About the magnificent tiger

It had been 10 years since my last trip to India, and during a recent visit I witnessed a massive change and made new observations every single day. Being in Bangalore on business I had an action packed week of Business Development; now I am trying to put in a simple picture what this week was like.

The one image that regularly is coming back to my memory is that of a tiger, building up energy and being ready to leap forward.

As the Tiger is the national animal of India, the website of the Indian Government says: “The magnificent tiger, Panthera tigris is a striped animal.  … The combination of grace, strength, agility and enormous power has earned the tiger its pride of place as the national animal of India.”

These attributes are very much in line with my observations on this trip. I wouldn’t say those are new or didn’t exist previously. However, the strength and agility can now be better observed and this massive momentum can be detected everywhere in society and economy.
The Indian economy moves at an amazing speed, supported by easy yet functional communications and transactions and very pragmatic solutions to daily challenges.

As an example, the omni-present Auto Taxis (Auto Rikshaws) since 2022 can be booked with the Uber-style Mobile App Namma Yatri that facilitates 100k rides per day with zero commission. 100% of the fare goes to the driver.

Behind the quick digital payments is the unique Indian payment system PhonePe that processes more than 100 Million transactions a day. For reference, the going rate for those Auto Rikshaws is INR 11 (0,12 €) per kilometer and we are talking fares in the value of 1-3 € per trip.

On a larger scale business and innovation level there is an amazing creativity and energy to innovate and explore new business models. All that is fueled by a very collaborative and inclusive yet sustainable investment climate.
India as of today lists 108 Unicorn Startups (> $1bn evaluation). The IDU Bank’s half yearly report on the Indian economy, observes that despite significant global challenges, India was one of the fastest-growing major economies in FY22/23 at 7.2%. India’s growth rate was the second highest among G20 countries and almost twice the average for emerging market economies.
If you want to get more details, check out the analyses from the Worldbank and S&P Global.

The backdrop to this are my personal experiences from business meetings and professional exchanges. I captured a great amount of energy and desire to set things in motion in a very professional manner and at great speed and agility. Most of the folks I got to work with have two or three jobs and engagements going in parallel, and all are open to share and listen to feedback and comments.
All of that in a very positive and humble mode.

These are powerful testimonies of grace, strength, agility and enormous power that left me energized and inspired.

I can see the magnificent tiger ready to leap forward.

Wealth of information and poverty of attention

An article on Heineken testing attention-based metrics to evaluate sponsorship success immediately captured my interest. This approach seems to be telling the absolute truth about how much attention an ad or article gets, and with that render all other (indirect) indicators or projections less relevant.

Trinity McQueen developed a system that they used for Heineken and others to evaluate the attention ads are getting. It is called BEACON and the metrics cover Brand Associations, Engagement & Emotion, Attention, Credibility/Plausibility, Optimism (of third parties) and Nailing the campaign message, leveraging AI to evaluate those metrics. It all starts with the attention, and the conclusion is that, no matter how great an ad is, if it does not get any attention it is not relevant and won’t perform.

Very straightforward approach and definitely food for thought.
Read here for the full article on ‘The economy of attention in advertizing‘.

Seeing new things in an old picture

Courtesy of MarketingKind xChange I was invited to listen to an online chat with Seth Godin.
Feel free to get a synopsis of this talk on the MarketingKind web site. In the follow up I also picked up Seth’s extensive list of top Marketing reads from This is Marketing.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoff Moore
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
Adcreep by Mark Bartholomew
Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? (A short modern classic by Michael Schrage.)
Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Workforce by Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell
The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman ScottSecrets of Closing the Sale (Zig Ziglar’s book is as much about marketing as sales.)
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Jack Trout and Al Ries
Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin (Of all my marketing-related books, this is the one that’s the most on point.)
Unleashing the Ideavirus: Stop Marketing at People! Turn Your Ideas into Epidemics by Helping Your Customers Do the Marketing for You (One more from me.)
Direct Mail Copy That Sells by Herschell Gordon Lewis (One of his many classic books on copywriting.)
A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century by Scott Bedbury and Stephen Fenichell
The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers by Douglas Atkins (An overlooked gem.)
Selling the Dream by Guy Kawasaki (His best book.)
The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank (A startup book with essential marketing insight.)
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Marketing: A Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers (Bernadette Jiwa is brilliant and I recommend all her books.)
Syrup by Max Barry (The best marketing novel ever written.)
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug (A surprising book about testing.)
The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook by Jay Levinson and Seth Godin
The Regis Touch by Regis McKenna
New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly
Talking to Humans: Success with Understanding Your Customers by Giff Constable (An extended blog post about talking to customers.)
The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations by Tom Peters
The Pursuit of Wow!: Every Person’s Guide to Topsy-Turvy Times by Tom Peters
Start with Why by Simon Sinek
The Experience Economy, Updated Edition by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore
Meaningful Work by Shawn Askinosie
The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World by Fred Reichheld
Business Model Generation (On How to Build a Business That Matches the Marketing You Want to Do) by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
The War of Art and Do The Work by Steve Pressfield (On why you might be having a hard time doing what you know will work.)

