Strategic Networking with the Benziger Green Team

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Skip Walter

Several years ago, I encountered an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review which researched “How Leaders Create and Use Networks.” The authors made the distinction between Operational Networks, Personal Networks and Strategic Networks. Most of our time is spent working within Operational or Personal Networks. The authors presented the importance of spending significant time creating and nurturing your strategic network.

The more I reflected on the article the more I realized that the notion of “strategic networking” should be extended well beyond the author’s observations. My first extension was to include strategic networking as a major yearly goal for my direct reports. I realized that they were so focused on operational networking and the “here and now” that they weren’t paying enough attention to the “there and then.” Amazing what a little “expect what you inspect” and manipulating the compensation system does to generate better organizational performance.

I then included strategic networking as a core reading for my UW graduate classes and for the entrepreneur mentoring work I engaged in. I even used strategic networking as the class project for one of my UW HCDE courses. While the article quickly became an active part of my work, I found that students and entrepreneurs rarely glimpsed the importance of strategic networking. They viewed it as just another form of operational networking and didn’t see the important differences.

As I spent more time with David Robinson, I realized that what was missing in my trying to evangelize the power of strategic networking is that I was violating the “experience first, make meaning second” mantra. David kindly agreed to demonstrate a different path for my grad students to understand these concepts through a series of kinesthetic group exercises.

David started by drawing the Chaos -> Order trajectory and then his story cycle on the white board.  He shared that “chaos” is the source of all story and the movement to create order.  He pointed out the following:

  • Business is all about chaos
  • Companies get stuck when they focus on the “order” or the product that they created rather than continuing to loop back to the chaos.
  • Learning is about not knowing.
  • Having to know before we act comes out of causal thinking.  Having the capacity to act without knowing comes out of effectual thinking.
  • Another way of looking at this cycle is are you oriented towards a question or oriented towards an answer?
  • Story is about when a yearning meets an obstacle.
  • Organization change can be thought of in the same way as personal change.  So as we explore personal change processes they are very similar to organizational change processes.

During class, we went through the following exercises:

ANGEL/DEVIL Exercise

Objective: To demonstrate through movement the bunching or binding that occurs naturally when anything is framed in terms of a duality.

Caveats: Have the experience first, and then we’ll make meaning of it afterwards. All learning happens at your edges.

      • If you come to a discomfort edge that is where you are learning.
      • Judgment is your edge. Suspend your judgment.
      • Put yourself into an entrepreneurial and effectual mindset.
      • Recognize that you are making choices and you are choosing all the time.

Directions/Process:

This works well when used in sequence with the Triangle exercise. In some cases, this is also a good warm up exercise. We use it because of how it works with Triangles (which demonstrates both interconnectedness and the ease and flow that occurs naturally when anything is framed in triads).

Everyone stands in a circle.

Secretly, each participant chooses two other participants, identifying one as their “angel” and the other as their “devil.”

Their goal is to move so that their “angel” is always between them and their “devil.”

Debrief:

In almost every case, the group will bunch up, lock up, and then explode. Then, they will repeat the pattern if you let the movement go long enough. Ask first what they noticed, what was their experience? If this was a sculpture (it is) what do they notice about the use of space, locations, textures. Etc.

TRIANGLE Exercise

Objective: To demonstrate through movement the interconnectedness and flow that occurs naturally when something is framed in terms of a triad.

Directions/Process:

This works well when used in sequence with Angel/Devil. In some cases, this is also a good warm up exercise. We use it at the end of a session because of how it works with Angel/Devil (which demonstrates the bunching and binding that occurs naturally when anything is framed in duality).

Everyone stands in a circle.

Secretly, each participant chooses two other participants, identifying them as the two other points in a triangle (the participant doing the choosing is the third point). The goal is to move so that they always maintain an equilateral triangle (If the two points move apart, the third point must adjust to keep the triangle equilateral).

Tell participants that, at one point during the movement, you will touch one person on the shoulder; that person must sit down immediately. The rule is that, if one of your points sits, you must also sit down immediately. This stops the movement so that participants can see how interconnected they are (you touch one person and the whole group sits), also they will be able to see the pattern they create.

Debrief:

In almost every case, the group will use the whole space (unlike Angel/Devil), forming a circle, looking towards a common center. Ask first what they noticed, what was their experience? Ask them to look at the patterns and positions of people in the room: if this was a sculpture (it is) what do they notice about the use of space, locations, etc..

The Angel/Devil and Triangle exercises helped the graduate students to experience and “see” the networks that they are a part of (with our class projects and in their work environments). And they see the different structures depending on how they frame the question that their network is interacting with.

