Finding the Next Generation of Great Leaders

How can a company or industry find the best managers? What should hiring managers be looking for in the next generation of leaders?

This is an important question, since I believe many hiring managers are looking for the wrong characteristics in potential leaders. Too often, hiring happens based on traditional credentials, such as the right university or a series of promotions. These are all good things, but they do not signal the special spark that indicates a new and bold leader on the rise.

When something truly remarkable happens at a company, often it is a not the traditional kind of leadership at the helm. Industrial Bank of Japan, which was originally the main bank of Nissan Motors sent managers over to Nissan and tried to reform it, but nothing worked. And then the more controversial Carlos Ghosn was hired as CEO, and Nissan completely turned around. The same can be said about Apple. When the company brought back Steve Jobs, it was at the brink of death, but as CEO, Jobs succeeded at a remarkable revival.

The next generation of great leaders will not emerge from the traditional ranks, but they will be the individuals who use bold tactics – managers who have a track record of creativity and revival. This is what we should be looking for in our next generation of managers.

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Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need,
   and trust them to get the job done.
6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

When Does It Make Sense to Deploy a Public Cloud vs. a Private Cloud?

For many of the same reasons that outsourcing your data center is an attractive option for businesses—it’s scalable, flexible, and cost-effective—deploying software and services via the cloud is also a very attractive option.

The cloud takes the benefits associated with outsourcing your data center and makes them even more appealing. Need to scale up to ten times your current capacity? Not a problem. Need to downsize because your business is in a month-long lull? That’s easy, too. If you want to ensure flexibility and accessibility, it’s often hard to beat the cloud for most business needs.

But when it comes to the cloud, there are two different options for you to potentially deploy:

• The public cloud: A public cloud is managed by a single external provider. Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular; it’s used by millions of businesses daily. In the public cloud, resources are pooled together and users pay only for the resources they actually use. When you deploy software via a public cloud, your data is logically separated from other users in the cloud, but is still all technically housed on the same network and most cases the same physical hardware.
  
  
  Public clouds (depending on the provider, of course) are secure, but not as secure as a private cloud or housing your data on-location because it still technically occupies the same space as many other users.  Even so, for flexibility, scalability and overall speed-to-market, the public cloud is unparalleled in the tech world today.
• The private cloud: A private cloud, on the other hand, is a data center and/or network that uses cloud computing technologies.  Peak is an example of a cloud provider that has public cloud options but whose customers typically demand private clouds. A private cloud can be deployed and managed by the IT department of the business using it or can me managed by any number of growing cloud providers.   Private clouds can be deployed within a companies own data center, a colocation partner’s facility or directly with a cloud provider.   Scalability is still fairly good with the private cloud, but the main difference is that the user is always paying for all of the resources, regardless of what percentage of them is being utilized. Since your business owns all of the resources in a private cloud, it’s up to you how and when you use them. 

If your plans are to deploy a private cloud within in your own data center versus with a cloud service provider, you can expect to be faced with many software, hardware and architectural decisions to make.   Not to mention the resources, different skills sets and new ways of thinking about IT service delivery.

A private cloud provides the advantage of added security over a public cloud because your business has complete ownership, control and maintenance of all the data within the private cloud environment.   This increased security, does however come at the expense of losing the scalability available within a public cloud option.

Whether you should deploy a public cloud or a private cloud depends entirely on your needs. As mentioned above, a public cloud is highly scalable, but less secure because of the way that resources are pooled together, whereas a private cloud is very secure, but will require more time, expense and skills to deploy on your own.   Private cloud deployments through a cloud service provider offer the best of both worlds for many organizations.  

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Lifecycle Marketing

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Lifecycle Marketing is a seven stage system in your perfect customer experience. It is comprised of basic strategies integrated into a single, self-sustaining process. Companies and salespeople that implement lifecycle marketing principles through affordable, easy to use automation technology are in the best position to grow, nurture and retain valuable customers.

1. Attract Traffic - Attract leads to your website with great content like ebooks, infographics, research reports, webinars and blog posts.

2. Capture Leads - Encourage leads to sign up to receive your content, Be sure to include opt-in language in your web form.

3. Nurture Prospects - Create a consistent campaign of useful information and offers with automated, personalized follow up messages.

4. Convert Sales - Turn Browsers into buyers with e-commerce tools and a wel defined lead management strategy.

5. Deliver and Satisfy - Fulfill your commitments on time, then provide additional value that surprises and delights customers.

6. Upsell Customers - Develop a long term strategy, tactics, products and services to help generate additional sales and recurring revenue over time.

7. Get Referrals - Encourage referrals bu creating incentives for customers and partners.
It seems obvious and easy right? On the surface there are no secrets in lifecycle marketing. Small businesses have practiced this concept for thousands of years.

The thing is that most of us do not have an automated system to help us with each stage and so we are so busy attracting traffic, capturing leads, nurturing prospects and converting the sale that by the time it comes to step 5 "deliver and satisfy" we are out of business and need to get back to step 1 to stay in business. The truth though is that there is more business in your existing client base than in attracting new traffic that does not know you yet.

The real value of lifecycle marketing comes from integrating the individual building blocks of your plan into a single system.