Feel free to work your way through the list © Seth Godin. Hope you find it as inspiring as I do.
Certainly, I am getting new ideas from this (old) list of Marketing classics.

I don’t think it’s the Pandemic

In April I wrote a post about how Marketing has (not) changed with the Covid Pandemic.
As I am re-reading it now, I do see some changes, just in the last months or so. 
When interacting with clients or prospective clients most of them are looking for

1. Sustainability is top of mind
   Is the company showing responsibility towards sustainability in doing business, sometimes even down to a single project level. As a result many different tests and certifications have sprung up.
2. Pervasive AI drives premium CX
   From recognizing interests and information consumption patterns in order to dynamically adjust reports, communications, and interfaces, it is all about understanding the clients’ preferences and priorities.
3. Snackable information now
   The main desire is for a quick, short answer now vs. a long and detailed root cause analysis that I might have to wait for.

I have immediately started to incorporate those points in my daily interactions and see an impact.
Let me know what you experience in this context. I am curious.

Find your essential – 2021 IBV CEO Study

How to thrive in a post-pandemic reality? That is a question that keeps many of us up at night. It is also to title of the latest IBV CEO Study.

“Whether COVID-19 impacts subside from here or persist, 2020 served as a dramatic inflection point. Never before has the entire planet reconfigured its behavior simultaneously, participating in lockdowns, quarantines, and enforced social distancing. For businesses and governments, the implications have been extreme, with assumptions and plans radically altered. From Asia to the Americas, the status quo evaporated both within and across industries. The future is murkier than ever—yet presents both new opportunities and new risks.”

© IBM Institute for Business Value 2021

As in other CxO studies thousands of execs were interviewed – 3,000 CEOs and most senior public sector leaders from around the world to define the most common mindsets, themes and challenges that the struggle with.
It is a great read that talks about Leadership, Technology, Employees, Open Innovation, and Cyber Security.

Download the 2021 IBV CEO Study here.

How the COVID Pandemic has (not) changed Marketing

This recent post ’10 Truths About Marketing After the Pandemic’ by Janet Balis triggered me to write down my thoughts on this topic.
Janet makes interesting points about how Marketing is currently being redefined, around

• impatience of both customers and vendors leading to acceleration of processes
• this pushes the design of complete (holistic) client journeys, not just a sequencing of individual touchpoints
• defining the score for experiences that matter based on the last best experience a customer had
• making successful marketing less about chance and more about data
• the increased C-Level challenge on driving growth

I am not sure if these dynamics are really driven by the Pandemic, but certainly they have been increased or accelerated by it.

Most resonating with me are Janet’s points about balancing Brand and Performance Marketing, resisting the urge to centralize and leave room for custom approaches. She calls it the Art and Science of Marketing.

Interesting blog, opening new perspectives, making me rethink and change daily approaches. But still emphasizes the old paradigm of keeping the customer in the center.

A/B Testing does not work in this case

What initially looked like the problem of a city, far away in China, immediately covered the world, and completely took control of social, economic, political, and medical dynamics. Of our lives.

When the COVID-19 pandemic took its course, it quickly became obvious that previously known and used problem solving patterns would not be successful in this case. No decision could only be taken within a region, a country or econom, and there were plenty of decisions that had to be taken on a daily basis. All had to be arbitrated across medical, economic, social and political fields. That’s the rational aspect of this crisis.

People and societies went into lockdown and through different states of mind and emotions on it: solidarity, determination, ignorance, frustration, impatience, aggression,  and many others.
My friend Shakti wrote an interesting Blog on ‘Ten Livelong learnings from Covid-19’ and there are many different other perspectives on the current situation, looking at all different aspects of what’s going on right now.
For the rational and the emotional part, the big challenge was that there was not a situation in recent history that this could be compared to, or where problem solving patterns could be derived from.

By now we’ve all realized that after this crisis nothing will be like it was before and we still don’t know what the world will be like when this is over. Actually, there is no ‘this is over’; the world will have changed forever.

So, how can we learn from this and how can we make the ‘after’ better than the ‘before’? Since we don’t know what’s on the other side we’ll have to follow our vision.
The decisions we make as a global community now, the visions that drive us, define an opportunity to change what might have looked like a one way ticket to global destruction. We can break the no-alternative approach of our system; we can build a new one.

My CSFs for this new approach

• Solidarity. Let’s show local and global responsibility for people in need and build a careful society.
• Agility. Be quick in assessing facts and dare to change the course.
• Sustainability. Stock indices aren’t an adequate measure of whether or not we are successful; if the world will be a livable place in 100 years is.

Can we do this?

Is your Chief Digital Officer MIA?

