lead by letting go

Ever since I started working in 1976, I’ve had this feeling that there should be a better way to organize a business, to make it more effective, to deliver more sustainable results.

I’ve worked in a variety of industries and sizes of companies and learned is that it’s not enough for just a few individuals to care, a healthy organization is one where the attitude of caring extends from the board to the person who sweeps the floors.

In this video, Traci Fenton, Founder and CEO of WorldBlu, Inc., explains the concept of organizational democracy.

This week I ran into an attitude that I haven’t encountered since I worked in the printing and graphic arts industry. I asked town council for the opportunity to present Able Networks’ plan for a Regional Broadband Network in Eastern Ontario. I have received moderate to strong interest from neighbouring municipalities.

The reply I got was “our MIS plans our set for four years, you’re welcome to bid at that time.” First of all, I wasn’t looking to bid. And, who uses MIS anymore? This is a sign of where these folks are right now.

And, setting your plans in stone, as it were, for four years? Come on, the world is changing every day. How can we assume what we’ve decided will be adequate for one month let alone four years?

The town is really a beautiful place, lots of amenities for recreation, reasonably priced homes and relatively low taxes. It’s been getting more and more difficult to attract residential and consumer investment over the last few years.

Our base over the last 25 years is light manufacturing and a some big employers have left (one quite recently, 200 jobs, just closed down). And no one has come in to replace them. These jobs are gone. And they’re not coming back.

A few years ago, we had an effort to bring “high tech” here. This effort failed badly. The committee no longer meets, and I believe it has been disbanded.

The current council appears to be hanging its hat on tourism. Not a bad thing, though the town needs something else to rekindle and rebuild its economy. It needs a vision of the future, one that is not based on the success of the past. It has to be based on how people will live, work and play in the future.

In this century, natural resources and proximity to markets don’t add up to much. Not when you consider how easy it is to buy what is needed to make a product or service and ship it thousands of miles to sell it.

A massive shift in wealth creation is already underway. What began as a movement of labour overseas to reduce costs and increase profits, is being combined with a catch-up work ethic by people in those countries to create totally new, power-house economies.

Wealth comes to those who organize and innovate around opportunity. In the words of Albert Einstein, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

I hope our council opens their eyes before it’s too late to stem the tide.

“You no longer have the classic carrot-and-stick approach to leadership. We have 90,000 people who work with us and I as a leader can’t do a performance appraisal on them, can’t offer them a bonus, can’t demote and fire them. So how do you induce them to do things they might not do otherwise? By being more open than you’ve ever been. In this new world, the most transparent leader is the most attractive leader. The leader who figures out a way for everybody to win is going to be the leader who wins. The leader who comes with a zero-sum mentality gets zero.”

Darren Carroll, CEO of InnoCentive

From the book “Mavericks At Work,” Bill Taylor and Polly LaBarge, HarperCollins, 2006.

Andy Kessler makes some good points in this article on why Net Neutrality is a bad idea. The main one is that we need less regulation, not more. The duopoly’s main source of power comes from regulation. It’s always a bad idea whenever a smaller force attacks a larger one’s main power base.

We need to outthink the telcos and cablecos. Their costs have climbed to an unsustainable level and continue to do so. So I say, attack their revenue stream and bottom line. This is what I’m doing with Able Networks.

We have to be clear about what we want. Do we want to conquer (and replace) the duopoly or simply defeat them? Trying to conquer them forces us to play the game as it is now, and ultimately isn’t going to give us anything different. Look at all the local wireless startups that are nothing more than telco wannabes.

In the long run, defeating the duopoly is better for everybody because it leaves them mostly in place. All we want them to do is to see there is a better way, a way they can dramatically reduce their costs right now, grow sustainable top line revenues without paying exorbitant costs (really, penalties) for delivering a service over a competitor’s facilities. And, the consumer would get lower prices (a lot lower than we have now - 10MB symmetrical for $40 a month anyone?) and connectivity in more places and more devices than ever before.

By itself, Net Neutrality is not going to accomplish this. In the current reality, ISPs won’t ever achieve structural separation (a decade-long battle that’s resulted in less competition, more duopoly entrenchment) with their costly legislative and regulatory advocacy efforts. Both of these attack the duopoly at its strongest point.

The duopoly is weak in two main areas, marketing/customer service and the prices they charge. Regulation, closed facilities/structures and the primacy of the profit-maximization mindset are the single biggest reason why the Internet economy hasn’t really taken root in very many places.

In my view, a third front is the game changer.

This CBC News article discuss Nortel’s plans for ‘new’ optical technology. In it, the president of Nortel’s Metro Ethernet division confirms they are “seeing significant demands for bandwidth.”

Also, he uses a phrase “hyper-connectivity, where every device that should be connected to the network, will be connected, the staggering bandwidth demands will only continue upwards.”

These statements confirm and would concur with what I see in the marketplace. And yet, they’re also misleading to a point.

What the article doesn’t mention is that this technology has actually been around for a long time. It’s been held back so that the duopoly (phone & cable cos) can figure out how to make the most money using their closed network business model.

What the article also doesn’t tell you is that this technology is targeted at operators’ - an industry word for phone and cable company - core network, not the edge, which is where the real problem is. This infrastructure, the copper phone wires and coaxial TV cable coming into people’s homes and businesses, is simply not adequate. It was never designed to handle the “current industry top standard of 10 gigabytes per second.”

Next time you have a chance, ask the folks at your local phone or cable company what their plans are to deliver 10 gigabits to your home and business.

Yes, bandwidth is exploding. All the duopoly is doing is making it cheaper for themselves to move all these bits around inside their network. They’re still not doing anything to give you and me decent bandwidth at a reasonable price.

Overheard at a major Canadian book store in Ottawa yesterday-

Customer: “Can I use your kiosk to access the wish list I created on your website?”

Employee: “No, they’re just for ordering. Sorry.”

This company has gone to great expense to build a website and brand. This site lets customers like you and I to create wish lists of items (in this case books and CDs).

This just doesn’t make sense to me. Does this company see the web as something different from its bricks and mortar stores? I suspect they do.

However to me, the Customer, it’s all part of the same buying experience. Why can’t I access my wish list from any store? For that matter, why can’t the employees also be given access to that info so that when I come into a particular store they can greet with more than the standard “Hello, can I help you find something?”

Of course you can! It just takes a different perspective, seeing things from the Customer’s point of view of the buying experience.

What can the Open Source Software movement teach us about marketing?

When we say we are “in business,” exactly what do we mean?

If money makes the world go around, what makes word-of-mouth (WoM) go around?

Put down that report. Turn off your Blackberry. Get out of the car/plane.

Get out and talk to your Customers. Ask them to tell you what it’s like to do business with your company. Ask them to give you the unvarnished assessment of your performance. Don’t do a survery. Don’t hire a marketing company. Get off your duff (you too, CEOs) and find out what it’s like to be a Customer.