Mar 10, 2017 | Random Musings
My work-life is great but getting a bit crazy, so I am looking for help to capture and take advantage of growing and new business opportunities.
Opportunity #1 – Business Manager
This is a genuinely unique part-time opportunity for a high energy, organized, and creative person. You will play a dynamic and I hope exciting and fulfilling role in growing my small but high impact consulting and thought leadership practice. I’m looking for a Business Manager/Personal Assistant to support the work I do as consultant, author, speaker, trainer and mentor in the area of market leadership, servicing large and small, local, national and international clients.
For details read here: KJR Business Manager Description
Opportunity #2 – Entrepreneurial Corporate Event Creator
I am looking for an independent entrepreneurial corporate event creator who wants to build a new venture with me. This is a once in a long time chance to create an industry wide event to a totally under-serviced market. I’m looking for a pro who is willing to share in both risk and upside, which is very large.
Email me at inquiries@kjrassociates.com to chat about either role!
Nov 14, 2016 | Random Musings
When should they mix, until now, I’ve said, “Never”. But I’ve changed my mind, here’s why.
It’s been 6 days since Donald Trump has become the President-Elect of the United States of America. In that time, I have lost sleep, worried about what this means to my daughters and son, tried to calm my mother, one who remembers all too well growing up here, but during the horror of Nazi Germany, and tried to carry on with parenting, business and life. After all, what choice do we have? I was NO big fan of Secretary Clinton, and many I know saw her as even a worse choice, and while I didn’t, those who did were clearly not alone.
I’d be lying if I said it’s been easy. I have found myself trying to convince myself that the Trump Administration won’t be so bad. That the things I agree with, like fixing Healthcare and support for Israel, will be the silver lining of these cloudy times. Trump has a Jewish grandchildren. He can’t be a anti-semite, can he? Being a Jew to me, in my lifetime, has been a blessing. Living in a country that allows the free and nearly unfettered practice of religion, without fear, without condemnation, has been a cornerstone of what America means to me. However, there is NO denying that this campaign, intentionally or not, has set loose the forces of hate, given them a seat at the table, and a voice, often a violent one, in our current social arena. I’ve been trying to understand what this means, and what can be done about it. I’ve been trying in my mind to understand what is behind the midwest’s states support for Trump. Do I really live in a bubble? Is California so out of touch with where I grew up? If they aren’t driven by hate, what does drive the Trump supporters? (and I think that Michael Laguardia’s piece, What Happened?, is very insightful on all of this).
My two high school daughters, and I suspect my middle school daughter and son, value Gay Rights in a way that makes me proud. To them, it is their civil rights movement. In an age where teens “come out”, and in a community where we have been blessed to know more than a few amazing same sex partner families, the thought of not accepting Gay Marriage or LGBQT people just makes NO sense to them. I have learned much from them when I listen, even if they don’t think I do! They also have a deep feeling of Women’s equality. We have tried to raise our children as kind, respectful and liberal. Liberal in the sense of the Constitution, a respect for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness FOR ALL and to make the world a better place, to do “Tikkun Olam”, healing of the world. To me, this is one of our greatest job as parents; to raise kind, compassionate, caring children.
Which brings me to this column. As friends who have followed me on my personal Facebook page will know, I have been rather outspoken this year about my issues with Mr. Trump, from the beginning of his campaign to now. I am, no I guess was, much more of a Never Trump voter than a pro-Hillary one. But Hillary to me, was the far lesser of two poor choices. However, I have, until now, chosen to keep the personal and professional sides of my public postings separate. Today I am breaking that practice. And though I will continue to focus here on marketing and market leadership, I’ve decided to be true to myself I will also cross that line, today, and most likely occasionally in the future. I had planned on a post on Purpose, and what marketers could learn from the Trump campaign, but it is still too raw for me. I’ll save that for another day, another post. Today, instead, I make myself and my children a promise:
“I will be diligent in calling out hate, in protecting our freedoms, in speaking up when I see injustice. I will support my daughters and son if they choose to do the same.”
Rest assured, I have no plan to turn this blog into a political one. Mostly, I’ll save that for my personal networks in life and the virtual world. However, I have come to now understand that my beliefs and liberty trump my business interests, pun fully intended. And if, as a consequence, because I chose to speak out here occasionally, someone out there chooses not to hire me because I am Jewish, or because I will defend the first amendment and the freedom of the press when they are under attack, or because I support my LGBQT friends with their struggle for equality and liberty, or even because they don’t agree with speaking out in a business forum, then so be it, I don’t want your business, please take it elsewhere.
