Something about devils, details, and dirty hands

07. May 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Business · Tags:

I saw this post from the head of admission at the Cambridge MBA, and it was a good reminder of why I chose to come to Cambridge rather than some of the top ranking schools.  Cambridge is scrappy – there’s an element to being an underdog that I really like and a certain lack of refinement that reminds you that kind of reminds me of a startup. It’s sometimes amazing, sometimes chaotic, but always challenging.

I was hesitant to get a MBA coming from a startuppy background involving a lot of techies who ridicule MBAs, largely because they create a lot of intangibles (and expect a lot of money for it); in a startup, there isn’t much space for anything that doesn’t ship. As a student of management, you are constantly reminded to focus on bigger, broader things — competitive landscapes, value chains, strategic planning — and you avoid getting “in the weeds”. Which is possibly why MBAs are often the butt of management jokes like this Fedex ad:

Even a MBA Can Do It

But the reality is that it doesn’t matter how amazing your strategy is if you can’t deliver it properly and the “weeds” are what your customers experience. They don’t see strategy decks, financial models, or business plans, they just experience the end product, the service, and if you’re doing it right, the warm/fuzzy feeling for your brand.  And none of the fancy Microsoft documents that you create come to life without having to get the dirty work of delivering done.

And I think MBAs get a bad reputation because in many programs, a lot of things are served to you on a silver platter.  Whether it’s a case or a class project, the information is provided or relatively easy to access or derive. You can pull together an assignment the night before because everyone else has the same goal that you do, and you can muddle through a presentation because everyone in your group is relatively intelligent [at least by MBA measures].

But the Real World is significantly less forgiving, and you can’t always convince everyone to pull an all-nighter so that you meet your targets when there is a world of families, friends or [insert entertainment of choice here] to divert their attention. The technical bits you learn on the MBA aren’t exceptionally hard; it’s the soft stuff that makes management difficult.

So looking back at my experience with the Global Consulting Project in Brazil, I’m thankful for all the bizarro experiences that made it realistic. There were no taxis or hotels booked, just a whole world of chaotic reality that everyone else has to live in too. But the experience of creating a make-shift white board, cobbling together broken Portuguese to get around, and negotiating to shove 5 people into the back of a cab made us all the better at dealing with the Real World, which allegedly is where the jobs are.

Three Lessons for the Perpetually Unsatisfied

31. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Personal Development

It’s the last day of 2011, allowing me a bit of time to reflect on my first semester at Cambridge and to catch up on reading about the world outside of the MBA bubble. Umair Haque’s article, Mastering the Art of Living Meaningfully Well, came across my Twitter feed a few times, and really made me think about what it meant to live well — largely because, well, I do not.

I did at one point: eating well, exercising four times a week, excelling in my personal and work life, and feeling like I was on top of the world.

But things fall apart, as the saying goes.

This prompted me to think about what I’ve learned in my twenties…what I’ve done, what I didn’t do, what I regret and where I am now. And from that, came my three lessons from someone who is perpetually unsatisfied:

It’s OK to feel bad sometimes.

I say this not as encouragement for the self-loathing or the self-indulgent, but as a reminder that happiness is not a default state; most of us came were born crying, and most of us will die crying. You can’t expect yourself (0r others) to feel fantastic every minute of every day because we’re not robots, as much as some of us would like to be.  I used to believe that not showing emotions was a sign of strength [hello my fine Chinese upbringing], but over time I found the opposite to be true — in fact, go watch this brilliant TEDtalk by Brene Brown and you’ll realise why:

The Power of Vulnerability

Having emotions is part of being human, so I’ve learned to embrace the ups and downs of life and take the opportunity to make myself a better human [even if it means I'm inferior to robots].

Stay unsatisfied, not ungrateful.

On the theme of being vulnerable, I’ll tell you my greatest weakness: being perpetually unsatisfied.  If you’ve ever wanted to strain all your relationships, this thing is like a magic wand.

At the same time, it’s an incredible source of strength.

