On the Road, a poem by John Updike.

Novelist, critic, short story writer, poet, essayist, and dramatist, John Updike (1932 – 2009) who died this week, earned virtually every American literary award available during his lifetime. He first aspired to be either an animator for Walt Disney or a magazine cartoonist. But a sense of narrative was nurtured by summer work in high school as a copyboy for a local newspaper, The Reading Eagle, for which he wrote several feature articles. Graduating from Harvard in 1954, summa cum laude, he won a Knox Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford. In June of that year, he had a short story and a poem accepted by The New Yorker, an event, he later said, that remained “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.”

It’s lovely to see a poem describe something with such few words by someone who used so many millions of them in his other works. “I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”


On the Road by John Updike

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors
while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller,
those hotel rooms where the TV remote
waits by the bed like a suicide pistol,
those hours in the air amid white shirts
whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers,
those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts —
such venues of transit grow dearer than home.

The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss,
the dripping faucet and uncut lawn — this is life?
No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop
whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror,
in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent,
and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide
down through the cloud cover to a single runway
at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.

How to recognize a "good" product.

How do you recognize a “good” product?

• A “good” product helps the company get known and accepted in the marketplace so it can move up the food chain later on. Netscape’s web browser is an example.

• A good product gives customers the capability to do more than they need to do at the moment. Delivering more value than customers expect creates product loyalty and increases the chances of creating a truly “hot” product.

• A good product ensures that the company is first to market with something that boosts distinctiveness was well as improving functionality.

• A good product incorporates correct assumptions about market readiness. Set realistic goals - don’t make the product a loser by aiming for unreasonably high sales.

• A good product reduces the ease with which competitors can copy the innovation.

• A good product neutralizes a competitor’s advantage.

• A good product supports a price premium.

• A good product grows in revenue by at least XX % a year.

• A good product has a return on equity greater than XX %.

• A good product exploits the company’s core technologies.

• A good product is faster ... cheaper ... closer ... friendlier. As Loretta Lynn says, “You have to be first, better or different.”

• A good product leverages your business partner’s capabilities.

• A good product contributes to your customers' success.

• A good product builds market share quickly.

• A good product creates a new platform of capability by using cross-functional processes for competitive advantage.

Rubbermaid asks these three questions:

- Who is your customer?
- What relevant service are you providing for them?
- Which of our business strategies are you satisfying?

Best Practices for New Product Development.

1) Plan for "right-to-market" v/s "speed-to-market."

Although being among the first to introduce a new product or extension of an existing product is an important goal, creating a product that will satisfy customers should be a higher priority. Companies can often have greater success entering a market late, but with a better product. The Thermos Electric Grill and IBM's ThinkPad notebook computers are good examples.

2) Focus innovation on product elements that are "visible and valuable."

IBM ThinkPad developers looked at all available technologies that would give their product more value for the customer, whether these were invented by IBM or not. Technological innovation should only be used to develop product features that the customer will be aware of and find valuable. Digital speedometers, for example, were soon abandoned by auto manufacturers when they found customers weren't aware of them and didn't think they added value.

3) Get physical fast.

Rapid prototyping to create tangible product models in the early stages of development allows engineers, designers and customers to learn more about a product's use by interacting with it, even if it’s just a physical mock-up, and to observe how customers use the product in the their own environment.

4) Have total team involvement in marketing research.

When it comes to researching customer requirements, it's better to have too much data than too little. In addition to surveys, quality function deployment methods and focus groups, the IBM ThinkPad team formed industry and customer advisory councils, and had "Customer Call Days" where members of the development team called customers directly to discuss the product.

5) Go beyond traditional market research.

Customers want it all. If you ask if they’re interested in a specific feature, they’ll invariably say "Yes." The Hewlett-Packard Digital Multimeter team asked customers if they had to choose from a list, which features would they keep. This "forced pain" questioning adds quality to quantitative data.

6) Have a complete model of customer needs.

The $APPEALS model introduced by Peter Marks in Defining Great Products, includes Cost, Availability, Packaging, Performance, Ease-of-use, Assurances, Life-cycle costs, and Sanctions (or social influences). This format offers a good starting point to understand customer's buying behavior as well as other factors that influence competitiveness.

7) Think "total product."