Not needing much of an excuse to visit Sonoma Wine Country, David and I agreed to do a strategic networking lunch and learn seminar for the Benziger Family Winery Green Team.

Our sponsor for the Strategic Networking engagement was Barney Barnett, a long time organizational consultant for the Benziger Family Winery. Barney prepared the green team for the workshop with this teaser:

“We will begin with two short 5 to 7 minute experiential exercises.  These will involve walking/moving around as a whole group in the barn.  We will have lunch, debrief and make meaning of the experiences.  The focus will be to understand strategic networking as a different way to think about what we normally do for operational networks.  This new conceptualizing turns around how we (as a Green Team, a member of Benziger and our other networking) create something new to attract others to see how they want to have the influence of the Green Team’s (or Benziger’s) values as part of what is important to their networking strategies.  We may use other storytelling, light guided meditation or dialogue to deepen the wrap up and implications for action of this one hour brown bag symposium/experience. “

As we thought about how to wrap the above exercises (Angel/Devil and Triangle) into a stand alone workshop, we started with yet another variant on strategic networking – how to set it up as a two way process – what do you need to learn from others and what do others need to learn from you? This simple addition to the strategic networking helps transform the teacher/student dysfunction to thinking through how the participant needs to be both a student and a teacher.

Benziger Barn Meeting Room

Barney and David explore the Benziger “Barn” Meeting Space

We started the Green team session with a brief introduction to the HBR Strategic Networking article. I shared my own experiences of learning so much from the Benzigers about biodynamics and observing how many different ways it takes to walk the talk of being green and sustainable.

IMG_5718

The joys of an open creative space

We posed the following thought experiment to the participants “who does the Benziger Green Team need to learn from and who in the outside world really needs to learn about what the Benziger Family winery is doing with biodynamics and day to day sustainability?”

As we did our initial quick introductions of the participants it became obvious that many of the participants didn’t know each other. Taking this into account, David started with a different exercise – introducing yourself as a problem.

We stood in a circle and David had us think of some small problem (not a large devastating type of problem). We paired up and introduced ourselves as our problem (rather than extolling our virtues to make ourselves look good to a stranger). After 2-3 minutes with our initial partner, we then shifted to new partners a couple of times. During the debrief we all laughed at how difficult it was.

We then reformed the circle and David started us with a different exercise – introduce ourselves by what we bring. What is our gift? We then spent a couple of minutes with several different pairs – with the instruction to introduce ourselves to someone we knew the least. The energy in the room rose dramatically. Nobody wanted to leave their current pair because they were having such a lively discussion. During the debrief David asked us to reflect on the differences between introducing ourselves as a problem versus the introduction of what we bring. Most of us experienced how much easier and engaging the conversation was with what we bring. Most of us wanted to have lots more time to continue sharing.

After the energy generated through the pairwise and movement pattern exercises, we returned to the circular tables. I observed that Benziger had done a great job over the years of learning from the best of the best about biodynamics and what it means to create a green company. Since we had just a little time left, I asked the participants to focus on who (besides the wine consumers who visit the winery) needs to strategically network with the Benziger Green team.

Who do you need to learn from? Who needs to know what the Benziger Green Team is doing?

Pretty quickly a consensus emerged that CEOs and corporate executive teams could really benefit from some experiential seminars that focused on biodynamics and sustainability rather than on just the great wine products that Benziger produces. It was exciting to see the energy released when each of the team members realized that they had something to teach (bring) others as well as strategically networking to learn from others.

Who should you be including in your strategic network? To learn from? To bring to (teach)?

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Posted in Content with Context, Entrepreneuring, Flipped Perspective, Learning, User Experience | 2 Comments

Whiteboarding: Designing a software team

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Skip Walter

Not knowing what I was getting into (a common state lately), I joined some former colleagues to catch up on their new venture. They asked me how I would go about designing a software team for their new pivot. They were going from a B2C product to a B2B (B2B2C) variant based on their recent customer discovery process.

whiteboarding software development

I allowed as how I couldn’t think through the question without standing at a white board so we found the nearest vacant room and a few white board pens and started in.

As they were in Silicon Valley, I started by paying homage to the latest craze of hacker, hustler, designer and visionary that is making the rounds. But with several twists.

I started by drawing a draft of the diagram below:

software development team

Then I realized that I was once again violating the “experience first, make meaning second” mantra. So I put my magic marker down and told a story.

After we’d gotten good and cash flow positive at Attenex, we were looking for additional markets. One of the many reasons I was interested in creating Attenex Patterns was so that I could have a personal version to make meaning out of my 8TB of digital detritus on my desktop computer. While we knew that we couldn’t do a stripped down version of our enterprise level product, we didn’t know what were the necessary and sufficient features for a Personal Patterns.