One of my exes used to ask me, “What are you on [read: drugs] and where can I get some?” Funnily enough, it was actually just my inability to accept dissatisfaction. Why? Because I feel things can be improved and someone has to do it. Being perpetually unsatisfied pretty much means I have a never-ending fuel supply to drive the things that I want to change; if no one else is willing to do it [and do it right!], I will take it head on like a bulldozer…

…which incidentally also means I can drive other people crazy. I’m the one always wanting more — from myself and from other people — and it’s easy to forget that other people have different standards or needs.  But I’ve been lucky in life, and I’ve encountered some lovely people who are great at forgiveness and I couldn’t be more thankful for that.

Do something, preferably memorable.

I overheard a conversation between two friends while I was eating pho in Harvard Square the other day: “I want to do something with my life, to see the world, go to Ireland, you know?” I looked over expecting to see a teenager, but what I saw was a woman who was probably my age.

I [smugly] turned back to my steaming bowl of pho (obnoxious, I know) and thought about how lucky I was. I had never really traveled when I was young, outside of the occasional trip to New Hampshire, California or Disney World with my family [ooh, and Canada!]. When I was 19, I decided I’d go backpacking across Europe on my own [to my parents' dismay] and that sparked a chain of events that has kept me traveling since.  My travel experience got me a job as a travel writer for Let’s Go, which led to me doing my thesis research in Switzerland. My travel bug led me to my first job at TripAdvisor which eventually transfered me to the UK when they expanded to Europe.  In the UK I had to opportunity to travel around Europe and encounter friends who have led me to Japan, India and New Zealand.  All in all, I’ve traveled over 30 countries — all because I bought a ticket without telling my parents first.

There is always a choice: you can stay where you are or you can go somewhere else.  It starts with doing something, however big or small.

All that being said, I still haven’t been to Ireland.

Happy 2012, my friends.

Random Thoughts on Culture

18. October 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Business

For those of you who have wondered where I’ve disappeared to, I started my MBA programme at Judge back in September.  A month in, I can say I know two things to be true:

1. Judge is as collaborative as it claims to be;

2. A one-year programme does mean that you cram everything in two years into one.

Despite the exhaustion, I’ve been really enjoying the range of topics that we cover in any given week.  One topic in particular happens to be my favourite: culture.

In our management practice class, we get in a bit of a bad habit of associating culture with specific nationalities or geographical boundaries; we talk about the differences between East and West and all the intricacies of styles of communication, approaches to hierarchies, and methods of decision-making and the myriad other ways that our national cultures impact the way we work.

However, I get frustrated by this trap when thinking about this in terms of business — I hate the idea of excessive stereotyping and like to think that it’s possible to define shared culture across boundaries, particularly for the purpose of doing business.

One of the things that I cherished most about working at TripAdvisor back in the day (c. 2005) was our internal motto of “speed wins”.  And not only did the CEO talk about it, you could feel it.  Stuff happened quickly, people were recognised for upholding the value, and you were never penalised for mistakes associated with moving quickly [except when involving money and people's privacy, of course].

A shared culture can act as interpersonal short hand; just as friends can often finish one another’s sentences, shared values, beliefs and approaches in business make it easier for everyone to get along and, more importantly, faster/easier to get things done.

And while it may be tempting to think that a workplace culture will form by itself, active management of it can provide a strategic advantage (just ask Zappos).  Your competitors might steal your model, hire your people, and copy your products but culture is one of those immeasurable things that differentiate the good companies from the great.

The trick to it, however, is consistency. It doesn’t matter how often you pound your company’s values into your employees’ heads, if they don’t experience it regularly (including and particularly from The Top), people won’t buy it. The fascinating thing about cognitive dissonance is that it impacts people in different ways: some will try to awkwardly adapt to your values while others will outwardly reject them because of the perceived hypocrisy.  ’Do what I say, not what I do’ doesn’t resonate with children, so why would it for adults?

Unplugged/Replugged

30. August 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Personal Development · Tags:

So I apparently caught the flu of the century after returning from a trip to Stockholm. It was horrid. Massive fever, achy body, endless coughing and a series of jabbing pains in my head. It was one of three times on my life I actually couldn’t get myself out of bed.  And I certainly couldn’t hang out online, read tech news, or even tweet (many) ‘ woe is me’ messages to the outside world.

And then I went home to visit the parental units and continued my lack of internet streak. I thought I would start getting withdrawal symptoms. I thought I would walk miles to find an unsecured network. I thought my world would fall over without constant access.

