When it comes to attitude you have two choices...

Someone came to me the other day and said it is so hard always to be the one with the good attitude.  It is true to be positive amid negativity can be a challenge, but there are really only two choices when it comes to attitude; either you pass your attitude on or you have attitude passed on to you.  So even though it may be a struggle, there is no middle ground, and you must try to influence others.

Content Marketing Institute: B2C companies have difficulty measuring ROI on content marketing efforts

New Content Marketing Research: B2C Challenged with Measurement

"This is the third year we’ve reported on B2C and it’s been interesting to see how their use of content marketing has evolved. One of the key findings this year is that B2C marketers, like their B2B counterparts, are having difficulty measuring how successful their content marketing programs are."

I saw this article from the Content Marketing Institute about measuring ROI on content marketing efforts for B2C organizations. Now we track ROI very closely and have a good understanding of the measurable returns on our content. So it is not a question of being able to track, I think the biggest question is the framework you are using to measure. Successful content marketing will take a longer amount of time and have a much broader impact than traditional advertising tactics. In fact, the best content marketing is not a tactic at all but a part of your offering.  The best content marketing is also a sign that you care about the customer.  You care that they know your product and you care that they are successful.  

Teams and truth

I have written a series of blog posts around the importance of defining the truth, about how it enables freedom for your team, forces leaders to make the right decisions, and keeps people focused, but what do you do once you have defined your truth?  

It should be alive within your teams and to your employees, a constant focus, a vehicle through which people can teach and correct others.  The truth is not for one person to own but the blood that flows through the entire organization.

If someone breaks a truth, any person within the organization should be able to correct the truth breaker.  There should be regular discussions about how things should be done in light of the truth.   Through these steps the truth goes from being words on paper to being actions with meaning.

When do you resolve your employees' challenges?

As a leader do you ask your employees to give you their struggles, their challenges, and obstacles? Do you take the time to remove those challenges for them? I know as a leader the times I found the greatest progress and greatest satisfaction in my job were the times that I was focused on improving the jobs of my employees.  They should be able to bring to you the challenges that they cannot control so you can help alleviate them. This enables your employees to focus on doing their jobs and doing the work you ask them to do. Through this there's so much more that can be accomplished rather than trying to resolve situations that are largely out of their control. Now this is not to say you handle all their challenges for them, because I believe challenges make people stronger but in situations beyond their influence it is good to ease their burden.
Question: Do you ask your employees about their challenges and then recognize the ones beyond their control and help alleviate them?

How do you execute on your vision? Your Brand.

Where Brand and Vision Meet

I have written about the importance of defining your vision around your customer's success and about how Brand is how you execute on that vision.  The critical point is where Brand and Vision meet and that is with your employees and in the truths that you have defined for your business.  You should be able to say to your employees, "Your actions should be worthy of our vision and our truths."  Doing so means everyone is working together towards the same goal and in the same manner and in faith that ultimately you will be successful.  This unity and focus is a powerful driver to move your efforts forward.  

Can star performers hurt overall performance?

You know that guy who's the star performer? Who thinks he's a star performer that's so good he can't be on a team with anyone else? No one else can contribute to what he does. That's the guy you need to part ways with. No one should be allowed to go it alone . Yes, the "star" sole contributor might accept some feedback grudgingly from his boss or some other superior, but never from a colleague, never from someone who's not an expert like he is. I understand, he's an artist, he's got it all figured out, but that is no way to build a team. That is no way to be successful.  In your mind you think, "Maybe I don't need to address it, his work is good and though people know he is playing by his own rules maybe it isn't hurting the team too much."

The fact is if you don't address it other people will think that is the way they can operate. That is not how you obtain long-term success. Do not let people go alone.  I am not proposing doing work by committee, but there isn't a person in the world today who is perfect. There isn't a person who isn't tempted to take shortcuts, who gets tired, and who couldn't use a little help. You do not want a team that is made up of just individual contributors, you want teammates, people who can work together, who know about how they work and know how they produce. A team that will sink into rhythm and flow.

Having people act as individual contributors without anyone else is a bad situation. You're definitely prone to much greater risk. People who act as individual contributors will be focused on their individual accomplishments, so their success can come even at the cost of team failure.