I started this blog with a question, “Business, religion and politics, when should they mix?” I think my answer is this, they should mix when they need to, when your conscious demands it and you feel compelled to speak up. When life is more important than business. The optimist in mean, when I can find it, hopes that Mr. Trump proves me wrong. That freedom, liberty and justice for all will remain the pillar of our society and our future. For now, I will sit back and wait and see what actions, what words, and what policies come from the Trump administration. But I will not stand idly by and watch our freedoms wither, I will not be a silent dissenter, for silence mean acquiescence. I will speak out when I see fit, damn the consequences, let freedom ring!
Sep 7, 2016 | Random Musings
Six years and a few weeks ago I published the post entitled, “McIntel, 4 Potentially Disruptive Outcomes” at a now abandoned corner of cyberspace . The occasion was Intel, my first Silicon valley employer from 1992-95, buying McAfee, my last employer from 2008-2009, for $7.6 B . Today, it was announced that Intel had sold 51% of McAfee to private equity firm TPG for $3.1 B in a deal valued at $4.2B. I am no financial wiz, but it sure seems like the deal either valued McAfee at $6.07B, OR Intel actually got a net of $2.1B, but regardless, this transaction clearly does not look like a winner for Intel investors.
So, I will call the deal at a minimum an admission of failure, if not an #EpicFail. In my blog of 2010, I identified what I felt were 4 large opportunities for Intel to leverage the McAfee asset. They are detailed in the aforementioned blog, but in summary were:
- Disruption of AV market distribution through embedded desktop/laptop security
- Leverage high performance Intel chips in McAfee Network security solutions
- Cloud security
- Aligning McAfee to Intel’s Apple OEM business
As far as I know, none of this happened. Most of my connections to McAfee and Intel and long moved on, but what little I did hear was that Intel and McAfee were never well integrated, and the businesses, though both very desktop and server bound, were never well connected. Whether this was a failure of strategy, execution or both, I will leave to those with much more data than I have.
When I left McAfee in 2009, they had a growing enterprise and consumer desktop business, a thriving $500M network security business, and an emerging Cloud Security business. And while I don’t follow them closely, my sense is that macroeconomics and industry trends have laid siege to the first and second, and newer start-ups have captured most of the third. The fourth as far as I know was likely a victim of both Apple and Intel’s focus on mobile investments.
More importantly, at least in the $500M network security business, we had truly established market leadership in two key segments, Secure Web Gateways and Intrusion Prevention. Now, while I am sure both of these business are doing OK, the Web Gateway is being led by new Cloud based entrants like Zscaler and the IPS market has shifted through consolidation by Firewall vendor Palo Alto Networks and others. The market context was beginning to shift in both of these markets even before I left in 2009. We were adjusting and reacting. I wonder if the product, messaging and market leadership we had could have led and kept up with those shifts without distraction of “Intel Security”
Where the McAfee business would be if it had not been engaged in what certainly from the outside seems like a failed attempt at synergy? Once again 1+1 seems to equal less than 2. Or in this case, $4.2B certainly equals less than $7.6 B. Maybe this is the “pit of despair” that McAfee needs to emerge from on their Hero’s Journey. I wish them luck and success in their re-birth and re-entry into the market as an independent vendor.
Jan 8, 2013 | Random Musings
In his haunting and inspiring book, “The Outpost – An Untold Story of American Valor”, Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) tells the story of the brave soldiers who gave their lives and honor to defend Combat Outpost (COP) Keating in the remotest part of Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border. COP Keating was originally envisioned as a Provincial Reconstruction Team base. To quote wikipedia, PRTs in Afghanistan are:
” the primary civil-military relations tool in Afghanistan and Iraq and are described as “’a means to extend the reach and enhance the legitimacy of the central government’” “
Nestled in a remote valley in the Nuristan province, Keating was positioned on the marginally passable road to Kamdesh, providing a base of outreach to the surrounding villages. The location however was quite vulnerable from a military perspective, surrounded on 3 sides by mountains, prompting just about every soldier who arrived to say, in I’m sure even more colorful language, “are you *&*&ing kidding me”.
