Let Pablo Eat! A Management Lesson in Encouraging Peak Performance at Work.

Pablo Sandoval with his MVP Trophy, Oct. 28th, 2012

Last night the San Francisco Giants won Major League Baseball’s World Series Championship. That’s two championships out of the last three years for San Francisco’s “boys of summer.” And the Most Valuable Player Award at the World Series went to SF’s Venezuelan born Pablo Sandoval. 

Sandoval, nicknamed "Kung Fu Panda," hit three homeruns in Game One of the Series joining the elite group of Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, and Albert Pujols as the only players in MLB history to hit three home runs in a World Series game. 

The back story on Pablo Sandoval is that he is a very gregarious twenty-six year old who is five feet eleven inches tall and weighs anywhere from a sturdy 230 to a corpulent 270-plus pounds during the baseball season. Since coming into the majors as a Giant in 2008 Sandoval has achieved a very solid .303 career batting average. And although he is widely embraced by fans, many of whom wear "Panda hats" at Giant games, he is universally criticized for his weight which visibly increases as the baseball season wears on. Coupled with criticisms of his free swinging ways at the plate, the rap on Sandoval is that he lacks the discipline to ever become a great player.

As seen at Highway 101 and Great America
Parkway  at 9 a.m.  this morning.

Much like the Sandoval's critics, the majority of high tech managers tend to focus on employee weaknesses rather than strengths. Case in point, when was the last time you were called into your boss’s office for doing a good job? In our age of information and ideas, wouldn't it make more sense to encourage our knowledge workers to build upon their best skills and talents rather than inordinately focusing on their deficiencies? Don't we want them to occasionally make breakthroughs rather than just focusing on making baby steps forward?

Hey, I’m no Pollyanna. I am all about excellence and understand that every manager needs to identify and correct employee deficiencies if their companies and cultures are to improve. But let’s start balancing our focus on correcting employee behavior with a commensurate amount of encouragement for our people to improve upon those things that they already do well.

Often companies achieve their most outstanding results when they get out of the way of their people and encourage them to do what they do best—even as their people continue to have weaknesses in other work areas. This approach is not that different from the sentiment of many of us around the Bay Area today who, in light of the Panda's sublime athleticism and accomplishments, are finally starting to say, “Let Pablo Eat!"

Gartner thinks that Big Data will be really BIG!

Gartner just came out with their Big Data IT spend forecast for the five year period of 2012 through 2016. It's a jaw dropping, but I think reasonable, sum of $232B through 2116 (Details on Tech Crunch). That's an average of $46B of spend a year--or ~1.5% of the total global IT spend of $2.7 trillion a year (Gartner's Global IT Spend). That's what a Google or a Cisco did in total revenue over the past year. Or from a software company perspective, that's a 2012 Oracle plus three 2012 Salesforces in sales. We're talking a significant disruption and growth here. Choose a seat near the front of the plane and buckle your seat belt.

May the Best Technology Win (Don't Bet on it!)

In my earlier post, “Breakthrough Technology Markets are Made Not Found,” I made the case that emerging technology markets do not occur on their own but are instead created. This flies in the face of the many technically inclined people who believe that, in open markets, the best idea and the best technology wins. I strongly believe that marketing and awareness, distribution, price, and standardization are each more important to a breakthrough technology’s success than are the merits of the technology itself.  The following examples act as my proof points:

>Tokenring and Ethernet networking (1980s).  Tokenring is a more predictable and elegant network architecture but Ethernet is simpler and is…well…good enough. 

>Pure Digital’s Flip Camera and mobile phone cameras (2005-2010).  The Flip Camera is a great, single purpose, pocket size camera.  It still works better than most mobile phone video recorders.  But Flip Cameras were trumped by a universally available, integrated, portable, multi-purpose device.

>Macs and PCs (forever!).  I don’t know anyone who loves their PC and Microsoft applications but I do have many friends who order Macs even before they are made available.  Nonetheless, the Wintel duo has consistently owned 90%+ of the desktop world for as long as anyone can remember. 

Even Apple, arguably the world's preeminent brand, has been unable to radically increase the adoption rate for Macs. Price, availability, software and accessory choice, massive distribution, and enterprise standardization have made it so that technically inferior Windows PCs outsell the Apple Mac by a ratio of twenty to one.

In my next post, I will explore the topic of how a startup with a breakthrough technology can go about establishing a leadership position within that technology category.