I would strongly encourage anyone in that situation to make sure there is at least one other person that every team member can partner with.  It is not good for someone to go heads down on their work and then show it at the end of the cycle. This is not a good policy.  They don't get a chance to understand whether the progress they are making is good or bad.  It is better for them to be completely open and expose their work entirely to someone else. In that way, you can find the mistakes much earlier and you can get an understanding of what they're doing fits into the larger picture.

Can the team environment increase people's potential?

Have you ever read a great book, a book that really speaks to you, and even though you have gained a certain meaning from it, someone else comes along and adds thoughts that make your understanding even deeper? Maybe you are part of a book club and you get many thoughts that enrich your understanding allowing you to enjoy the book on many different levels.  It is the same for people.

Because each of us is complex and multi-faceted, working as part of a team brings out depth and aspects of our abilities that are not fully realized when working alone.  As part of a team is where the full potential of your abilities and the abilities of others are shown. Your teammates bring things out in you that you have not developed to their fullest potential, abilities you may not have even known you possessed.  You do the same for them.

The beauty of the team is magnified even further when you see the great aspects of others that other people bring out in them.  For instance, a team member you think of as fairly quiet, could open up in interactions with someone else on the team and contribute great ideas.  The interaction with that other person shows a side of that person that you would never know.    How much greater could your efforts be through the understanding of others?

I am convinced that given the chance, each person can improve projects and strategy by offering their thinking and skills beyond what it says on their job title.  The team environment gives individuals a chance to explore what they can offer beyond their job title. They can give more of themselves. By giving more, people do not just improve their work, but also improve their chances for career success.

What do you do when the truth gets in the way?

I believe that truth brings focus. I also believe it keeps you from making mistakes when the desire to be liked takes over. The problem is that sometimes the truth gets in the way of what you think will lead to success. What do you do when the truth gets in the way?

The fact that it does get in the way is exactly why you must define the truth.  It will get in the way when you want to make a bad decision that may have short term gains over long-term benefit, it will get in the way when you want to abandon process, it will get in the way when you want to push an issue under the rug, and it will get in the way when dealing with employees, when dealing with customers, when dealing with your boss . But you need it to get in the way, you need it to define what is right and wrong, that is the rule of truth

If you are not going to allow the things that you hold true to get in the way then don't even bother going through and defining your truth. By the very definition of true, "being in accordance with the actual state of affairs", these items cannot be negotiated, the truth is part of the actual state of affairs.  It is a lot like the law of gravity or light. Your truth is the law to you. Do you negotiate with gravity?  Do you negotiate with the speed of light? No, you do not negotiate, it is what it is and it's the same in this case.

These are your laws that you and your organization live by. So when you go through and define truth, get ready to use it as a bulwark in those situations that you may struggle against.  It's making the right decisions in those situations that will pay the longest term benefit. No one needs truth for easy situations, you need to have it for those challenging situations.

How do you give your employees more freedom to do their jobs?

I am writing a series of blog posts on how important it is to define the truth for yourself and your organization.  Earlier I wrote the first reason: Define your truths, the items that are fundamental to you, so that you do not place being liked over the right thing to do. The second reason to define your truth: Defining what is true helps you focus on working on the right things.  Now the third reason, operating under a structure of truths brings freedom to you and your employees.

It is critical that you clearly define the truth up front.  If truth is not defined clearly, published, circulated, and socialized people may be operating with the best intentions but against your truth. But if you have clearly established the truth and you know people are working towards it then you can give them freedom to work. They don't need to be micromanaged, they don't need to have every action reviewed, because you know they're operating within the truth  framework. The truth does set you free.

While your employees may not work exactly like you would work the fact that they're working towards the same goals and the same truths should enable you to free them to work without you looking over their shoulder. For instance, say a truth of your organization is that the customer comes first, the customer experience is primary, and you have documented this truth, published, and trained people on this truth. Unless they are choosing to be ignore you, your employees will not be making decisions that go against the truth. You don't need to worry about the freedom people have because they are operating within that context. They aren't going to take action against it and if they do there will be appropriate ramifications.