So I pulled in my lead architect to spend a month researching and building a personal patterns prototype. Eric was the architect and UX designer. I filled the roles of visionary, UX researcher and hustler. We made good progress in three weeks and a part of my hustler role was talking about and demoing the prototype to anyone I could grab (trying to find a lead customer). Everyone nodded and patted us on the proverbial heads and said “that’s nice” but there was no energy in the engagements.

So we went back to the drawing board and I went and did a little user research with Marty Smith (one of the lead customers for our Attenex Structure product), a contracts and Intellectual Property attorney at Preston Gates. Not really knowing what I was looking for, I asked Marty if I could just sit and observe him working on contracts for a couple of hours.

One of the lessons I learned at the Institute of Design in Chicago is that observing people in the wild (their actual work or living environment) is far better than trying to interview them. People make stuff up (mostly because they don’t want to appear stupid) when you interview them and most of the time they don’t really understand what they actually do (tacit knowledge). However, they are incredibly “articulate” when you can just observe them in their natural work habitat.

Marty was working on his third draft of a licensing contract for a very large software company headquartered in our area. There was a lot of client discussion around a patent indemnity clause. He knew that he’d had to rework that clause for a couple of different clients in his previous ten years, but he couldn’t remember which clients nor which parties the contracts were for.

Marty’s primary tools are Microsoft Word and Outlook/Exchange. He organizes his file foldering systems (both on the hard drive and in Outlook Exchange) by client and then by year and then by the company name of who a contract was with. One giant hierarchical mess. He could have used a primitive Boolean search engine (but his law firm IT group wouldn’t allow such a thing – corporate security and all). Even if he’d had a search capability, by searching for “patent indemnity” he would have gotten 1000s of hits.

So I watched for thirty minutes as he walked the folder hierarchy, trying to use the client folder names and the contracting party names to jog his memory for one of the three or four contracts he’d modified in the past. He’d drill down through folder after folder; select a contract; scan through the contract in MS Word to see if there even was a patent indemnity clause; find nothing; and then go back to the folder hierarchy. No joy. So after thirty minutes, he gave up and went back to crafting a new clause.

I knew I was seeing something important here, but didn’t know quite what. So I asked a few business model questions.

Skip: How many times a week does this happen to you where you can’t find a clause you are looking for?

Marty: 3-4 times a week.

Skip: How many times a week does it happen to the other 20 IP attorneys in the firm?

Marty: Probably the same amount for each of us. And we never find what we are looking for so we have to draft from scratch. We try for a while, but never find anything.

My back of the envelope business calculation was the extra cost to clients of $500 per hour * 20 attorneys * 2 hours (search plus redrafting time) * 3 times per week = $60,000 per year. In this one law firm we had $60,000 per year of savings for what I was thinking we might price at $20 per seat. Oops, missed the value equation on this one.

I bounced down the stairs to share my findings with Eric. I described what I’d seen (unfortunately because Marty was doing client legal work I couldn’t use video ethnography to record and analyze his interactions). We realized that the difference that would make a difference was if Marty could do clause level searching rather than try and guess at a couple of keywords that might be needed.

We put some straw designs together on the whiteboard and then I left Eric to do a prototype. After a few iterations, Eric worked his brilliance and came up with the following:

attnenuated search

On the bottom left, the user selects a range of text to use as the search string. The selected text could be a couple of sentences, a paragraph or pages of text. The text is then copied into the search box (top of slide) and the text is treated as if it were a series of “OR” statements. Some 2381 documents were returned. That is clearly too many to look at. So either the slider bar for “Contains” is moved to the right or the “Proximity slider bar” is moved to the right until a more limited number of documents is identified (in the example 42 documents are returned). [NOTE: For those of you interested in the gory details of the search technique you can look at the Attenuated Search patent application.]

Once you get to a reasonable number of documents to look at you can display them with one of the standard visual analytics view of Attenex patterns (semantic network view, social network view, or timeline view).

attenex patterns interface

Well, the fun was just starting. I went into my hustler persona and took the opportunity while we were interviewing the CIO at Bell South for a board position to demo the new prototype. I was unprepared for the result. He grabbed my laptop out of my hand and said “I’ll take it back with me.” Momentarily defaulting to my designer role, I objected “But you can’t; it’s just a prototype.” A tug of war with my poor laptop ensued as we both chuckled.

Quickly going back to my hustler persona to see if I could glean some more marketing data, I asked the CIO how much he’d pay if the prototype were indeed a product. He thought for a few seconds and said “I’d want this for the top 100 executives and managers (and our assistants) at Bell South, so I think an enterprise license of $300,000 per year would be appropriate.”

