MJD Management Group

Archive for October, 2009

I attended a network lunch and presentation today for entrepreneurs.  The speaker was fantastic, informative, and engaging.  For this session, there was a 30 minute slot to network before lunch where you had the opportunity to work the room to see people and there name tags which had a color dot to identify industry.

In the middle of the networking event, I had a flash back to a high school dance where now manner how cunning my strategy, I could never opportunity to meet and engage the right girl in conversation.  After all, you really want to maintain some degree of decorum and not be rude to others.

It is the same here, the individuals that you want to talk to which is based upon limited intelligence (i.e. who works for what company in your industry or can help your grow your business) because from across the room you can see the color dot on their name tag, and the room is so filled, everyone is talking to someone, so there is not getting to meet someone within the limited time when it is elbow to elbow is fairly prohibitive.

Back to the high school dance analogy, someone is always talking or dancing the prettiest girl or in this case the one individual that you want to network.

So, the aforementioned scenario in the previous paragraph is so common for network events it is scary and nobody complains. To quote the Beach Boys, “Wouldn’t it be nice” if we approached these situations differently where perhaps before the event, optionally participants could for free or a fee provide the usual information name, company, phone, email, networking objective in advance for those that register like a job fair so that individuals can figure out who will be there and know who they may want to connect with.  Further, the individuals who are interested in participating, but can’t attend because of scheduling, could provide there information (again for free or a fee) so that it is part of the networking follow-up process for those that attend.

This would be a much better way to approach the networking process and it can be handled electronically where all parties involved can benefit.  The hosting organization could collect more fees to benefit their club, those that attend could have an informed target list where they can find by name tag who they want or need to seek out and lastly fees can be collected from those who are interested, but can’t attend because you can offer them network access.  Lastly, everyone gets a networking list with all interested participants that they have for their files.

Now I am not sure if this approach would work in the high school dance analogy, but it a much more advanced way to hold a network session.

Technology is a wonderful thing that can do amazing things and make seasoned individuals say words like “cool”, “wow”,  and make excited noises.  We are sometimes lulled into believing that by building the better mouse trap, the lights will flash, doors will open, and the heavens will rain down in the form of money and PO’s from customers.  Well maybe not to that extent, but we believe the better features will help us thrash the competition.

I always enjoy discussions about emerging technologies and how close they are to mainstream and making a difference.  I am reminded to one of the most insightful analogies about technology and adoption which I heard twenty years ago at a user conference speech which aptly puts all of this in perspective.   The speaker whose name I can’t remember, but I give all credit likened emerging technology, adoption, and mainstream usage to teenage sex.  At the time of the speech, Client-Server was all of the rage (yes that is a very dated reference). He said that “new technology adoption is like teenage sex in the perspective that everyone is talking about it, far less are doing it, and only a few are doing it well. “  At least it was funny in the meeting hall.  Well for all those who romantically talk about the promise of new technology and it hitting mainstream, I share with you the Gartner Group Hype Cycle which has the full technology life cycle for emerging technologies.  Gartner does a great job on this and updates it annually.   I Google it annually as part of my industry research.

As a Silicon Valley Technology company native, there is a lot of pride in the success of the five foot brains of Silicon Valley that created and revolutionized and industry while battling and winning fierce competition.

[If you are looking for a great primer on the history of Silicon Valley and the legends, check out "Accidental Empires:  How the Boys of Silicon Valley Made their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date" by Robert X. Cringley.   I met Bob a few years back at a dinner and with the extra detail he shared beyond the book, I feel like I could be a historian on Silicon Valley.]

Getting back to this post, there is tremendous business growth in the BRIC countries and US businesses are focusing on these markets as US growth has slowed to a crawl.  The engine of growth are the brains and creativity of the educated workforce the dreams of new ideas, brings new technology, and reengineer how we do business and live   Silicon Valley has long been an international city with the best international restaurants of any cuisine (which tells you about the diversity and make up of the individuals that live and work there).  The growing trend of the highly skilled and knowledgeable brain power that I have heard about is validated in this TechCrunch article

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/17/beware-the-reverse-brain-drain-drain-to-india-and-china/

Tell me what you think about the article.

We hear a lot of conversation about effective listening, but what is listening.  The commonly accepted definition of listening is ‘to make an effort to hear something.”  The definition sounds OK for every day life, but that definition is not a good one for a client-supplier relationship.  It is not OK for a client-supplier relationship because it doesn’t involve comprehension because it is viewed as a passive activity.  Effective listening is an active, engaging activity where clarifications questions are offered to insure clarity and context free open ended questions to explore client interests and desires.  From a supplier perspective it also means coming to the client with a learning orientation and using the “blank sheet of paper” to illustrate and explain instead of pulling out PowerPoint slide 7 from a canned services presentation to explain a point.  I consider active listening as that I would be able to do a format presentation of the clients points directly back to the client without his/her clarification during my presentation.

In many ways it is funny how innovation brings change and with change brings an expectation difference.  With technology innovation our expectations have changed and though many do not know or understand Moores Law relating to Transistor counts and density over time, it is understood from an end user perspective of  faster and smaller computing foot prints and rapid new introduction of technology.  I believe with that comes the belief system that we should and will always be continually improving on what we have today as a product to  make it better and more complex going forward.   To this point, a thought provoking article entitled, “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is just fine” was recently published in Wired Magazine.  http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough?currentPage=all

Watch video listed below (http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html). Why is there a dichotomy between what science has long proven as useful and productive motivation tools versus the tools commonly used by companies?

I was having this discussion with a friend over coffee about email and how in a general sense it has morphed beyond the utility it once had and how in many ways we have evolved in the information age beyond it.  The following WSJ article by Ms. Vascellaro is a great article that does a deep dive to explore this topic.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574431151489408372.html

Michael just completed taping Niche Capsule series interview as part of the experts online video series with Andy “Google Me” Greider of Marketing Pedagogy.  The video interview will be posted soon.