But that is freedom, the fact that their work is informed by the knowledge that they put customer experience first means they can operate without as many explicit instructions. People value freedom because that is how they can do meaningful work that utilizes their potential.  The best work gets done in that freedom.  Instead of having an additional person, namely you, working to accomplish what you asked, you're able to enable people to accomplish the work on their own. Oversight is adding nothing if it's solely there to establish guard rails which could be established by just clearly defining your truth up front.
This idea scales to you to your team to your larger organization into your company. Have you gone through to find the truth in your organization? Not the best practices the actual fundamental truths, the themes that you cannot deviate from. If you have have you got through and documented them then go make it clear to everyone exactly what they are.  

How can you improve your team's focus?

I am writing a series of blog posts on how important it is to define the truth for yourself and your organization.  Earlier I wrote the first reason: Define your truths, the items that are fundamental to you, so that you do not place being liked over the right thing to do. Here is the second reason: Defining what is true helps you focus on working on the right things.

It is easy to spend your days working on items that feel important in the moment, but in reality do not advance your efforts.  Your truth can function as your North Star, informing what you should work on so you are headed in the right direction.  Perhaps more importantly, what can slow your progress as an individual can kill your progress as a team.  Failure to define truth for your team or organization can lead to the senseless arguments we have all been a part of, where the battlefield is semantics and no meaningful decisions are made.  Once again I think it is instructive to return to Google's "Ten things we know to be true", which I included below for quick reference.  By defining the items that constitute truth for Google, they have clearly defined to employees where their focus should be and help eliminate the senseless discussions.  When defining the next product the focus should be pretty clear for teams at Google, focus on the user, do it really, really well, make it mobile, fast, and social.  While the specifics of a product are obviously not laid out as part of their truth statement, the big items, the fundamentals are there.  

Question: Have you defined the items that you hold to be true?  How about your team?  

Google's Ten things we know to be true

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

   Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

   We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.

   We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. Democracy on the web works.

   Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

   The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

   Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
   • We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
   • We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
   • Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

7. There’s always more information out there.

   Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

   Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

   Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

10. Great just isn’t good enough.

    We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.
    Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious–but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.

Does the lack of creative thinking hold your organization back?

Perhaps the most valuable skill for work and for life is the skill that is least taught, the ability to think. In fact, not only is the ability to think not taught, in some ways what is taught discourages good thinking. What I mean by the ability to think is how people discover new ideas and explore new concepts. This is a highly under valued skill. If we were able to see how some of the great minds think it would really bring great insight into how to approach problems and discover new ideas.

We would be surprised at how much we could learn if we allowed ourselves to think. Read what children can do when given the opportunity,

In 1999, Sugata Mitra was chief scientist at a company in New Delhi that trains software developers. His office was on the edge of a slum, and on a hunch one day, he decided to put a computer into a nook in a wall separating his building from the slum. He was curious to see what the kids would do, particularly if he said nothing. He simply powered the computer on and watched from a distance. To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the machine.
Over the years, Mitra got more ambitious. For a study published in 2010, he loaded a computer with molecular biology materials and set it up in Kalikuppam, a village in southern India. He selected a small group of 10- to 14-year-olds and told them there was some interesting stuff on the computer, and might they take a look? Then he applied his new pedagogical method: He said no more and left.
Over the next 75 days, the children worked out how to use the computer and began to learn. When Mitra returned, he administered a written test on molecular biology. The kids answered about one in four questions correctly. After another 75 days, with the encouragement of a friendly local, they were getting every other question right. “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”

It was an amazing story a story that is almost unbelievable, except the methods have been shown to work with other children as well, 

In 2009, scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences conducted a study of 48 children between the ages of 3 and 6. The kids were presented with a toy that could squeak, play notes, and reflect images, among other things. For one set of children, a researcher demonstrated a single attribute and then let them play with the toy. Another set of students was given no information about the toy. This group played longer and discovered an average of six attributes of the toy; the group that was told what to do discovered only about four. A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.

These stories show the power of creative thinking. They show that if we were able to take a childlike approach to learning how much more we can learn on our own. I think it would be fascinating to see the search history for Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin,  or Warren Buffett to understand how they approach the exploration of different ideas and concepts. What really distinguishes them as leaders and innovators is the way they work through these ideas. The problem is how to think is not something we teach in schools. Thinking is not something we teach at work. We teach rote learning and not the exploration of ideas.
There is evidence that the more we are told the less we learn.