With just the addition of the “clause level” searching, we’d gone from no interest to a “got to have” application that senior managers were willing to pay quite a bit for.

While Eric and I were lucky enough to have the skills to play all four roles of hacker, hustler, designer and visionary, most teams will need three to four professionals in these roles.

What gets missed with the above story is a really critical team member – the lead customer. Most people assume that the UX person (designer and researcher) can be the customer surrogate. However, I’ve found that it is crucially important to view the lead customer as a member of the team and invite them inside the product development bubble. The key to having the lead customer as a team member is to be able to regularly visit the customer’s work environment. Their work site is where the observation action is.

Let’s look at the four key roles of the ideal software product development team:

beginners_mind_experts-mind

  • Visionary – the visionary sees the opportunity and imagines what technology is capable of solving the customer need. In an ideal world, the visionary sees not just a “nice to have” but a “got to have” solution and a business model that makes money quickly. A good visionary will have a big dose of hustler in them – the ability to “engineer exchanges to separate customers from their money (time/attention) willingly by creating, communicating and delivering unique value” (thank you Dan Turner for this definition). As Dan Pink shows in To Sell is Human, the hustling skills can be learned (and most of us are tacitly already “selling” most of our time).
  • Architect – builds the prototype and foundation for the product. While the term of the moment is “hacker,” I prefer someone that can go beyond prototyping and design at scale. They are able to translate the visionary opportunity and designer wireframes into something that works. An ideal software architect will build at hacker speed and think/architect for scale.
  • User Experience Designer – observes customers and translates the observations into human computer interaction designs and thinks more broadly about the full user experience design. The UX researcher needs to exhibit “beginner mind” and be optimally ignorant while observing customers “in the wild” and in their natural work habitat. A key role of the UX researcher is to See Organizations.
  • Lead Customer – the ideal customer is the manager who has the direct need and the budgetary authority to buy your product or services. They should have the time, expertise and commitment to see the project through. The “got to have” need has to have one or more (preferably all) the characteristics of increases efficiency, increases effectiveness, increases revenue, and decreases expenses.

It is the responsibility of the Visionary/Hustler to find the lead customer. They need to go beyond seeing the opportunity and find the customer who can help them create the solution. Once they get the lead customer working with the architect and the UX Designer, the visionary/hustler needs to identify the business model that will not only grow their own business but help the customer grow their business (see Growth Partners).

To help identify good opportunities, the visionary uses a form of “backward chaining” by finding workflows that have a clear valued outcome and then working backwards to the starting point. A really good opportunity will have a decision point which leads to high value and/or a high risk outcome. Inserting a product into a high value or high risk workflow allows you the opportunity for value based pricing. The realization that the eDiscovery market was very high risk and high value allowed us to build a value priced solution with Attenex Patterns.

Through hard won experience, I’ve found that you can’t just trust the architect and UX designer to stay focused on what is necessary. They drift. No matter how experienced they are, they drift. The visionary needs to check constantly on the progress of the product team. The easiest way is with the daily demo (not the agile daily check-in where the developers talk past each other, but an actual demo of what exists). I describe the daily demo process in Advice to a Non-Technical CEO of a Software Start-up. An even better way is to bring the lead customer to these daily demos on a weekly basis.

With a good team and good process (daily demo), you are ready to race to a Minimum Viable Product (not minimally valued product as newbies misstate) in parallel with your customer discovery process. Of course someone needs to manage this process and balance the Four Developments. That’s fodder for a future post.

For more information on this human centered product design process check out the following resources:

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Posted in Content with Context, Design, Entrepreneuring, Flipped Perspective, Human Centered Design, Innovation, organizing, User Experience, Working in teams | 3 Comments

Lifelet: CanyonLands National Park

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Skip Walter

On this day of national shame no matter what your political persuasion as the government shuts down, I salute the National Parks which have given our family so much joy. The “google search image” celebrates our National Parks:

123rd-anniversary-of-yosemite-national-park-6124274398003200-hp

“Google is celebrating Yosemite’s 123rd anniversary – on everyone else’s behalf.

“Yosemite and all the US’s national parks, monuments, and zoos were closed at midnight last night, after Congress failed to pass a new budget.

“The government shutdown comes at an ironic moment for Yosemite: today is the park’s birthday, and it won’t be open for its own party.”

Today’s celebration Lifelet is of CanyonLands National Park in Utah, part of the Utah Rocks National Parks. As part of our sunshine get away from Seattle weather, we toured CanyonLands NP and Dead Horse State Park. The day before we were at Arches and climbed out of the river valley onto several plateaus filled with arches and hoodoos.