 

How Ideas Become Movements (or 1 Minute to the Tipping Point)

When passion, an idea, and the right context combine, the results can be astounding. Take a look at this video clip--start your viewing at 50 seconds and watch for the following minute--and you will see how one impassioned crazy can inspire many, many more. Isn't this emotionally contagious and collective response the goal of today's viral marketers? My compliments to Seth Godin and Alice Lankester.

START THE VIDEO AT 50 SECONDS, 

THEN WATCH FOR ONE MINUTE MORE.

So What is Product Marketing?

Most people seem to know what Marketing and Product Management do. And everyone knows what Sales does. So why is there so much confusion around the role of Product Marketing within technology companies? The main reason for this confusion is that Product Marketing (and Solution/Vertical Marketing) plays largely enabling roles to support other functions within organizations. Enabling roles are less apparent from the outside looking in.

Think of Product Marketing within technology companies in terms of providing an automobile to the market. The parts and vendors chosen, the manufacturing, the assembly, and the delivery and distribution of cars all happen with little or no input from Product Marketing. Everything else, including definition of the target market and features required, market position, category, and differentiation, pricing and options, feature descriptions, proof points, and characteristics in support of the company brand are primary functions of Product Marketing. Functionally speaking, technology Product Marketing provides:

• Product Management with a market strategy for delivering a product rather than a set of features, 
• Marketing with product positioning, relevant market themes and business value, and use cases and other content that make the company and product relevant to the market and fuels launches, programs, and to a lesser extent demand generation too, and
• Sales with product differentiation and unique selling propositions, claims, proof points, competitive analysis and "silver bullets," and sales tools that keep the customer engaged and moving through the sales funnel.

Below is a graphic that I put together to visually illustrate Product Marketing's role. I call this graphic a "big animal picture." If a big animal picture is successful, it should seem almost obvious at first glance. So if this seems very simple or even trite to some of you pros, please bear with me.

Products and Point Solutions. Product Marketing should price and package products to be readily consumed. Product marketing should also bundle products and components together into a broader offering to make that product more valuable so that (1) it not need to compete on features or price alone and so that (2) it does not need to prove itself each time a new competitor is introduced.

Pricing and Packaging. Product Marketing should add pricing and packaging in similar ways as product management adds features. They are two attributes that help define the product’s overall value. Product marketing should also use pricing and packaging to shape or create emerging market categories as well. Consider how pricing and packaging have differentiated enterprise software from enterprise SaaS—even if they offer the same ultimate value.

Market Position and Category. For me, creating position and category are the most strategic and aspects of Product Marketing. This is where Product Marketing maps the company’s product lines, capabilities, and market reach vis-a-vis the competition and market and technological trends and chooses the company’s market space and makes the company’s leadership claims, and provides the high level proof points for the company’s leadership position.

Brand Identity. Product Marketing provides the underlying validation for a company’s brand identity. Product Marketing must support the brand by validating that the product can deliver against the values implied by the brand (e.g., quality, enterprise grade, simple, or comprehensive).

Breakthrough Technology Markets are Made Not Found

Fresh out of business school and in my new job running and selling customer satisfaction, technology market research projects, I paid a sales call to Oracle. I visited a Sr. VP and was appalled at his arrogance. He had the gall to say that customer opinions did not matter--what mattered were the strength of the ideas and concepts behind the products and services. I was certain that the exec was daft and that Oracle would soon "hit the wall".

Having worked on the technology vendor side for many years now, I have largely changed my perspective to mirror that Oracle exec's viewpoint. Sure there are technology markets that are "found" by focusing on known targets and then by excavating those niches. But I can't come up with one, very big, world changing technology idea that was generated because Marketing people did research, identified a need, and then went forth to create a product or service. Nope, big markets are made NOT found. IBM's early computer, Netscape's browser, Yahoo's search business, and Apple's iPhone are examples of innovations that stood as much chance to fail as they did to become game-changing initiatives. More to the point, no amount of upfront market research could have predicted the product requirements and the outlines of the market opportunity. These innovations were driven by imaginative visionaries driven by inspiration rather than analysis.

Generally, great innovations are so unique that they cannot be "tested" against market expectations. The market must first be introduced to the product and educated about it before prospects can make intelligent comments on the attractiveness of the technology. Hence, market research and analysis play little or no role in the making of the biggest technology hits.

So, if markets are made, then what role does Marketing play with regard to innovation? That answer may be different depending on whether an innovation is meant for consumer or business audiences. And I'll plan to explore this topic in a future blog post.

Oh, and I have finally stopped holding my breath while waiting for Oracle to implode....