How does the lack of thinking manifest itself? The two ways I see most prominently are:

1. When asked to accomplish a task, the response is either "How do I do this?" or  "That can't be done."  I find it very frustrating when I receive one of those responses, yet I am able to find the answer with some simple exploration.
2. The other manifestation is when individuals are asked to contribute ideas.  Most often the response is to think for a few minutes about the issue and then write down some ideas.  While that may appear to be creative thinking, it isn't.  The lack of curiosity to understand what others have done or to do analysis on past data is a lack of creative of thinking.

I think real creative thinking starts with research and exploration. Is there existing data? What have others done in our space that has been successful? Where have others found success in other areas that may not be related?  While researching you let your mind explore what the data says, what others have done etc... iterate through what it means, how you can apply it to your situation, where else does it take you? Once you have done some real thinking, then start to solve the problem. The work of others and your exploration should bee fuel to the fire not a how to manual.

Stewardship vs ownership

I once had a discussion with an employee of mine who disputed the idea that people "owned" their tasks.  I disagreed, believing that people should be responsible for the success or failure of their jobs.  Recently though a much better word has come to my attention, which I believe more accurately portrays the relationship between the worker and the work, which is "stewardship."
Here is the definition from dictionary.com:

stew·ard·ship

 [stoo-erd-ship, st:yoo-]  Show IPA

noun

1.

the position and duties of a steward, a person who acts as the surrogate of another or others, especially by managing property, financial affairs, an estate, etc.

2.

the responsible overseeing and protection of something considered worth caring for and preserving:New regulatory changes will result in better stewardship of lands that are crucial for open space and wildlife habitat.

These definitions are fine, but what I think stewardship conveys is being responsible for the success or failure of something that someone else owns.  The distinction being that someone who owns something can destroy it primarily at their expense, a steward is not approved to destroy something because someone else actually owns it.  The owner trusted the steward to care for the item.

So an employee, a team, or really even a company are not owners of what they are working on, they are stewards, responsible for success or failure, but charged with caring on the behalf of someone else.  

Can celebrating individual achievement hurt success?

While celebrating individual accomplishments is great and needed, it is important that the individual achievements are tied into the larger goals as well. The reason why this is important is because we don't want an organization where people are just striving for their individual achievements, instead we want individual achievement tied to the larger goal.  

In "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" the dysfunction at the top of the pyramid is "Inattention to results."  One of causes of this inattention is that team members are too focused on their own success rather than the success of the team.  

While I certainly wouldn't dismiss the necessity of recognizing individual accomplishments, I do believe that it should be done carefully.  Individual recognition can have a ripple effect, "She was recognized for her individual accomplishment when she did X" --> "I want to be recognized so I will do Y for myself" and it quickly becomes that the standard is set around individual achievement rather than team achievement.  

Question: Think about the last time someone was recognized for success, if you go beyond the the high level platitudes to the team, were there incentives (either monetarily, verbally, or otherwise) given to the individual that might reinforce the idea that individual achievement is paramount? 

How can you keep the desire to be liked from influencing your decisions?

I am going to write a series of blog posts on how important it is to define the truth for yourself and your organization.  Here is the first reason: Define your truths, the items that are fundamental to you, so that you do not place being liked over the right thing to do.

When you think about defining your truth or your principles, the first item that comes to mind is defining some sort of moral statement around how you operate.  And yes, your truths hopefully include the right moral thing to do, but this goes beyond that. Perhaps the best example of this is Google's "Ten things we know to be true", which I included below for quick reference.  

How would this apply? Say you fundamentally believed that testing is always critical when changing your product, but some of your employees come to you very excited about a change that they want to put in place immediately.  Because you have not taken the time to define and share your core principles, they say "I know we like testing, but this is a sure thing, we should just put this in place immediately.  It really doesn't make sense to add all of the extra steps around testing something so certain to work."

You reply, "I think testing is pretty important to our projects."

