Want to Kill a Few Brain Cells, (Try and) Read a Management Textbook

June 25, 2008 By 3 Comments

(Author's note: this post is filled with hasty generalizations and probably a few miscarriages of justice and judgment.  If you are in academia, read it at your own peril.)

I suspect that I might raise the ire of a few publishers and professors with this one, but oh well, life is short and some things just need to be said.  Of the many things that I am involved in, one of the newest and most enjoyable is teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels.  This has been a long-time goal of mine driven in large part by a number of great experiences and great instructors earlier in life.  You know the type of instructor that I'm talking about.  The ones we all remember are the educators that both created and satisfied intellectual curiosity, entertained and ultimately left an impression on us. 

And while I'm loving the experience, I can't help but observe that the textbooks are some of the most mind-numbing, coma-inducing products ever to emerge from Gutenberg's great creation.  In particular, the Management text in my Fundamentals of Management course this Spring is almost certain to drive the most interested of business majors to consider something more exciting like accounting or neurophysiology.   What a shame to take a noble and exciting and complicated topic like management and wrap a bunch of dead theories in-between some interesting case studies and let that suffice for something that is supposed to teach the fundamentals of management.  (Author's note: I didn't pick the text…it was pre-picked. I won't make that mistake again.)

I confess to being a bit over the top about business education.  I've spent a decade attending programs at Kellogg and I've never left a day long, week-long or year-long program without being filled with ideas, excitement and new found energy for the challenges ahead. (And now that I am teaching at several institutions, I aspire to have that impact on the participants in my classes.) I must have missed the memo that said that it is OK to inspire executives, but for undergraduates, we've got to test them by subjecting them to content that is almost certainly non-essential for success and most definitely, boring.

OK, in fairness to this unnamed textbook, words like strategy, management, market forces, Porter's Forces, leadership, innovation, information technology and many others that you would recognize as belonging to the field of management do appear.  However, it's downhill from there. 

I suppose the best cure is for me to write myself and I may.  I already co-wrote a leadership book that I now look at in a new light after struggling through the text's painful treatment of one of my favorite topics.  I'll stop my ranting now and offer a few suggestions for anyone considering writing about or teaching management to the future managers of the World. 

My suggestions for the ultimate management textbook (versus the one I had to teach from):

  • Please skip the history of management theory development or at least condense it down to an interesting few pages. This is a great topic, and likely very important at a more advanced level, but not critical as an initial exposure to management.
  • I do want to provide students with some context for the evolution of business and business models and how organizations and leaders have changed over time based on advances in technology and changes in society.  Good stuff and important context.
  • Leadership…keep it practical and make certain that we do much more to highlight that leadership is a profession and a very complex, challenging and rewarding one at that.  You can skip the nonsensical debate and endless pages about the mind of a manager versus the mind of a leader.  They are one and the same person…dealing with different topics from tactics and operations to strategy and motivation.
  • Speaking of strategy, please portray this powerful tool of leadership and engine for value creation as a dynamic process that involves an entire organization versus something that consists of SWOT and Porter's Forces analyses.  And don't forget execution.
  • The section on HR reads like something developed by the Politically Correct Committee.  Please.  HR's role as a critical enabler of strategy through talent and systems and tools is much more exciting than whole sections on diversity and harassment.
  • Hmmm, Information Technology as a subset of some other chapter is not going to cut it.  Again, we are talking about a critical enabler of strategy and a complex and constantly changing arena.

And so on…

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I'll stop here with a comment that now that I've thought about it, I don't know why a text is needed at all.  Staff the program with experienced business professionals and infuse the curriculum with readings and concepts from Welch, Charan, Maxwell, Day, Drucker, Collins, Churchill, Lincoln and Franklin and most issues of Harvard Business Review and call it The Joy of Management.  Hmmm, it just might work.  Remember, you heard it here first.

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Seven Suggestions to Consider When Creating A New Market

May 26, 2008 By Leave a Comment

If you've ever worked in an organization or on a team that got caught up in the quest to create a new market you know that the experience is all consuming and exhilarating.