A customer's relationship with a company doesn’t end with the sale, but continues through service, upgrades and maintenance. It’s more economical to sell more to existing customers than it is to find new customers.

8) Ease-of-use opens new markets.

"Human factors" design can make a product more accessible. The less specialty knowledge required to use a product, the larger the potential market.

9) Understand the science of your product.

Defining a product's specifications means understand its physical and technological limitations. Knowing the trade-offs of the science and technology up-front can make the path of product definition clearer.

10) Choose your team carefully, then make them accountable.

Make sure the functions represented on your team are appropriate to the project. The JBL Sound Effects team had a seat reserved at every team meeting to represent the customer. Even when that seat remained empty, it still left a physical reminder for the rest of the team to keep the customer in perspective.

Planning for breakthrough products.

Breakthrough products are rare and consume unpredictable amounts of time and money - “they take what they take.” The most frustrating cases, which are often the most important ones, are next-generation core products (like the Ford Taurus) which are true advances and whose success is central to a company’s fortunes. Introducing frequent small improvements based on customers’ reactions is less risky than taking one great leap forward based on the prognostications of market researchers. That way, new products are a series of little pops, not big bangs. Variations on existing products are predictable enough that phased development works, especially for companies that dominate mature markets. H-P believed it could grow incrementally by integrating its test, measurement and computer capabilities to provide unique offerings (information appliances such as hand-held gas chromatographs, for example) for customers building complex networks. Innovations that depend on technical platforms or infrastructure that others lack provide a sustainable source of competitive advantage. Little advantage comes from just developing clever technical applications.

Faster product development comes from pausing to plan basic technologies. Technology planning keeps developers from chasing technical sophistication that only engineers can appreciate. In most new products, only 20% of the design brings added value. It’s important to establish checkpoints for a technology’s readiness and robustness before letting the designers use it. Think about successors to new products as well as the products themselves. If you don’t plan new generations early, you end up looking at your competitors’ innovations saying, “I wish we’d done that.” Trying to recover quickly by adding features that you didn't initially think results in an expensive, unreliable, untimely (late) product.

Experience suggests that successful marketing strategies emerge from identifying multiple niches, focusing on just one niche and doing very well there, then leveraging this success into other segments. As a company increases its volume through success in other segments, it can re-define the market in terms of its product or service. When Peoplesoft started out, for example, prior to merging with J.D.Edwards and being being acquired by Oracle, it knew it couldn’t compete against much larger software companies. So it concentrated on creating a client-server capability for HR applications and won 70% of that market segment, thus becoming the industry leader. This enabled it in time to move into other segments, such as finance. It now provides Human resource management systems (HRMS), customer relationship management, Manufacturing, Financials, Enterprise Performance Management, and Student Admin. software solutions to large corporations, governments, and organizations.

The difference between a new product idea and a business revolves around the question of how are you going to make that first sale.
- Find people with pain.
- Define that pain.
- Then define the market size.
Alternatively,
- Find industries in pain.
- Find the people in those industries who feel that pain.
- Then get a Beta customer, someone who says, “Yes, I think I could use that.”

Involve customers in new product development.

A 1989 McKinsey study showed that products that got to market on time and 50% over budget eventually earned only 4% less than those that were on time and on budget. Products that got to market six months late and on budget earned 33% less than those that were on time and on budget. In a fast changing world, it’s especially important to get new products and services into the marketplace as early as possible rather than waiting to perfect them. Once they hit the market, no one can anticipate where that will lead or whether they’ll succeed or not. Sanctioning experiments with uncertain outcomes is the best way to make progress quickly. The penalties in being late to market in a growing business far outweigh overruns in development costs or the potential waste of having to shut down a development team. Strategies that move organizations in the right direction can be quickly refined through rapid experimentation and adjustment when managers concentrate on failing and learning faster than the competition. Every new product decision has two parts. First you make it, and then you decide to continue it or change it.

As the president of a hi-tech company explained to me recently, “We’re making products daily that are still evolving, delivered to a market that’s still emerging, using a technology that’s still changing on a daily basis.” In uncertain times, much of the route forward may be invisible from the starting point. The only way to see the road ahead is to start moving because clarity emerges more readily from error than from confusion. In a business environment where progress depends on serendipity and spontaneity, high risk and high rewards go hand-in-hand. In many organizations, however, the quest for efficiency drives out opportunities for experimentation. This is a mistake. The quick rise of Casio and Sharp in hand-held calculators and of Ricoh, Canon and Sharp in plain-paper copiers came largely from launching more new high-quality products that the competition did. Time-to-market is as important for success as proprietary technologies and processes. If you wait to move until everything is certain, you can be sure your competition will get to market before you.