They respond back, "We know, so don't we, but anyone can that this is a great improvement."

You acquiesce, "OK, but we need to make sure we test going forward." 

  

Presented in black and white, it is easy to argue that you would never act this way, but it is human nature to want to be liked. You want to be liked by your boss, you want to be liked by your coworkers, and you want to be liked by your employees. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be liked, but it is critical that you take the time to define your truth so that being liked is not chosen over the right thing to do. Is often hard to tell real time when this is happening, so that's why it's so critical to take the time now to clearly define your principles. Because being liked is not wrong by nature, when you're in a specific situation it may not feel like you're taking action that is detrimental, action that sets you back from your ultimate goal, but clearly defined  truth establishes the guard rails to keep you focused on the most important things. 

Question

Can you think of a situation where you chose being liked over a fundamental principle that you hold?

Google's Ten things we know to be true

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

   Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

   We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.

   We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. Democracy on the web works.

   Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

   The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, a free, open source mobile platform. Android brings the openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

   Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
   • We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
   • We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.
   • Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

7. There’s always more information out there.

   Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

   Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 Internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

   Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

10. Great just isn’t good enough.

    We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.
    Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious–but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.

What relationship are you developing with your customers?

Part of the I VIEW THE TOP philosophy is creating a vision that puts customer success first and developing a brand that is about delivering on that vision.  There is a power in this approach in the relationship you develop with the customer. When you take this approach, you are not saying a specific product or service you offer for a specific need of the customer is going to enable the success of your customer. Instead the approach says that developing a relationship with me, with my organization, with my company, is what will ultimately will deliver success.

All of your company's actions and products are part of the relationship.  It is like marriage, parenting, or friendships, just because you do a certain task for someone does not mean you are married, or a parent, or a friend.  Yes, you do those actions as part of the relationship, but it is the promise that you will be there on an ongoing basis, beyond a specific task that creates the relationship.

The relationship is what creates loyalty, and with it the faith that you will overcome troubles when they arise and the expectation that you will want to be together during happy times.  This relationship allows you to do more for each other than just a specific task or transaction.

To get back to the analogy of friendship. It is easy to find someone who will feed your cat, but harder to find someone who will be there when your car breaks down on a cold night or when you're upset. It's true on the flipside as well, a friend is someone you think to include about when you want to celebrate. Is that the relationship you're developing with your customers? A relationship where when they know if they have a problem you can help resolve it or when they want to buy something they come to you first? That is a relationship. 

How many companies do you deal with care if you are alive or dead other than the dollars you spend?  You might think that expectation, that a company or its employees would really care, is too much.  I don't think so.  

Question
What relationship are you developing with your customers?

Can you improve future performance by incorporating the past into your organizational routine?

Looking back to the past as part of your standard operation is critical for success. 

There are three reasons for this:

1. In order to improve, you must have a record of what has happened previously.
2. Remembering the successes and stories of the past ties current efforts to part of a larger picture.
3. Remembering the successes of the individuals and teams of the past conveys that you value those past efforts and lets current employees know that they will be valued as well.

In order to improve, you must have a record of what has happened previously and have those results integrated into your process.  

This is the first and most obvious reason why looking to the past is critical. Simply put, how can you learn if you have not documented what's happened the past?  A learning organization almost by definition has to have a good record of its past efforts.  It is not enough to simply record the past though, it must be integrated as a part of your operation in order to improve.  How many meetings have you been to where someone says, "We tried that before and it didn't work."?  The obvious response is "Can we see the results?" The standard response, "It is in an old PowerPoint on my computer, I will pull it up and send it to you."  This is a death cycle to improving your organization.  Someone is taking the initiative to test and improve and is slowed down by a mythical PowerPoint.    

Remembering the successes and stories of the past ties current efforts to part of a larger picture.

Research shows that being a part of a larger effort has the affect of getting employees to work harder and be more effective.    The efforts and stories of the past are a great way to demonstrate to employees that they are contributing to something bigger, something meaningful.  

Remembering the successes of the individuals and teams of the past conveys that you value those past efforts and lets current employees believe that they will be valued as well.

