List of Biases

For convenience, I list some of the important biases in thinking and decisions.

These affect the way teams communicate, the collaborative quality of organizations and leadership, and use of decision tools like analytics and dashboards

Some of these pertain to these categories

1) Ways in which advertising is used to influence consumers
2) Ways in which advertising is tested and monitored for performance
3) Ways in which customers evaluate software decision support tools and processes
4) Ways in which teams formulate strategy and tactics in reaching early customers
5) Ways in which teams and corporation find alignment on product and customer strategies

Cognitive and Decision Biases

Defining Agility

I noticed recently this blog posting:
http://www.cio.com.au/index.php/id;1786870611

Agility means something different for everyone. Of course it does, all conceptual properties of people (and companies) mean different things to everyone. Because companies are a PowerSet in the mathematical sense of people, plus accumulated culture, norms, processes and expectations, they are in fact more complicated, nuanced, and fickel than (most) people.

So with that in mind, I tried to come up with a definition of Agility that would apply to firms, companies, corporations, and instituitions, in a way that reflects that need for differences. Organizations have different starting points, different goals, different means of achieving goals and competition for attention, recognition, and success in their individual marketplaces.

This is not heavily researched at all, but here it goes

Reaching Agility:
An orchestrated state of process-enabled knowledge management for achieving (near) optimal decisions, actions, outcomes according to the strategic goals of the organization.

Having Agility:
The ability of an organization to navigate external marketplace and environmental changes while improving its overall position relative to its strategic goals.

Organizations strive for "reaching higher levels of Agility" by invoking very different means from technology, tools, powerpoint slides, approval processes, decentralization of decisions, centralization of data, databases, knowledge management, business intelligence and the rest of all the stuff.

Note that Alignment in general should help organizations acheive Agility. However, if you have Agility, you may not want to mess with Alignment. Alignment is a means to end; not a goal unto itself.

Defining Alignment for Performance Management

I noticed there continues to be a lack of good solid definition for "Alignment" and therefore how to achieve it gets lost in various discussions.

Here is my best current definition for Alignment, in the context of Corporate Performance Management in general.

Alignment is the state of "collaborative agreement on company objectives", based on a common framework or tool for measurement of success, and linking the dependencies of target outcomes between people, projects, programs and objectives.

Ideally alignment is the "degree to which the separate pieces contribute to the outcomes" within their divisions and how well they lead to the overarching goals.

Metrics Questions for hiring your next CMO

Interviewing Marketing Executives

When Interviewing CMO candidates, the best approach is to first ask open ended questions and then allow descriptive stories to emerge that reveal culture, interaction and expectations from the candidate.

1. Which marketing metrics are most important to firms in general?
2. Your last firm (job position) in particular?
3. Which metrics were you most successful at improving?
4. How were you recognized for that improvement?
5. What specific goals or targets were used?
6. How were these negotiated and by whom?
7. What was the percentage change you impacted?
8. How did you do it? Over what period of time?
9. And how did your staff work with you?
10. Why did they trust your plans and ideas that they supported?
11. What mechanisms did you employ to gain consensus within your team?
12. Across other related teams (sales, production, engineering, service, support)? What does accountability mean in the context of a marketing department?
13. How is accountability managed between marketing and advertising?
14. How is accountability managed between marketing and sales? Does the VP sales agree?
    
15. How are results measured, communicated and interpreted?
16. Are the people achieving the measurements the same people who own the data and report results?
17. How did you come to trust those results?
18. For you past firm, how did you understand the metrics which influenced sales volume?
19. Describe the interaction of team roles that achieved results in your team?
20. What experience selling or in sales management do you have?
21. How did you establish credibility with VP of sales?
22. What inputs and influence did you have with regard to sales models?
23. What inputs and influence did you have with regard to the go to market strategy?
24. Which systems and processes were established before you arrived?
25. Which systems and processes were established by you?
    
26. How do they interact or relate to each other?

Asking candidates about the attribution of credit across their team, and the cause-and-effect influence on internal performance metrics can reveal a lot. Having their thoughts on what was measured, its validity, and what could be measured, gives you insight to their ability to create value in your organization. Also it reveals potential synergies or conflicts when working with sales and product organizations

Advertising Ecosystem

One of my startup clients is in the advertising tools space, so its useful to provide links to images that pertain to that market and those interactions.

FLICKR photostream


Do you have others you would post and share??

--Chris

Collaboration between firms in Information Technology

Here is my Blog article from 1997, ancient past, in Hal Varian's first course on Strategic Technology. Joint MBA and EE/CS class experiment at UC Berkeley.

Its still online in its original format!

Collaboration between firms in Information Technology

Web 2.0 -- What is it?

A couple of decent resources:

http://adaptivepath.com/images/publications/essays/What_puts_the_2_in_Web_20.pdf


YouTube Show

This gives you some context.

Cheers, CR