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leadership, Management
Must see lectures #1: Bran Ferren – Leadership
Bran Ferren is the CEO of Applied Minds and the former president of Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney’s R&D division. This lecture is almost 2 hours long and it is very good. While watching this lecture, I put together another piece of the puzzle that reveals the process and methodology we use with Tourism BC’s online team and Rob Munro’s team at technology partner T4G.
My interpretation of Bran’s argument is that there are two types of people; the requirement thinkers and the big idea thinkers. Requirement thinkers are driven by process, documentation and figuring it all out before you start. Big idea thinkers are visionaries, innovators and driven to make things better. To achieve excellence, you need diverse talent and constructive tension to generate a vision, and an aligned team who’re great at implementing using a requirement process but are comfortable with continued evolution. Sounds a lot like our team.
I also like his statement that “consensus based management is the most evil process for destroying innovation I can think off“. I don’t disagree. Although desirable, it often leads to mediocrity or an insane waste of time.
The part I’m referring to runs from minute 24:30 til minute 46:00. There’s more great stuff, you have to watch it.
In another article I found Bran said: “Big-idea companies are run by passionate maniacs who make everybody’s life miserable until they get what they want.”
Guilty as charged. Sort-off.
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Management
This is the time to get stuff done
08.17.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsI often joke around with one of my co-workers that the time to get things done is when a lot of people are on vacation. No nay-sayers, no roadblocks, nobody to get permission from, nobody to get feedback from, nobody to sign-off on anything. Seth Godin’s latest posting also talks about using the least productive time of the year to be the most productive as you can be. So go ahead, and get stuff done now, before it’s too late.
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Internet, Management, Travel & Tourism
Kayak CEO Steve Hafner Interview
05.20.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsExcellent video of an interview PhoCusWright president Philip Wolf conducted with Kayak CEO Steve Hafner during the Travolution Summit. I’m a big fan of Kayak. Both their business model and their Interface are things envy. A must watch for strategists in the travel industry.
My favourite quotes:
About his OTA days: We all build great companies. None were great websites, they don’t search everything, they don’t show you everything. there is a bias in how you display the results, in particular on the Hotel side. Wouldn’t it be interesting to build a website that we wanted to use. And we weren’t biased about what we sold and we would allow you to build supplier direct or agency direct cause that’s what we do as consumers. So as executives, why don’t we build a website like that.
The middle is a mostly PPA, we’ll get a commission or a referral fee.
The next phase is turning Kayak into a vertical ad network.
Our goal is simple. We want to be the number one travel side for consumers information world wide.
Conditions you need for meta search. You need fragmentation in the supplier and agency community. You need a deep penetration of online booking habits. And then you need a vibrant marketplace for monetizing that traffic.
This month we’ll do 45M queries. That more then pricelines, that’s half the size of Orbitz. We do more searches a day then United Airlines.
My observation would just be that Travelocity, Expedia, Orbitz, Kayak; we’re all websites. So the website should be were you put your efforts,; were you innovate. Where you eliminate all the friction for what the consumer wants to do. And I would warrant you that these websites haven’t changed all that much in quite a long time despite having massive human capitol and massive P&L’s.
Travelpost; if you’re going to Tripadvisor its really hard to get to the hotel review. They post lots of impressions and clutter around it. We’re going to fix that.
Our mission statement is: Number one travel site world-wide. Best place for advertisers to market their services. And do it with the lowest operating costs ever seen. We’re going up against Google, we’re going up against Expedia, and we’re doing it with a Craigslist operating philosophy. It’s crazy.
Here we are, 10 years into online travel and buying a simple airline ticket still sucks. We need to fix that part of the equation before we move definitively into the complex travel.
Microsoft is in a tough spot. They’ve gone on record to say they want to compete against Google. They’re not really going to get there with horizontal search so they’ve got a strategy to go vertical search. So they’re assembling the Microsoft Office of vertical search. You’ll see them buy a real estate site, a job site, a travel site, and weave that together into a search volume competitor to Google.
Any place that consumers goto for travel information and that advertisers spend money on is a competitor of ours. Plain and simple.
We’re small or a reason. Not because we can’t hire. We’re small because we want velocity on the website development. I want to continue that innovation stream and beat those other guys at having a great website.
There is a lot of disruption still to come on the user generated content side. If I had to start another company in this space, that’s were I would start. Nobody today has done a great job at integrated user generated reviews with data about rates and availability, what’s a deal, and what’s not, etc.
Thanks for making this available Kevin. -
Internet, Management, tourism bc
Job opportunities at Tourism BC’s online unit
03.18.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsAs the importance of our web presence is growing every day, we have to make sure we can meet the demands of our organization and it’s stakeholders. So we have posted two positions to strengthen our unit.