Business and product development strategy should be driven primarily by customer needs, values and priorities. Ask, “How do the customers we’re targeting want to deal with us?” Then design the product from the outside in. Make the customer’s use of the product, not the technology, central to all product development. Employees need to develop an instinctive understanding of target customers. Don’t launch a product just because engineering loves a new technology. Consult target users at every step of the way, from the initial idea stage to the actual rollout. Customers don’t want drills; they want holes. Strive to move customers into the design arena, making them part of the design process, developing them into “prosumers” rather than just accepting them as consumers. Success comes not from satisfying customers, but from keeping customers reasonably dissatisfied with what they have so they’ll welcome new products.

In high technology companies, the products are complicated and the people who use them often know as much about how the products work as the people who develop them. Researchers at MIT found that 77% of the innovations in equipment used to make semiconductors and circuit boards came from customers. As technologies become more complicated and users more sophisticated, customers are no longer the passive recipients of a company’s products but the engines of innovation instead.

Passers-by, a poem by Carl Sandburg.

I normally like Elizabeth Alexander's poetry. However, I wasn’t particularly taken by her inauguration day poem, "Praise Song for the Day." So I asked myself who would I have picked if the president had asked me to make the choice. I would probably have recommended Passers-by by Carl Sandburg from his Chicago Poems (1916) both for the relevance of the poem and the poet.

Carl Sandburg (January, 1878 – July, 1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois to Swedish immigrants. At the age of thirteen he left school and began driving a milk wagon. He subsequently became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas. After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, he became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biography, novels, children's literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina. He once said, “All politicians should have three hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.” He also believed that, “Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.”


Passers-by by Carl Sandburg.

Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me
Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe soles traveled
And your voices rose and blent
To form the city’s afternoon roar
Hindering an old silence.

Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,
Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love.
Records of great wishes slept with,
Held long
And prayed and toiled for. . .

Yes,
Written on
Your mouths
And your throats
I read them
When you passed by.

Managing mergers & acquisitions.

Startups are often tempted to grow quickly by combining their efforts with those of other companies. However, there’s more to managing successful mergers and acquisitions than just looking at the numbers. According to the worldwide managing director of Bain & Company, 60 to 70% of corporate acquisitions don’t create shareholder value. That means for every ten deals, seven don’t work out as planned. It seems that the road to successful acquisitions is fraught with danger. Mergers today differ from marriages in that there’s seldom a honeymoon period.

Mergers are only a winning proposition if:
- the underlying business strategies are sound,
- the integration plans are well carried out,
- the cultures of the companies involved can be consolidated successfully.

Experienced practitioners use the following guidelines:

• Be clear about the logic of a potential acquisition. Don’t rely on “synergy.” Clearly understand how the new combination will leverage its assets and abilities to create value.

• Use due diligence beforehand to examine a prospective partner’s organizational health, leadership talent, and managerial abilities. While some differences can be worked out, others are insurmountable and should be avoided.

• Design the integration as carefully as the initial deal. If you’re Quaker Oats, don’t buy Snapple and then dismantle the distribution system that made it successful.

• Apply the guiding principles that were important to the success of the acquiring company to the acquired business as well.

• Specify roles for each of the partners and their top executives in advance. Working it out as you go is usually a recipe for disaster.

• Standardize transferable practices and apply what’s worked well in the past. If the acquired company insists on doing things its own way, verify it’s essential to achieve strategic leverage rather than just a way to resist changing.

• Don’t make additional acquisitions to fix, justify, or further leverage the original deal. If it doesn’t provide the value you expected, fix what can be fixed and cut your losses.

• Define the "where you want to be" before you define the "as is." Identify issues of common concern and rally everyone around these issues.

• Get the leadership established as quickly as possible. Promote a few smart people and give them responsibility for managing the integration process.

• Control the executive compensation system to reward the behaviors that support the culture you want.

• Get the transition over with as quickly as possible by making it painful to hold on to the old.

• Always bear in mind that you get big because you get better; you don't get better just because you get big.