Through 600+ stirring pages, Tapper tells a story of individual bravery and institutional failure. Under-resourced, understaffed and isolated, the mission of the PRT is abandoned and COP Keating becomes a mostly military operation. Poorly located, it is an easy target for both ambushes on the supply lines and eventually direct attack. However, for 3+ years, soldiers and commaders continued to try to build the relationships with local elders to root out insurgents and build critical infrasturcute like water pipelines. In the end, hundreds of years of tribal conflict, a complicit Pakistani intelligence service, the Taliban and the geography fated the mission; and too many soldiers gave their lives in defense of the outpost, until it was eventually attacked, successfully and bloodily defended and finally intentionally abandoned and then flattened by US bombers in late 2009.
It most certainly trivializes the immense sacrifice of the COP Keating soldiers to find lessons that we might apply to marketing, and before I do so, I want to take a moment to honor and remember their valor, bravery and memory. At the end of this blog, I’ve listed organizations that you can donate to if you so like. Tapper’s book has moved me deeply, and I have an new found respect for our soldiers, and a renewed disgust with the brutal reality of war.
So with that pause to reflect, I do find some interesting lessons to learn here.
1) When the mission changes, past decisions may no longer make sense –
When it became clear that the PRT was not going to work, the location became a combat outpost. In that role, it could not have been in a worse position. Yet past decisions and senior leadership commitment kept Keating going in its location, despite the change in mission.
If you’ve changed your mission, or pivoted, are you clinging to business decisions that no longer make sense. Whether key partnerships are no longer strategic, or pricing and packaging are wrong, or team members need to change, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to NOT adjust your tactics to your mission.
2) Surrounded, the position left no real room for maneuvering and defense. –
If you find Google on one flank, Facebook on the other, and Oracle on the third, you may NEED to seriously consider repositioning your offering. You need to find higher ground, move to a local peak that you can own and defend.
3) Despite the urging of those on the ground, the generals were paralyzed by not wanting to change what was clearly a failing strategy.
Are you listening to your team and open to change, or are you stuck and committed to a course of action. Your sales team and other customer facing parts of the organization are at the coal face. Listen to the feedback from the front-line. Do so formally and informally, and do so often. Change is a must in fast moving markets.
So, be clear on your mission, find higher ground to own and defend, and listen to the team and adjust quickly. Seems pretty easy to say, but ain’t so easy to do.
(In honor of and in memory of the Soldiers of COP Keating, if you are so moved, here’s a few places you can make donations: Army Emergency Relief, Defenders of Freedom, Fisher House Foundation Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors and the Wounded Warrior Project.
Sep 18, 2012 | Random Musings
(This post was originally written as a contribute piece for Nimsoft’s Modern IT Blog, but I thought it would fit well here too – Enjoy)
Much has been written here, and in many blogs, about Cloud Adoption. However, most of this has focused on the tangible and critical pieces like technical architecture and operational considerations. This can’t be minimized in the least. However, in my work with both vendors and end customers, I’ve identified what is another critical success factor across all organizations, and that is adopting a Cloud Mindset. And while mindset may seem “softer” than the other issues, if we don’t shift our mindset, we will continue to cling to ideas and assumptions that served us well in the past, but can get in the way of our future success.
The OPF™ Mindset Framework:
I’ve developed a model to both understand and manage mindset transitions. In the OPF framework, Mindset is composed of 3 components; orientation, perspective, and focus. Each of these has a very specific definition:
1. Orientation – My relationship and adjustment to the environment that I am in
2. Perspective – My way of regarding/judging and interpreting facts
3. Focus – Where I choose to concentrate my attention
In order to change, to bridge from one mindset to the next, it is often helpful to explicitly define, discuss and agree on an organization Mindset.
Let’s now apply this framework to the three transitions in question, ISV to SaaS, Service Provider to Cloud Service Provider, and Enterprise IT To a Cloud First Organization.
The SaaS Mindset
As I blogged earlier, ISV and new SaaS providers need to change their Mindset:
- Orientation: from Product to Service
- Perspective: from Spikey to Continuous
- Focus: from Transaction to Relationship
Without these changes, the incentive to drive the organizational requirements for success and the framework to make strategic choices will be flawed. I’ve seen many cases where ISVs have not succeeded with the transition to SaaS, not because of technical barriers, but because they failed to change mindset and therefore made poor organizational, resource and strategic choices.