CanyonLands is at the top of the plateau and you look outward and down at wondrous mazes of canyons. All I could think of the whole time we were driving the park roads was of Robert Redford and Paul Newman hiding from the feds in their film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

[For the lower resolution video click here.]

In some of the photos you can see the narrow dirt roads leading down to the canyon floor. My heart was too weak to take a drive (dive) downward.

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Posted in Lifelet, Lifelogging, National Parks, Nature | Leave a comment

B2B2C

Posted on September 30, 2013 by Skip Walter

Over the last six months, I started a research project in conjunction with a B2B accelerator, 9Mile Labs, to understand what factors lead to entrepreneurial success.  A key part of the research method was to use video ethnography to capture a record of the many kinds of interactions of companies within the accelerator.

Spending several hundred hours behind a video camera was beyond boring. Evaluating those hundreds of hours of video is cruel and unusual punishment. Yet, through observing without intervening, my pattern recognition brain had to find something to do.

Most of my professional life is spent in business to business product development and new venture generation. Through forty years of experience, most of my understanding of this space is deeply tacit. Through watching nine new ventures struggle with the development of B2B companies, I saw something that I’d completely missed in how I think about B2B business.

B2B businesses are no longer B2B, they are really B2B2C. Ok, Skip, enough with the acronym city. What are you talking about?

With one exception, all of the accelerator companies were building a product to be used by consumers or end users. Their relationship with the businesses who were their customers was as a distribution channel.

Let’s step back and look at some definitions:

B2B – Business-to-Business

b2b-blog-word-cloud-image1

Business-to-business (B2B) describes commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer. Contrasting terms are business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-government (B2G). B2B branding is a term used in marketing.

B2B is also used in the context of communication and collaboration. Many businesses are now using social media to connect with their consumers (B2C); however, they are now using similar tools within the business so employees can connect with one another. When communication is taking place amongst employees, this can be referred to as “B2B” communication.

The terms B2B and B2C are short forms for Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C). Both describe the nature and selling process of goods and services. While B2B products and services are sold from one company to another, B2C products are sold from a company to the end user.

While almost any B2C product or service could also be a B2B product, very few B2B products or services will be used by consumers. For example, toilet paper, a typical B2C product, can be seen as a B2B product if it is bought in larger quantities by a hotel for their restrooms and guestrooms. However, few people will buy an excavator for their private use.

Most B2B products are purchased by companies to be used in their own manufacturing, producing goods and services to be sold on. The value added product can then be either sold to yet another company; or to the consumer.

B2C – Business to Consumer

Business-to-customer marketing refers to the tactics and best practices used to promote products and services among consumers.

B2C marketing differs from B2B marketing in a number of key ways, one being that it often depends on campaigns’ abilities to invoke emotional responses, rather than solely demonstrating value.

Like most forms of marketing, technology has greatly expanded the number of channels B2C marketers must use in their campaigns. However, it has also provided companies with the ability to use different techniques across multiple channels based on which demographics are most likely to access them.

The most popular or effective channels for a business will differ according to its unique demographic, but the web is becoming universal in consumers’ shopping research. According to a report from Pew, 33 percent of adults aged 18 to 39 turn to the internet first when looking for information on local businesses, while 26 percent of older adults rely primarily on the web for researching nearby companies.

Additionally, the web is the starting point for research in a number of B2C businesses, such as restaurants and bars, by adults of all age groups.

The folks at Keyora do a quick overview of the differences between B2B and B2C:

“When looking at the difference between B2B and B2C e-commerce, often times people assume the most obvious difference – B2B is businesses selling to other businesses online, and B2C is businesses selling to consumers online. Sure, that’s true. But that’s not all.

Let’s look at a few other differences.

Purpose 

The purpose of B2C e-commerce is not only to sell products and services online, but also to drive traffic, increase and strengthen brand awareness, and educate customers on catalogues and promotions. Generally, there is equal focus on customer retention and bringing in new ones.

In B2B e-commerce, the purpose is to increase and strengthen existing business relationships overtime, and cut costs of searching and dealing with new vendors. B2B e-commerce involves lower traffic, but higher AOV.

Purchase Power

In B2C e-commerce, the purchase process is much less complex. The buyer is usually also the decision maker. Purchase power is often influenced by brand loyalty, consumer recommendations and reviews, and consumer preference and taste.

The purchase process in B2B goes much beyond a single buyer and one decision maker. Purchase processes in this type of commerce generally involves a number of highly knowledgeable buyers that consult numerous executive decision makers.  Orders are made based on the needs of the company such as raw materials for a manufacturer.