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How to rebrand: 19 questions to ask before you start

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Stephen Hawking

Companies will at some point come to that milestone known as “the rebrand.” For some, it happens early on once they’ve discovered who they really are while with others, it occurs after many years of having grown (or outgrown) their brand.

Then and Now

You’ll discover that some brands go along an evolutionary track that one could basically follow. (Personally, I am not a fan of the current Pepsi logo and consider the legacy and heritage was tossed out the window with the current logo, whereas Coca-Cola has done an amazing job of maintaining and refreshing their brand.)

Others have made a change that was a disastrous departure that resulted in a complete about-face within a two-week window:







And while a brand is so much more than a company’s logo, the logo is one of the key ambassadors to any brand. Hence the examples shown above.
There are various reasons, assorted catalysts or numerous “straws that can break the camel’s back” of the old or existing brand.
Yet, there are a number of questions that routinely come up when I start with a company to rebrand them. Here (in no particular order) are many of the questions that need to be answered to keep the brand:

• true to itself,
• meaningful so people take notice and care, and
• powerful enough to make the difference everyone hopes for.

19 Questions That Every Rebrand Needs to Ask

1. Why are we doing a rebrand?
2. What problem are we attempting to solve?
3. Has there been a change in the competitive landscape that is impacting our growth potential?
4. Has our customer profile changed?
5. Are we pigeonholed as something that we (and our customers) have outgrown?
6. Does our brand tell the wrong (or outdated) story?
7. What do we want to convey? To whom?
8. Why should anyone care about our brand?
9. Have we isolated exactly who should care about our brand?
10. Have their needs, or the way they define them, changed?
11. Are we asking our customer to care more about our brand — and what it means — than we do?
12. Is our brand associated with something that is no longer meaningful?
13. Is our brand out of step with the current needs and desires of our customers?
14. Are we leading with our brand direction?
15. Are we following with our brand direction?
16. Is the goal of this rebrand a stepping stone (evolutionary) or a milestone (revolutionary) ?
17. Will this solution work in 5, 10 and 15 years from now based on what we can anticipate?
18. Have we assigned some committee to manage the project versus someone (or at most, two people) who is/are focused, inspired and can lead?
19. If we were starting our business today, would this be the brand solution we would come up with?

More Than Skin Deep

Use the questions above to isolate why you rebrand to keep it from the “cliffs of insanity” (i.e., cliche crud like much of the current wave of homogenized, committee-drenched crap being put out by several of the big Fortune 100 corporations over the last few months).
Want to export this information to colleagues and any entrepreneurs you know? Here is the Slideshare version which has been viewed more than 100,000 times around the world.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

 

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Logo Versus Brand – What Is The Difference?

Granted, yes, a logo design is part of your company’s corporate identity. However, the logo itself is not dependent on your company’s brand alone. So logo versus brand, what is the difference and when exactly does a logo become part of a brand? In order to answer this question, first let’s determine what the difference is between a logo and a brand.

What is a logo? In order to fully understand what a logo is, we must first identify the reasoning behind it and what its main purpose is. Several different aspects go into the design process of a logo. It must aim high to make it immediately recognizable while also inspiring admiration, trust, loyalty, in addition to an implied superiority. A logo is not used to sell, it is used to identify.

Paul Rand, one of the world’s greatest designers states that “a logo is a flag, a signature, an escutcheon, a street sign. A logo does not sell (directly), it identifies. A logo is rarely a description of a business. A logo derives meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around. A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it represents is more important than what it looks like. The subject matter of a logo can be almost anything.”

What is a brand? The best way to describe a brand is to look at it as a collection of perceptions that customers and prospective clients have about your business. Although you do not have control over these perceptions, it doesn’t mean that you have no control over your brand. Controlling your customer’s idea of your brand can be defined by designing striking and impactful graphics that will convey your message. Using these same graphics on a consistent basis throughout the design of all of your marketing materials will help portray the right idea about your brand to your customers and clients.

What Aspects of Your Brand Do You Have Total Control Over?

Your Story – What are you trying to say about your business? Figuring out who you are, what you do, what makes you unique and separates you from everyone else, and who are your best clients? And then combining all of that information into an easy, straight-forward, and understandable story of your brand.

Your Logo – Your logo should be designed in a way that identifies your brand while also maintaining an attractiveness to your target customers and clients.

Your Visual Vocabulary – Your logo is only one piece of your visual communication tools. Visual Vocabulary is a combination of various other visual aspects. These may include but are not limited to background colors, palettes, and patterns. Others may include header designs, stock photos, borders, special treatments for buttons and special offers, product images, and font styles. In essence, Visual Vocabulary provides you with more tools to create stunning designs for your brand.

Specific Marketing Material – This includes business cards, letterhead, stationary, brochures, website, blog, and social media design such as your Twitter background and Facebook Timeline Cover. Each of these materials should maintain a consistent look and feel while also complementing each other.

So in conclusion, a brand is so much more than just a logo. It is the uniform way of telling your company’s story through unique and consistent design. This story will then stick in your client’s minds and their comments and buzz about your company will reinforce their perception about you, and the ideas that you want them to have about your business.

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