But what’s amazing about being forcibly disconnected is that you start remembering that there id life offline. If you don’t have Google Maps on your phone, you learn to call for directions. If you don’t have email or Facebook constantly vying for your attention, you can read a darn good book (or two) in one sitting. And if you’r not busy engaging in conversions on twitter, it’s a heck of a lot more time for real conversations.

It’s easy to forget the tradeoffs we make every day, but I sure am grateful to be reminded.

Fighting Inertia

03. August 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Personal Development · Tags:

Just in case anyone was worried, I’m still alive. Mostly suffering a fine combination of physical exhaustion and writer’s block. But I figured writing something was better than nothing, so here I am taking the first step.

Wish me luck.

Relevancy: Social, Search, and Why Marketing Isn’t Getting Any Easier

06. July 2011 · 1 comment · Categories: Marketing · Tags: , ,

I had a pseudo-epiphany last week.  Well, not an epiphany so much as a kick in the pants to remind me to write about something I’ve been neglecting.  I was sitting at  ”Social Media Roundtable” sponsored by the lovely people at Experian and I had an interesting conversation with someone from the BBC and how the internet has become a challenge for individuals and organizations.  What prompted this post is what slipped out of my mouth:

“The problem is that people don’t realize that the web has a perfect memory.” (Or something along those lines. Note: I am not the web)

This perfect memory is a massive challenge though.  Not only in the “oh I wish my friend didn’t tag me in that ridiculous photo” way, but also in the massively important billions of dollars/pounds worth of brand marketing way.

The social web understands relevance more than any individual person or group can.  In a world where a developer in the UK can be connected with developer in the US, China, Australia or elsewhere, even though the average Joe can learn how to put up a web site, actually proving Joe is relevant to the development community is getting more difficult. There is more data coming through and more people who are getting better at filtering The Real Thing from the wannabes. And so are search engines.

As most of you already know, Google already incorporates elements of social into its search results – if people in your network +1 something, it’ll show up in your search results.  But also, Google incorporates a whole load of other factors that are easy to forget about when you’re opening up a web browser: location, your personal search history, what you’ve read in the past.  All of this is just the beginning of what you could call a social search experience.  And this is exactly why Google wants your social graphs.

And while there’s no explicit (public) formula, Facebook has at least acknowledged a few factors of  Edgerank, which decides what to you show on someone’s feed based on people’s affinity towards you (i.e. they actually bother to look at what you post), the level of investment people put into what you have to say (e.g. comments may weigh heavier than Likes), and time.  So just from those two major players, we can extrapolate that the following variables are becoming more important:

1. People – not just who you know, who is in your networks, but how often they interact with you (relationship depth)

2. Place – geolocation is clearly a big piece, particularly for mobile, but also where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked and where you are active online.  Places are no longer just physical but also spaces where people interact online, like an interest group or a professional forum.

3. Time – Constant, consistent activity is becoming a key driver to being relevant.  When something occurs/occurred is becoming a bigger factor because relevancy ages in the real world and online.

Why are these becoming more important for search and relevancy? Because they are factors that are relatively hard to fake.  If your entire Facebook photo history shows that you’re a Yankees fan (boo!) you can’t just move to Boston and pretend that you’re a Red Sox fan – you’ll just be considered a traitor by the people back home or a poser by the people in Boston. Similarly, you can’t have spent your entire online life demonstrating that you’re X and expect Google to show you as relevant when someone is looking for Y.

In order to show up as relevant, you actually have to be relevant.

This, of course, is exactly why marketing isn’t getting any easier. You can’t just buy people’s attention, you have to earn it over time and continuous engagement.  You can’t expect people to listen to what you have to say if you choose not to reciprocate. To be relevant in people’s lives (and in search engines), you have to prove that you are consistent, reliable, and worthy. All the perfectly crafted marketing messages –meaningless if the social web deems it so.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a thump? Turns out, the answer is no. But the situation is much more unnerving if people are around, but no one bothers to turn their heads.

* Don’t mind the parentheses, they are the topic of my next post!

Technology Cannot Save You From Yourself

15. June 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Business · Tags: , , , , ,

It’s been said that change is inevitable.  Whether or not you notice, it just keeps happening. It’s also been said that the more things change, the more they stay the same.  How is it that both of these statements can simultaneously feel like truths?