Infrastructure

B2C e-commerce systems generally have a simplified structure that communicates a paralleled brand message and product catalogues across the same group of customers.

In B2B e-commerce, this requires a more advanced system in which products and prices are customized to different groups of customers. A high degree of personalization creates streamlined process flows, eliminating browsing for the needed product catalogue for order.

Payments     

B2C transactions are done at the point of sale on the B2B web store via credit or debit cards, or even customer gift cards.

In B2B transactions, payment processes are set up on account-basis. Consumers place their orders electronically on the web store, and receive the invoice for the purchase to process the payment.

B2B2C – Business to Business to Consumer

“Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C) is an emerging e-commerce model that combines Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) for a complete product or service transaction. B2B2C is a collaboration process that, in theory, creates mutually beneficial service and product delivery channels.”

So that’s the definitional background. But a funny thing happened on the way to observing the product pitches. All of their product presentations looked like a B2C company product pitch. What was going on?

Slowly, it dawned on me that most of the B2B businesses were really B2C companies and they were just selling to a “business” as a distribution method. B2B2C was a better description of what these companies were really doing.

Comr.se team at 9Mile Labs Demo Day

Comr.se extended team at 9Mile Labs Demo Day

If we take Comr.se as an example, they figured out how to do an eCommerce transaction directly in Facebook or Twitter without providing a pointer back to a brand’s eCommerce site. All of their product development work is aimed at how to interact with a consumer directly in these social media channels. Their interaction with a business is for the business to “distribute” the Comr.se software through the brand’s social media customer relationships. By relieving the brands of any additional website or eCommerce development, Comr.se hosts these transaction so they are also getting direct access to the customer information.

The businesses (brands) that Comr.se works with (like Dita Eyewear) are excited about this approach as it removes one more transactional friction from the customer (reduce the number of clicks to order something) as well as potentially provide them with some increased margin. Comr.se follows the key business strategy recommended by Mack Hanan of creating “growth partners.”

“How can you grow your business?

“You cannot.

“You can only grow someone else’s business.  His business growth will be the source of your growth.  By growing, he will force growth back upon you because he will want you to grow him again.

“The businesses you can grow have a name.  They are called your major customers.  Their growth must be the objective of your business.  The capabilities you require to grow them must be your asset base.

“Growth requires a partner. A growth partner is a special kind of customer.  He is a customer whose costs you can significantly reduce or whose profitable sales volume you can significantly increase.  In one or both of these ways, you can improve his profits.  This is the basis for his growth.  It is also the basis for his contribution to your own growth.  As the two of you grow each other, you will become mutually indispensable.

“If you cannot grow a customer, you cannot partner him.  You can continue to do business with him, buying and selling, but the maximized profits of growth will elude both of you.  If all your customers are buyers instead of growers, you will be a slow-growth or no-growth business.  None of your customers will be growing you because you will not be growing them.”

By using this B2B2C strategy, Comr.se is an excellent example of what Forrester termed “transactive content – software that blends transactions with interactivity and content over the net.”

Transactive Content

If you are a B2B company, what would your products and services look like if you thought in terms of B2B2C, growth partnering and social media “transactive context”?

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Posted in Design, Entrepreneuring, Flipped Perspective, Human Centered Design | 5 Comments

Lifelet: Mighty USS Missouri

Posted on September 30, 2013 by Skip Walter

One of the joys of having a home that overlooks the Puget Sound is the wide range of shipping traffic that flows through the sound. Since we are on the path for ships going to and from the Bremerton Naval Ship Yard, it is always a treat to see these large beasts of the sea pass by our view.

One of the most poignant moments was watching the USS Missouri make its final voyage from Bremerton, WA to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The USS Missouri had a long history with the US Navy as the timeline below shows:

Uss-Missouri-Timeline

This website carries a brief history of the USS Missouri:

“The ship was built during World War II and is one of the Iowa-class battleships that were designed for speed and firepower. The Missouri was the last battleship ever built. The ship was part of the force of firepower in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. During the war’s final month, the “Mighty Mo” served as Adm. William “Bull” Halsey’s flagship for the Pacific Third Fleet.

The Mighty Mo is massive:

  • 887 feet in length: 209 feet from keel to mast
  • It weighs 58,000 tons on a full load.
  • It is 5 feet longer and 18 feet wider than the RMS Titanic.
  • The ship could travel at 33 knots.
  • It possessed 13.5 inch thick steel armor plating that protected the hull.
  • It is also known for its 16-inch guns and twenty 5-inch anti-aircraft guns.