The provoking abstract of the recent IBV Study on the role of the CDO:
“Business magazines have recently been thick with obituaries for the role of Chief Digital Officer. … Heralded in 2012 as “the most exciting strategic role in the decade ahead,” just a few years later, headlines appeared predicting the CDO’s demise. By 2016, a Forbes headline warned: “Say Goodbye to the Chief Digital Officer.” In 2018, we got “Does the Chief Digital Officer matter anymore?” and “The death of the chief digital officer.” And in 2019,“Have we reached ‘peak’ Chief Digital Officer?” and “Chief Dinosaur: The Chief Digital Officer role is already heading toward extinction.””

© IBM Institute for Business Value 2019

Despite this attention grabbing opening the study offers some interesting insight on the role of the CDO. My top highlights are:

• Digital transformation continues to be a mission-critical undertaking for many established companies
• Placing a CDO in the organization can be associated with higher digital maturity of the company
• Once the enterprise adopts new ways of working and is able to create new platforms, products and services fueled by digital innovation, CDOs will have worked themselves out of a job.

© IBM Institute for Business Value 2019

The study also explores the CDO challenge between digital transformation being an opportunity to fundamentally reinvent the business vs. tactically developing a set of technology-focused projects impacting a few business functions.
Should the better CDO be a technologist or a business strategist?

In my opinion the CDO focus should be on business strategy and leadership, and organizational change. A successful CDO will make digital transformation part of the core business function, and will be the shared responsibility of every member of the executive team. This will only be the end of the CDO job role, a ‘mission accomplished’ if the CDO does not provide the business leadership to continuously re-invent the organization and disrupt the market. And that would be the demise of the company.
So, the CDO better not be MIA!

Download the IBV CDO Study here.

 

1:59:40 vs 2:01:39

Eliud Kipchoge breaking the 2 hr marathon mark © picture alliance/dpa / Herbert Neubauer

Not even 2 minutes is the difference between the official and the unofficial marathon world record. In normal life that difference seems neglible; in top level sports it’s a massive difference.

On October 12, 2019 the magical two hour barrier for the distance of 42.195 km finally fell. With 43 of the world’s fastest runners as pacemakers, an electric vehicle projecting the ideal position for each of the pacemakers onto the specially paved street, and a couple of other aides, Eliud Kipchoge ran 100 m in a 17 sec average across the complete marathon distance.

I believe the impact of this exercise is even more disruptive than simply stirring up a discussion about the validity of this record.

Of course, this is a record made in a laboratory, not relevant in the sense of Baron de Coubertin’s values, but it shows the power of determination and the potential of disruptive approaches. Without any doubt it opens the path for the 2 hours to be undercut in a regular, open race at some point.

Our challenge is to think of those disruptive approaches that will help solve real world problems!

All companies must record employees’ working hours – what does that do to Digital Transformation?

Image courtesy REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

“Member States must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured,” the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on May 14.

This decision was triggered by a case a Spanish Trade Union filed against Deutsche Bank and to me, went to an unexpected level of detail. This blog post won’t enter the heated political discussion, but will look at what this outcome could do for the digital transformation in Europe.

The implementation boils down to

• Businesses have to record the time worked each day by each worker
• The law is binding for companies that are doing business in Europe
• Means or systems of recording are not specified by the law; that is the authority of EU countries

For years, I have enjoyed the benefits of a work model based on trust and commitment to drive results for customers and the business. Work-Life Balance has been part of an employee and manager responsibility and employee empowerment, not formalized via specific implementation practices.

The way this has played out was, that meeting project deadlines and driving results for customers defined what had to be done. When projects where delivered, I’ve had the flexibility to take time back. I even tracked my own annual leave times. With a global job responsibility, I crossed time zones back and forth and spent many hours in airports and on airplanes to get face time with clients and business partners in their time zone.

As a result, work related phone calls happen on the commute or at home. I making use of downtime to do work emails while waiting for at a doctor’s appointment and I am thinking out work strategies on the weekend. At the same time I am stepping out of the office to see a doctor, leave work early when I go on a weekend trip, or I even extend a break when I meet a personal friend for coffee or lunch.

This is a flexibility I am enjoying and it gives me the room for creativity I need to succeed. For me it is an efficient use of time to maximize results. Logging times in these scenarios would be a massive effort. Am I now crossing the law if I decide not to record any of those times that I work outside standard hours or outside the office?

I am out of wits how this law can practically be implemented in times where more and more jobs are digitally transformed to bring more flexibility to employees, where technology enables us to work anywhere anytime, and where at the same time we want to restrict an omnipresent digital surveillance.

I am not seeing how this law is giving employees room for personal initiative and how it is making European businesses more competitive on a global scale. Unless I am missing something in the full verbiage, I think it lacks concept of a trust based working model based on dynamic times, flexible locations and virtual work settings, giving employees more flexibility and work-life balance. Instead it’s weighing them down with concerns of 24/7 tracking and monitoring.

Looking forward to your thoughts on this.