The other aspect of looking to the past and honoring successful individuals and teams is that it lets people know that they could be honored and decorated as well. The fact that you take the time to honor the past is a sign that you value people as more than just a commodity.  If you care enough remember those who have gone before surely you will care about those currently with you.  

A good example of these principles to both the good and the bad is the NFL. They do exceptional job of both honoring previous players and teams and incorporating statistics as part of their brand.  Players know they can make it to the Hall of Fame and what individual statistics they need to achieve. They have a proper respect for the past but they also use their focus on stats to improve the game for the future.  Interestingly though, as the discussion heats up around brain injuries and the NFL's actual treatment of their former players you can see the principle work in reverse as well.  Because current players perceive that the NFL has not treated former players well, it is affecting the current player's relationship with the league.

 It is a great example that any business should follow. 

A Question 

How easily accessible are your past test results and your past stories? 

What is Sony's Vision Statement and is it any good?

Finding Sony's vision statement is not easy, when I first searched I found this, "To create exciting new digital entertainment experiences for consumers by bringing together cutting-edge products with latest generation content and services."

I can't find this vision any longer, but I can now find a mission statement from Sony, "At Sony, our mission is to be a company that inspires and fulfills your curiosity. Our unlimited passion for technology, content and services, and relentless pursuit of innovation, drives us to deliver ground-breaking new excitement and entertainment in ways that only Sony can. Creating unique new cultures and experiences. Everything we do, is to move you emotionally.
BE MOVED"

I also found this mission statement from Sony Electronics, "OUR MISSION Be the brand of choice in the hearts and minds of our customers by delivering the best customer experience."

The first time I read through the first vision statement and the first mission statement all appeared good. They had a statement about the consumer...good, a customer focus. They had a statement about developing a platform...good, involving both technology and content. So we're in good shape with this vision statement correct?

When I do a second run through this vision statement is when the questions really start to rise. When I see terms like exciting, new, and cutting edge products and latest generation content services those words make me wonder about the purpose of this vision. The key to a successful vision statement is that the company is putting the customer first when I hear terms like these, it makes me wonder if they are self-serving terms for the company. Does the consumer primarily desire exciting, cutting edge, latest generation products? I would think if the company is putting the consumer first this is fine but I sense they are not.
They are focused on actions based on with the company desires. That is where vision's fall apart. Now of course, if exciting new digital experiment experiences or cutting edge products or latest generation refers to delivering miraculous experiences to its consumers, that I'm all for it. That's one of my fundamental principles. But I think Sony would need to do some soul searching to figure out if that's actually the case.

Are your employees making mistakes out of fear?

You have an employee who is making mistakes on a regular basis and you want to take drastic action to fix the situation. Before you do, I would encourage you to ask one question "Are they making mistakes up out of fear?" Are they a good employee who isn't making the right decisions because they're scared of messing up? Have you created an environment where that fear is causing unforced errors? Employees making mistakes out of fear don't need more fear, they don't need you to scare them further, they need to know that they're wanted. Screwing up out of the fear of making a mistake is bad leadership because it's wasted potential.  If someone makes mistakes because they didn't care enough or didn't work hard enough,  that is on them and they should be corrected, but if it is out of fear that is on you.  You could have a great employee who is not living up to their talents.  This not to say you shouldn't push people for their best, but make sure you aren't pushing them to mistakes.  A little humble reflection may help you.

Would big data have invented the car?

Here's a question, would you have invented the car by looking at big data? Would Netflix have come into existence looking at big data? The question is will big data lead to great leaps or simply improve performance in the existing paradigm? I think this is a critical question as you look at your business. If a paradigm shift is needed and you're focused on your data dashboard are you going to see the need for a major shift? The case can be made that some of the most innovative decisions would not be revealed in the data. That heads down in the data companies would not see these major shifts in thinking. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a set up that would have resulted in inventing the car. It seems unlikely to me. Maybe it would have resulted in more brown horses or white horses or a faster horse or some aspect that is different, but it's still a horse. Even from an optimization standpoint it seems like you need to make sure that you're asking the right questions and that you have the right data for the correct things to be revealed.

What relationship should technology and data have with the customer relationship?