The last voyage of the USS Missouri was a reminder of all the valiant sailors that served aboard this massive battleship. We give you our eternal thanks.

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

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Lifelet: Kolob Canyons of Zion National Park

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Skip Walter

On our drive north from Zion National Park we spotted Kolob Canyons of Zion National Park. Having a few hours of daylight left, we turned into the park and started a steep climb out of the flat lands. As we reached the upper part of the  park we were amazed at the red rock formations – and nobody was around. We had the park almost to ourselves.

What was most impressive is that when we got to the east end of the canyon rim road we could see for 80 miles over the vast plateau that drains into Zion National Park. You can almost see the millions of years of geologic time speeding by.

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

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Lifelet: Patterns Surround Me

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Skip Walter

My good friend and colleague David Socha introduced me to his habit of taking “patterns” photos.

wet-autumnal-leaves-on-sidewalk-1024Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. On my good days, I am on the hunt for interesting patterns. Here are a few of my favorite observations.

David Robinson has taught me to be a SEER and look for the patterns that connect.

What patterns do you see today? Did you take out your smart phone camera to begin your collection of patterns? Flip your perspective and see the world differently today.

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

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Both/And or Either/Or?

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Skip Walter

“If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” Abraham Maslow

As good left brained analytics trained by Western “education systems,” many of us technical folks believe that there is one right answer to every question or every decision that is in front of us. We tend to argue endlessly about which is the right feature to implement or which way to implement a given feature or which tool to use. We’d rather argue than try and do an experiment to find evidence as to what is the right path.

Recently, a great deal of attention is paid to A/B testing to quickly gather evidence as to which way to implement a new feature. What gets missed in A/B testing is that you actually implement both options rather than argue about which option to implement.

I first captured this thought in Walter’s Laws:

7. If you are agonizing over picking the optimum choice from a list, implement all of them (move from either/or to BOTH/AND).  Time after time I see software engineers spend days to weeks trying to figure out by themselves (without involving real users) what is the best choice.  By implementing all of the possible ways (usually takes far less time building than trying to decide), choice is preserved until you do get the product in front of real users.

I was reminded of the need for this “law” when working with an early stage start-up that is evaluating technologies to incorporate into their product. I brought up the importance of backward chaining (from the AI world) in doing their customer research versus the forward chaining thinking that most developers start with in the “If you build it, they will come” mode.

They were about to pivot and were asking me what I thought of their new product direction versus their old product direction. I loved the new product direction because it nicely fits the “backward chaining” model. That is, there is a clear goal or decision that the users of the product would have and thus you could do the user research to figure out what steps are necessary to reach the goal.

Their first product had no clear goal or decision to aim at. It was a “forward chaining” kind of product that leads to a development process of continuing to develop new features in hopes that somebody would find some subset of the features useful for some as yet unidentified activity.

As we discussed the concepts, I realized that I was going into the Either/Or mode of thinking and not the Both/And. I shared that “of course, good developers realize that no problem is either completely a backward chaining or a forward chaining type of problem, so a good solution usually involves both approaches.”  This kind of approach is often associated with the AI technique of a “blackboard system” where you have multiple types of processes working against the same knowledge base and updating the “blackboard” as they complete the iterating with their world view. From Wikipedia, a metaphor for a blackboard system is:

blackboard system

“A group of specialists are seated in a room with a large blackboard. They work as a team to brainstorm a solution to a problem, using the blackboard as the workplace for cooperatively developing the solution. The session begins when the problem specifications are written onto the blackboard. The specialists all watch the blackboard, looking for an opportunity to apply their expertise to the developing solution. When someone writes something on the blackboard that allows another specialist to apply their expertise, the second specialist records their contribution on the blackboard, hopefully enabling other specialists to then apply their expertise. This process of adding contributions to the blackboard continues until the problem has been solved.”

Over the years, this combination of backward and forward chaining shows up in interesting places beyond the AI world. While in a working session with several long time DuPont manufacturing managers, one of the managers responsible for building DuPont plants in remote sections of the world shared his process for planning the logistics of plant construction.

“When I started in this business, I would begin my planning in Wilmington, DE, with all the things I needed to get from here to some remote place in China or India. What I quickly found myself doing is contingency planning and before long I was trying to ship everything we had in Wilmington to the remote location.

“After several very expensive and over-budget construction projects, I realized that a much better way was to stand in the remote location and then figure out what I needed to pull from Wilmington, DE. This backward chaining process cut 50% off the logistics costs. I no longer had to do any contingency planning and the path to get everything to the site was a whole lot clearer.

“I later realized this was a different form of the ‘Begin with the End in Mind‘ habit of Stephen Covey. In this case, the end is the physical location.”