The funny thing about change in organizations is that most people hate it, but many recognize that it needs to happen, or that it is happening regardless so adaption is important.  However, what’s really interesting is the ways in which we can pretend to adapt without really having to, especially with the help of the constant technological changes that we’ve seen in the past two decades.

Just think about it.  Thanks to technology, we’re now armed with the ability to video chat with our distant friends (like Skype) or program our computers to automatically back themselves up (like Apple’s Time Machine).  But how many of us actually do that take the time to bother with video chat despite having Skype on our machines? And how many of us surfing away on our Macs actually bother using Time Machine despite the fact that it’s pre-installed?

Similarly, organizations that are struggling to keep up with the technological changes  are mistaking superficial usage with adoption.  Megan Murray wrote a very valid rant about Huddle’s “adoption” guarantee, surfacing the problem many enterprises have with fully taking on board new technology: they make little effort to integrate the change into the business and expect the technology to magically be taken on by people simply because it is introduced.  There is a misconception that if the technology is cool, people will automatically see its value.

Wrong.

The technology adoption lifecycle virtually never fails.* While you might be able to attract some innovators and even a few early adopters just by being cool, whether or not what you deliver will survive in a larger market largely depends on whether most people can see the unique value in what that technology delivers straight away. My favorite example is probably a startup called Blippy: marketing itself as the Twitter of personal finance, it is still a bit unclear why anyone would want to broadcast their spending habits and what value they got out of it.

Many businesses, wanting to keep up with all the shiny new startups featured in the likes of TechCrunch, start asking how they can use these new technologies before even asking whether they should. Strategies are thrown away and years of customer loyalty put at risk solely for the purpose wanting to show that they can run with the cool kids. Really, people? Is that how you run a successful business?

The thing is, this form of adoption isn’t actually change; true adoption requires total and complete integration, technologically, operationally and culturally, which requires a whole load of investment on the part of the business (especially if you’re a big business with complex and/or multiple systems and a lot of employees to retrain).  Anything short of that often just comes across as a rocket pack stuck to the side of a minivan.

Change is happening – is your business adopting or is it just pretending?

*If you have any examples, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Making Time to Be Inspired

06. June 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: Personal Development · Tags: , , ,

I spent Saturday attending my first TEDx Oxbridge event, and my mind is still buzzing a bit from the experience.  As with most TED events, the speakers were inspiring, funny, and generally great reminders of how everyday people work to change the world, every day.

Highlights for me included:

Lizzie Shupak, an international experience designer, spoke about her Wok and Wine events fueled by 40lbs of prawns and 40 bottles of wine, designed for random encounters to spark conversation between 40 (really) different people.  I particularly loved how she described the events as designed to create “collective discomfort” and the importance of that lack of existing etiquette or personal agendas that allows for truly honest and creative conversations. The guys from GetSatisfaction, Lane Becker and Thor Muller, similarly discussed planned serendipity and how to design situations to allow for random encounters.

A somewhat unexpected but excellent choice of speakers was Shizzio (@shizzio), an East London rapper who very much earned the only standing ovation of the day. When he said, “Who is TED, what does he want?” I just grinned from ear to ear; he reminded me of the extent to which events (and even concepts) like TED are filled with incredibly middle-to-upper class, arguably overprivileged individuals for whom spending a Saturday being inspired by world-class speakers is an option.  It made me graetful for my life trajectory, but concerned about my limited involvement in removing the distance between socio-economic classes despite having access to more resources than most people in the world.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

One of my favourites, however, had to be Alex Steffen (@alexsteffen) and his views on the history of the future.  His talk, along with the ones previously mentioned, really hit home the message around the extent to which what we think is shaped by what we know from the past, what we think we know, and what we allow ourselves to  think (apologies for the convoluted sentence). Having studied anthropology in undergrad, I was reminded of what is core to the study of anthropology: understanding why we think what we think.  The cultural lens through which we see the world is shifting quickly with the increasing usage of personalised content and the dangers of actively limited the flow of information that we’re exposed to (another TED talk worth watching: The Filter Bubble)

The day was long but managed to pass quite quickly — I met some pretty awesome people and enjoyed somewhat unexpected discussions with a few.  It was a great reminder of the importance of making time to be inspired by ordinary people doing extraordinary things and allowing yourself to break out of personal habits and just expose yourself to different ways of thinking.