While the all-new pure white-space scenario is elusive, a fair number of organizations leverage their deep knowledge of a specific segment, a group of customers or a set of customer challenges to create new offerings that don't fit traditional market definitions or boundaries.  The combination of blazing a new trail and believing that what you have created and what you are espousing will help reshape and transform for the better how something gets done is intoxicating. 

I met the other day with a CEO living through this very situation right now, and from listening to her very real challenges and reflecting on my own experiences on one of these market-creating odysseys, I offer a number of leadership and management suggestions that might prove helpful on your own journey of market creation. 

7 Issues that Should Keep You Awake at Night on Your Way to Creating a Market:

1.  You have to surround yourself with flexible, free-thinking and adaptable people.  Hiring the former BIG CO executive who hasn't lived through what it means to swim without a life raft may not be the best plan in the early phases.  You don't have time to wean people off of big company practices…bring in the professionals that have already been through this process somewhere else.

2.  Listen to yourself and your people talk and read your own propaganda.  If everything that comes out of your mouth is about how great your new product is at the feature/function/capability level, you've got a problem.  If the answer to every business question is something about the unique capabilities and elegant architecture of your revolutionary product, you've got a problem.  If your web site is nothing but more of the above, the problem is real.  The prospective clients that you are seeking as early adopters are motivated by a bigger vision, not by the elegance of your technology.

3.  Markets don't emerge on anyone's schedule.   If you are banking on going from nowhere to critical mass on a short-horizon, you and your investors are likely to be disappointed.  While everyone in awhile markets emerge at remarkable speed, most of them take years and often never emerge.  If your market's emergence is dependent upon people and institutions changing long-standing practices and overcoming deeply embedded approaches, you better be planning for a marathon, not a sprint.    

4.  Back to the message coming from you and your web site.  Like it or not, you are evangelist and educator all at the same time.  If all you do is shout product, you will not appeal to either the hearts or brains of your prospective customers.  Make sure that your people, your web content and the preponderance of your conversation is educational and informative and not pure product propaganda. 

5.  Traditional marketing tactics don't work when you are creating a market.  Give it up and shoot your marketing head if he/she is suggesting advertising, trade shows and direct mail as primary vehicles.  (OK, this one will generate some controversy.  Sorry, I believe that the world has changed and people gather their information and assign trust in very different ways than they used to.  Before flaming me on this topic, read David Meerman Scott's: The New Rules of Marketing and P.R.  and then let's start the debate.)

6.  Traditional selling tactics don't work when you are creating a market.  See also the marketing comment above.  Transactional salespeople and sales approaches need not apply.  Your early focus is on market visionaries willing to take a risk to realize something profound for their business.  Match the value creation resource with the task to fuel the vision.

7.  Map the Influencers and figure out how to appeal to their fundamental need.  Don't know what that is.  It's simple.  Market influencers gain influence by having radical opinions on what's right, what's wrong and what organizations need to do about what's right and what's wrong.  Paint your vision for them, encourage them to develop their own vision and provide them with a soapbox to tell the world.  A good influencer will never back you or your product overtly, but if they see the opportunity to enhance their position by grabbing on to the issues that you are dealing with, they help educate the market.  This type of influence is not purchased with a subscription to an analyst firm or via press releases, it is gained through personal relationships and involving the right individuals in your strategic market and client discussions. 

The bottom-line for now:

The above 7-suggestions barely scratch the surface of what it takes to succeed in helping an organization create, define and profit from a new market.  However, they are important issues that I often do not hear the leaders of these exciting firms thinking and talking about.  Creating a market is a non-routine project, and as a result, non-routine thinking is required every step of the way.  Leave the traditional tactics at home, spend some time thinking beyond the moment and trust your gut that this is really challenging.  Remember, if you are right, you want to harvest what you spent so much time, money and gray matter pioneering.  If not you, the companies right behind you will be happy to benefit from your efforts.

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