You hear it all the time. People will start the discussion on customer experience based on what the existing technology can do. The will say "Our technology can do this or can't do this," or "There's a new technology that allows for this," or  "Our relationship with our customers is changing based on technology."  I think this is the exact wrong way to go about defining the customer relationship with your business. Think first about what the ideal relationship would be. Period. Do not even think about the role technology will play as part of the ideal relationship. Once you have figured out the ideal relationship with the customer then think about how technology can get you as close as possible to that relationship. How many businesses would have been saved if they thought about their relationship with their customer this way instead of thinking about technology infrastructure first? This also plays into the discussion around big data.
The starting point is the ideal customer relationship and data can help you recognize how far from the ideal you are or trends.  If big data is helping determine the ideal relationship with the customer that's terrific, but the starting point should never be the data.

Say you're running a bank and you looked at life from the customer experience first, what sort of decisions would you make? I think USAA did a great job thinking this way with remote check deposit. The first question wasn't  "What does technology enable?" The first thought was that people want to be able to make deposits from home and how could USAA develop the technology to  allow their members to do that? And they quickly realized its not even that people want to make deposits at home, really they wanted to be able to make deposits wherever they were and so they enabled mobile deposits. They did this at a time when everyone else was thinking the technology would not allow for it.

 Of course the technology does not allow for it if you don't even think of the idea.

When should I use storytelling for marketing?

I have written before about the power of storytelling and metaphors. I think the ability to tell a good story is important to growth, but to others storytelling may be conceived as just the latest marketing fad.  Why would stories be more effective than just clearly displaying the price, features, and benefits?  If you are selling one product and it is very, very straight forward you probably have no need for stories  (but this is not a simple assessment, mortgages should be a commodity, but Quicken Loans is selling customer service too), you just need to say what it is and the price. But,what if there is more to your product? What if your product is different than any thing else on the market? What if the future state potential is difficult to describe using current paradigms? What if you're creating a customer service experience that is on a whole new level? What then?

The basics just won't cut it because there is nothing in the customer's mind to compare it to. In these instances, a metaphor or story can be the most powerful way and perhaps the only way to convey what you offer and get beyond just words to emotions. Zappos is a great example. Yes, they have exceptional customer service which now defines their brand, but before that was established how could they convey how amazing their service was?  How about a story about an eight hour customer service call?  Zappos offers "wow" customer service and the story about the call is a great way to show what "wow" means.

Another great example is Google's series of ads showing how their products are used in real life.  The commercial below called "Dear Sophie" is a great example. These ads are clearly stories about both life and Google products.  The ads also connect on an emotional level. They are essentially parables, telling a story so we can relate on how we could use the products.  This ad has been viewed almost 10 million times on YouTube which is pretty amazing for an advertisement.  

So when should you use storytelling?  When your offer is different than what else is out there...and really, I hope that applies to 99% of us.  

Why should you look forward to challenges?

I have never worked at a place that did not present challenges. I don't think there is any place you can work that does not present challenges. The reality is that it is the challenges that make you better, that make you stronger for the long run, that ultimately lead to success. If you show me someone who has not been challenged, I'll show you someone that is headed to failure. You don't make Marines by going to the spa and many great businesses rose from the ashes of previous unsuccessful attempts.

That being the case, don't you think that we should embrace challenges? Look forward to the  challenges? Realize that those challenges are how we're going to get better? And as a leader, it is important to challenge those who work for you and as a good teammate it's important to challenge those who you work with. If you go in with the mindset of embracing challenges how much happier will you be when they come then going in with the mindset of dreading them?

Is agile marketing just a better way to manage projects?

I certainly think that managing projects using agile practices is a better method than more traditional approaches, but if you just stop at the practices and never embrace the culture you are leaving the largest opportunity on the table.  

You can get things done more efficiently and improve quality by breaking your work into cross functional teams, working in sprints, having daily stand ups, using retrospectives to continually improve, and creating backlogs.  But, the culture shift of validated learning, team ownership and strategic contribution is what will really propel success.  You don't simply want a more efficient assembly line, you want an inspired team working on the right things. 

As with most of life, the changes with the highest reward are also the changes that are most difficult to make. It is much easier to implement stand ups and backlogs than to give ownership to a team and just as importantly have them take it willingly.