Business Strategy is Dead!

In the last 10 years, businesses have gone from strategy overload to no strategy at all. Of course I'm generalizing, but the trend remains. I'm referring to everything from marketing communications down to sales. It just seems dead and I blame it, at least in part, to the growth of the world wide web. When I was in advertising creating marketing communications strategy for the likes of Kraft and Lipton Foods, we'd work with these very bright, young individuals with graduate degrees who embraced a very analytical, by-the-numbers approach to strategic planning. It could take a year or more to agree on a strategy that was prepared with hundreds of hours of research and analysis. And then spend many more months agonizing over the execution and tactics to support the strategy. It was painfully slow. In the meantime, the dotcom boom put everything into overdrive. As opposed to thoughtfully making strategic planning decisions, there was no strategy at all. Spend and extend at all costs! Build it and it will come! It was like running a long distance race and suddenly you see everyone take a shortcut and you're all alone running the course. It was an eerie feeling. It seemed like the world had changed in an instant. The "Web specialists" that marketers and advertisers had hired to manage the online activity soon had equal or greater power, but lacked the strategic knowledge. And the old-school strategic thinkers (that were now being viewed as dinosaurs) began to feel the pressure to make quicker decisions and advance communications and sales strategies more rapidly. Strategic planning went from "too slow" to "too quick/none at all". Strategic planning digressed into a series of tactical assaults.

Today, there seems to be an overload of "specialists" and "marketing strategy" is a bankrupt word. I'm not suggesting a specialists is a bad thing, but a balance is in order. The Web is not special anymore; it's just another medium for extending marketing communications strategies. Today, marketing managers need to be as fluent in Web development, analysis, content management and application design as they once were in traditional media planning and strategic development. And they need to be in touch with what's happening on the Web. You don't have to look far to understand what I'm saying is true. Many of us experience a large gap between a marketing message presented on television and what we experience on the customer service or sales level. And the riff manifests itself in many other ways too.

I'm not suggesting we go back to "analysis paralysis" but strategies need be separated from tactics and organizations need to re-examine the skill requirements and structure of their marketing departments. Seek individuals who can provide more synergy (now there's a bankrupt word!) between marketing, technology, business units and sales. No one said it would be easy.

Yahoo! screwed up my music Jukebox!

What was Yahoo! thinking when it purchased MusicMatch? For those not in the know MusicMatch is a "jukebox" type application for managing music on your computer. MusicMatch was the greatest; it had tons of features that I can to appreciate. And I purchased the lifetime subscription to ensure that I always had the latest upgrades. Then Yahoo! purchased MM and migrated all the users to Yahoo! Music Jukebox (YMJ). YMJ was missing dozens of features and was painfully slow. Why would anyone purchase a company for millions of dollars ($160 million), strip its product of the very features that made it superior and roll out an inferior application. Of course they wanted the customers, but did they really lose sight of the fact that the superior application that MM had is the reason the customer base was so big? I can picture the strategy meeting when the purchase proposal was first made: An over-paid executive stands up and says, "Let's grow our Yahoo! Music business by purchasing MM and moving the customers to the Yahoo! Music family of applications. We'll make tons of $$ by extending all the great services that Yahoo! Music has to offer!" The sane question from the quiet corner of the room: "What is Yahoo going to do with the MM application?" Answer: "We don't need no stinkin' MM application. Yaaaaahooooo!" Idiot. Was no one in the boardroom willing to stand and say the 'Emperor has no clothes!' Anyway, after a year of struggling through YMJ to justify my lifetime subscription to MM, I finally had to say so long to YMJ and found a new jukebox application called Media Monkey. These guys are like the old MM; really trying to meet customer needs by adding new, cool features all the time. I have just one request: Please don't sell out to Yahoo! In fact, just to be safe, don't sell out to anybody. What's $160 million gonna buy you anyway?

Who Should Be Promoted?