A multitude of thanks again to the lovely organisers at the Said Business School at Oxford for such an awesome experience (don’t mind the inside reference).

Why Social Media Got a Bum Rap – Part 2

03. June 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Business · Tags: , ,

I’m sure you’re just dying for more around my thoughts on how social media got a bum rap – and here it is.

So last time I mildly ranted about all the geniuses who run around calling themselves social media experts, but it seems only fair now to take a look at the people hiring them. Whether it’s a large company building out their massive internal Twelpforce or a smaller company just trying to get themselves out there, businesses hiring the “experts” are often failing in understanding the scope of impact for social in their business. Many are creating accounts on Twitter to do business-as-usual customer service or marketing without recognising that a massive part of the social journey may require significant operational change.

There, I said it.  You actually have to adapt your business to address the needs of your audience.

And it’s not just in customer service or marketing that businesses need change to support their new social media endeavours. Finance, product, technology, HR — pretty much all your business units might need to reconsider their existing business rules and operational models based on the fact that you’ve actively decided to enter the social space.

Why? Because being present and engaging just isn’t enough anymore. Demanding customers know that making a big, public stink is a great way to get a business’s attention about their problems. However, individual customer problems are reasonably easy to manage if you’ve got a bit of common sense and tact about you; these are the situations your recent grad social media “experts” can gracefully handle. What you really need to worry about is whether your business can withstand a full on social media onslaught — from angry blog posts to nonstop forum posts to that ever-scary viral retweet that gets you into the news the next day — triggered by very reasonable people with very reasonable expectations.  Because it’s the inability to meet reasonable expectations that makes people angry.  Very angry.

While being active in social media might help support your brand activities, customers are smart enough to see through the engagement veneer; your organisation’s ability to actually address opportunities and issues as they arise will be the key to the success of your social – and more importantly – business strategy.

Key Takeaways

  • Set out clear objectives and goals for your social media program and see whether they’re realistic considering your current business operations.
  • Do a SWOT analysis of your business units and their readiness for adopting of a social program.  Lack of flexibility or scaleability needs to be addressed.
  • Hire someone who has experience outside of social media – you don’t want someone who has social media blinders on.
  • Slam the door on anyone who is trying to sell you a <insert hot social network of the day> strategy.  Anything that ties you to a business that may not exist in the next 3 years is not a strategy. Just imagine if you had adopted a Friendster strategy.

Why Social Media Got a Bum Rap – Part 1

25. May 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Marketing · Tags: , ,

In general, I’ll try not to bombard you with more than 1-2 posts a week, but I was inspired by this post on SEOMoz this morning, and I just couldn’t help myself.

It’s hard to say when exactly this happened, but at some point, social became a dirty word.  I think it’s largely linked to the fact that social media got overhyped by, well, what you’d call the regular media (remember the coverage on Chat Roulette) and everyone and their mothers got onto the social media bandwagon.

Just to be clear, social media existed before the likes of Facebook and Twitter — the many-to-many model of communication existed well before the year 2000. It’s just that the likes of Facebook and Twitter made social media mass market and accessible to the average Joe.

The challenge for social (media) specialists/strategists is that the technology that they’re knowledgeable about is easily hijacked by just about anyone, and the area is new enough that few people (ahem, hiring managers) can really tell the difference.

Much like email, just because you are technically capable of doing something doesn’t meant that you should be in charge of it – if that were the case, you’d allow anyone with a Hotmail account (or even the ability to use Silverpop) to run your email marketing program.  The main difference is that you would never hand over the reigns of your email service provider to just anyone in the rank and file, whereas it’s almost expected with social media… and it would be highly unlikely that they’d end up sending an obscene message on behalf of your brand to your entire opt-in base.

That being said, the social space is still very much in its awkward adolescence, and test-and-learn will inevitably be part of the maturation process as we try to understand fully the complexity of being a business in the social space. However, as with all scientific experiments, it would seem wise to let those who understand the potential risks and benefits do most of the complex experimentation.

vinegar experiment
Image by jimmiehomeschoolmom on Flickr.

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