The Cloud Service Provider Mindset
Service Providers, of course are in the business of selling services, not products, so they have a different challenge in transitioning. They must become more agile, like the technology they support. They must accept that they win not only by expanding their service catalog, but by making it more “open” to other cloud providers, and adding value in layers above their traditional service catalogs. Applying the OPF framework to this transition, we can summarize this transition like this:
- Orientation: from closed and control to open value add
- Perspective: from customer value from me to customer value through ecosystem leverage
- Focus: from Service expansion to Service agility
The more a service provider opens up and expands its catalog, business practices and value add to the Cloud ecosystem, the more opportunity opens and barriers to winning the Cloud melt away.
The Enterprise IT To a Cloud First Organization Mindset
Traditionally, IT has been the provider of services to the Enterprise. And while this is the role that they will continue to play, it is being transformed daily. First of all, with layers from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS being provided to IT, they must understand that they are no longer a buyer of services, but have in many cases become the consumer of these services. They must consume, add value and broker these services to their internal and external customers across web, mobile and other channels. They must move beyond exploring the cloud and drive to strategies that exploit it. In short, they are the beneficiaries of the work being done by ISVs and Cloud providers, but only if they learn to consume, exploit and effectively broker new and innovative services. In short, their mindset must shift like this:
- Orientation: from buyer to consumer
- Perspective: from exploration to exploitation
- Focus: Service delivery to service brokering
As we see, Cloud Adoption changes the role and mindset across the IT service delivery value chain. Has you organization changed or is it clinging to an old mindset? By explicitly thinking, discussing and agreeing on an organization’s mindset, it’s Orientation, Perspective and Focus, you can change the speed and effectiveness of your cloud adoption and success. Happy Bridging…
May 17, 2012 | Random Musings
Andrew Chen’s recent blog post entitled – Growth Hacker is the New VP of Marketing certainly got my attention and was one of the most intriguing post I’ve read in months. Andrew essentially writes an obituary for Marketers, saying they are going the way of the dinosaur to be replaced by a new and more evolved species he calls the Growth Hacker. Do I agree, NO! But that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a very important post that bears attention and response.
I recently spent an hour with my daughter’s 4th grade class teaching them – “What is Marketing” for a business simulation unit they are doing. In it I told them that “Marketing is fun, because you get to be part artist, part scientist and part poet.” Andrew argues that I was wrong on 2.5 of these, and that Marketing is now fun because you get to be part Coder and part Data Scientist. Andrew says,
“The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs. Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric. Whereas PR and press used to be the drivers of customer acquisition, instead it’s now a lagging indicator that your Facebook integration is working. The role of the VP of Marketing, long thought to be a non-technical role, is rapidly fading and in its place, a new breed of marketer/coder hybrids have emerged”
Do I agree, yes and no. Marketing, especially direct marketing, has always been part science, and business development has always been about partnering and distribution. So in that sense Andrew is both right and wrong. There has definitely been a continued rise of analytics in marketing starting with Direct Marketing, moving to SEO/SEM, and continuing with the emerging fields of social analytics, A/B testing and other new techniques. In fact, to many CEOs marketing is no longer a “black art” , but is now a “black science.”
The major problem I have with Andrew’s post is toward the end. After walking through an integration between AirBnB and Craigslist, Andrew states rather pejoratively,
“No traditional marketer would have figured this out
Let’s be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above – there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist. “
Not only is this totally unsubstantiated, it’s insulting. Plenty of marketers, like myself, are pretty damn technical, they have to be. Do they code, maybe not, but can they spec and understand an integration like this, HELL YES. Secondly, who tasked the hypothetical engineer with doing this in the first place? So while this post is definitely interesting, at the end of the day I think it is wrong.
As I’ve argued extensively, in today’s overloaded information market, getting attention is still about context and communications. The argument that coders and data scientists will be the only flavors of marketers in the future is just a leap beyond logic and reality. Marketing, taken in its broader sense, is the understanding of markets, buyers, communication and value exchange. It doesn’t require a coder to do this, it requires a business person, albeit, a pretty technically savvy one in many organizations. In addition, it may be the romantic in me, but I think the artists and poets will continue to play an important but changing role in marketing success. If you want one compelling argument for this, I’d point you right to the Apple Product Design team. So, as much as some would like to pronounce the VP of Marketing as dead or dying, as Mark Twain famously said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”.