Who should be promoted: Someone who takes a worse than average loss in a bad marketplace or someone who has better than average gains in a great marketplace? Ideally both would be promotable, but in the real world, the former gets fired and the latter gets promoted. Then when times are bad, the manager who was promoted because of his or her success in an easy marketplace has no idea how to manage a down cycle. This is how I perceive the business environment in the last 10 years. The health and longevity of any business is determined by its ability to excel in good times and remain stable in poor economic conditions. The real test of a strategic thinker is his/her ability to function in a poor marketplace. When I was an account manager at Fujitsu consulting (1999), I saw the technology consulting marketplace turn on a dime once the Y2K spending dried up. I remember the Director of Sales was asked by Corporate to provide a strategic document for managing the business going forward. Quote: "I don't know what a f$#@%ing strategy is!". He proceeded to show me his pictures of all is buddies with whom he worked at IBM, most of who then also made up the upper management of Fujitsu Consulting. It was a good 'ol boys network. And these guys where making some serious cash! They didn't have the know how to develop a strategic plan (nor the incentive since they were financially set). Coming from an Advertising background with some of the best and brightest strategic thinkers in the World, it confounded me how someone could rise this high in any organization and be this stupid. I remember at one sales meeting when the President of Fujitsu North America visited the New York office and presented her aggressive revenue targets. In the highly political and extremely aggressive universe of NY tech sales, it's best to keep your mouth shut at those meetings, but there I was raising my hand: "Excuse me. Exactly what is the strategy accomplishing these goals?". The President responded, "Hard work. And we have the inside track on some new business." Ah, yes the old "rainmaker" strategy. They threw more money at these overpriced rainmakers with their supposed "inside" contacts. Flash forward: It yielded nothing! But they got to hire their friends. (Besides, that wasn't a strategy; it was a tactic!) They had no idea what they were doing.

So in these economically tough times, pay attention to the strategic thinkers who are capable of high level thinking and their ability to execute the plans at the tactical level. Once again, businesses have the opportunity to recognize and promote the smarter people to the management positions and wash themselves of the Good Time Charlies that managed to luck their way into their promotions.

Is Bankruptcy Now Socially Acceptable?

In our grandparents day, if a late payment was made for any bill, it was a very big deal. And there was a moral stigma attached to it. Oh how we've slipped. Nowadays, it's no big deal to make a late payment or miss a payment altogether. Missed or late with the telephone bill? Eh, catch up next month. While it seems that it has become more commonplace for people to feel very casual about letting the small bills slide a bit, I've always felt that the big bills like houses and cars still had some respect. With the media constantly reporting on housing foreclosures (over 2 million+ now!) it seems like many of those who could probably struggle to make the payment just giving up and "just walking away." I'm not just talking about lower/middle class people here; famous people: movie stars, sports figures and other celebrities. It has become morally acceptable to have the bank foreclose on your home. And that's what concerns me the most. Sure, there are going to be people that just can't afford to make a payment, but then there are others (those that could afford to make the payment) who now incorporate defaulting on a housing payment as part of their financial planning. As little as a generation ago, defaulting on a loan was done in secrecy and shame, now is seems as if you're part of a new social club: "I was smart enough to walk away [from the promise I made to repay the loan]." Certainly stricter lending standards are needed. Maybe they should include a personality and lie detector test as part of the standards too.

You want my SS#??

Every doctor's office I visit, every retail credit card application I've ever completed requests my SS#. As I sit there completing the ink and paper form and pass it to the sales person/receptionist, it occurs to me that anyone would have to be an idiot to give them your SS#. I never have, and no one's ever given me much resistance. The only people that need your SS# is the bank, your employer and the government. Do you know what happens to those paper forms? Sometimes they end up getting manually put into a database and the paper is tossed in the trash. Doctors just store them in a paper file folder. Don't believe any claims that they take "precautions" because there's no way to verify it. Parameters for storage and security of information for offline systems is not regulated.

Here's a story that happened just last year that really chapped my hide: My parents apparently forget to pay their Belk Department Store bill that month (they have a perfect record of payment) and the department store called to inform them about the missing payment. To make the payment over the phone, Belk requested their SS#. It was foolish of my parents to provide it to them (anybody could have been calling) and an indication of Belk's poor policy of protecting its customers to even ask for the SS#. Here's a tip: If someone calls you asking for your SS#, hang up.

Direct TV "Assistance Fee"

In this world of automation for the sake of cost savings, the irony did not escape me when last I called Direct TV to order a PPV movie. The automated system found my movie and as it proceeded to check out, it informed me of an "Assistance Fee". Are automated systems now collecting wages and health insurance? Is there a union of automated assistants? Isn't the purpose of automated systems to reduce fees and overhead? I hung up the phone and ordered the movie through the TV remote. Thankfully, that automated system didn't have a markup. Maybe it wasn't part of the union yet.