Many do have untapped markets they could exploit given the right collections of insights, creativity, and attention to detail; and they all certainly are collections of people who need management support to do the best work they can.

And, like it or not, not only are we each responsible for our own careers, but executive-level career management really is a game. Those who refuse to play generally lose.

But just because these seven perspectives are equally valid, that doesn’t make the CEOs who prefer each of them equally enjoyable to work for. Given a choice, most of us would, I suspect, prefer to work for competitors, mechanics, explorers or servants.

I wonder what the odds are.

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