As we explored his experiences further, he allowed as how he was really using both backward chaining and forward chaining. The flipped perspective was to realize that I needed to ADD backward chaining to my previous unsuccessful use of forward chaining. Both/And thinking emerges again in the context of remote plant construction.

Calm from Fl!p shares his insights on flipping your perspective:

perhaps a different mindset is required

This backward chaining also shows up in Russ Ackoff‘s development of his Idealized Design methodology. Russ and his clients were frustrated with the lack of results from trying to plan for the future by only looking at the past. Russ described other planning methods as being a variant of either standing in the present and looking backward at what an organization did in the past or standing in the present and trying to predict the future. His Idealized Design method recommended standing in the future and looking backward at the present through the lens of what you want your world to be like in the future. Backward chaining by any other name.

However, in order to prepare for an idealized design session you need to understand where the organization has come from – Both/And at work.

From today’s social media stream and an article from Geekwire “Three book recommendations for executives from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,” I was reminded of another example of the perspective shift of Both/And thinking and backward chaining from Eli Goldratt. Goldratt was an Israeli physicist who got involved with transforming manufacturing with his Theory of Constraints. There are two key lessons I carry with me always from Goldratt – the Theory of Constraints and his use of the Socratic Method of story telling. Both lessons reinforce the Both/And concepts.

Goldratt’s book, The Goal, was one of the three books that Bezos employs for his book club discussions. The Goal is a novel that tells the story of a manufacturing manager who learns the Theory of Constraints from the Socratic guru Jonas to save his factory from being shut down. Goldratt had tried for years to get his concepts across to manufacturing managers through hours of lectures that he captured in his first book, The Race. None of his “students” got the concepts or acted upon them. So in desperation he linked up with a novelist (in the loosest sense of the term) Jeff Cox to write the story. The Goal sold millions of copies very quickly and Goldratt was in high demand to help companies implement the Theory of Constraints.

The Goal provided the context and the motivation for manufacturing managers to then really dig into the Theory of Constraints through The Race and through Goldratt’s classes. Neither of the books could work without the other to generate action and great results. Both forms of “knowledge” are required.

The Theory of Constraints is a Both/And and backwards chaining example as well. Most of us when confronted with a complex workflow that needs improvement believe that in order to improve overall performance you need to optimize every single step. Drawing on his work in physics with analysis versus statistical methods, Goldratt realized that optimizing every single step doesn’t optimize the whole system. Rather, there are only two to three “constraining” steps in any given complex workflow. To improve overall performance you only need to focus on optimizing these bottleneck or constraining steps.

Goldratt realized that through backward chaining at the right level (the whole system versus individual workflow steps) you could achieve high performance results with significantly less effort. You still need to optimize, but only for a couple of steps.

So the next time you are sitting in what could turn out to be an interminable argument around an either/or discussion, change it to a Both/And that will allow you to more quickly both implement a solution and gather the evidence. As I found in the past, it generally takes less time and you end up with a better architecture and design if you implement both approaches rather than just a single approach.

Both/And thinking and backward chaining – where could you be using these techniques today?

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

Posted in Content with Context, Entrepreneuring, Flipped Perspective, Patterns | 1 Comment

Lifelet: Angels Landing and Walter’s Wiggles

Posted on September 27, 2013 by Skip Walter

We’d heard so much about Angels Landing from our daughter Elizabeth and her dissertation research professor, Paul Dassonville. We decided to spend a second day at Zion National Park in order to ascend what looked to be a comfortable hiking trail to the top of Angels Landing. And how could we possible resist a portion of the trail known as Walter’s Wiggles.

Yet, the medium effort hike changed dramatically when we got to a flat area near the top. From a nice wide path, there emerged a chain “to help ease the fears of intrepid hikers.” Not for me.

Joe Braun captured my stopping point so colorfully. The humbling part is that as I was holding on for dear life several 7 year olds scampered around me wearing just flip flops oblivious to the two thousand foot drop off.

joebraun_angels chain link

After a slow lunch, we let gravity pull us downward.

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

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Lifelet: Seafair, Blue Angels and Hydros

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Skip Walter

Seafair is a wonderful tradition in Seattle to spend several weeks honoring the Navy for their service and entertaining us with the unlimited hydroplane races. For four days (two days of practice), we get to enjoy the Blue Angels zooming over Lake Washington and buzzing the sky scrapers in Seattle.

Standing on the I-90 bridge over Lake Washington you get to experience the thunder of the jet engines in the Blue Angels and in the unlimited hydroplanes.

For a humorous look at the wonderful world of innovation and new ventures, checkout Fl!p and the gang at Fl!p Comics.

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