The first position is an Online Specialist whose primary responsibilities are related to managing our User Experience but understands the context of the big picture.
The second position is an Online Specialist whose primary responsibility is to manage our Search related activities; both through Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.
If you, or somebody you know is ready for the challenge, please check out the detailed descriptions and send in your resume. Tourism BC is a great place to work and our online programs unit rocks (see picture below of our Rock Band extravaganza last Friday).
Mikala (Mickey-La) on guitar, Holly (H-meister-C) on drums, Jose (J-Go) on the mike -
Management
Results Only Work Enviroment – I’m already a fan
01.15.08 | Permalink | 4 CommentsI love it when I find something brilliant I didn’t know about (thank you Seth).
I totally buy into the idea that in the workplace, results is what matters. Working hours are a leftover from the industrial age, physical presence is almost redundant because of technology and meetings a complete waste of time in most cases.
I’m already a fan of some of Jim McCarthy’s ideas and what Seth pointed me to was McCarthy-esk in a lot of ways. It’s good to see a company such as Best Buy adopting a radical approach to the workplace called ROWE (results-only work environment) that produces results. It’s nice to see your thoughts validated through proven methodologies.Read about it here and the inventor’s blog. -
Management
The Experience is the Product. Even Steve Jobs has to be reminded.
01.10.08 | Permalink | 6 CommentsGreat story in Wired about the development of the iPhone and the impact on the wireless carriers. I like this part:
So that summer, while he publicly denied he would build an Apple phone, Jobs was working on his entry into the mobile phone industry. In an effort to bypass the carriers, he approached Motorola. It seemed like an easy fix: The handset maker had released the wildly popular RAZR, and Jobs knew Ed Zander, Motorola’s CEO at the time, from Zander’s days as an executive at Sun Microsystems. A deal would allow Apple to concentrate on developing the music software, while Motorola and the carrier, Cingular, could hash out the complicated hardware details.
Of course, Jobs’ plan assumed that Motorola would produce a successor worthy of the RAZR, but it soon became clear that wasn’t going to happen. The three companies dickered over pretty much everything — how songs would get into the phone, how much music could be stored there, even how each company’s name would be displayed. And when the first prototypes showed up at the end of 2004, there was another problem: The gadget itself was ugly.
Jobs unveiled the ROKR in September 2005 with his characteristic aplomb, describing it as “an iPod shuffle on your phone.” But Jobs likely knew he had a dud on his hands; consumers, for their part, hated it. The ROKR — which couldn’t download music directly and held only 100 songs — quickly came to represent everything that was wrong with the US wireless industry, the spawn of a mess of conflicting interests for whom the consumer was an afterthought. Wired summarized the disappointment on its November 2005 cover: “YOU CALL THIS THE PHONE OF THE FUTURE?”
On the outset it seemed to make so much sense. Two CEO’s had it all figured out. But when things that were completely irrelevant to the consumer started to impact the consumer experience of the product, it turned into a failure. Never forget that the experience is the product. Never compromise on it.
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Management
Complacency will be the architecture of your downfall
11.10.07 | Permalink | 4 Comments
The highlight of the conference was without a doubt the presentation from Jeremy Gutsche, Chief Trend Hunter at TrendHunter.com, who said “Complacency will be the architecture of your downfall”. He told a story about Smith Corona, at one time the largest typewriter manufacturer. They saw the rise of the personal computer but essentially said “there will always be people who need a typewriter”. They are now bankrupt.
That made me think. How many times do you hear somebody say “yeah, but people still want to…..”. All the time right? These words by itself is telling. It acknowledges that a change is inevitable, but combined with the refusal to accept it and the argument that change doesn’t happen overnight. It’s based on having comfort with the status quo, the fear of the new and perceived risk associated with it. That’s not leadership, that’s complacency.
From now on, whenever somebody says something like “yes, but people still want to…”, please respond with “complacency will be the architecture of you downfall.” -
Management
Jared’s ‘The Death March for Advertising’
Jared wrote a great article about the state of advertising.
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Management
Crazy Jim
That’s how we refer to Jim McCarthy at Tourism BC. I had the chance to spend 10 minutes with Jim last year. Those were 10 very intense minutes. Jim doesn’t beat around the bush and he left me one of his hand written business cards and a DVD of a presentation he did years ago when he was still working at Microsoft. I think his approach scared a few people here so we never hired him to work on one of our projects. But after watching the DVD and reading one of his books, I would love to have the opportunity to work with him or take his BootCamp one day.
I’ve been listening to the Podcasts he hosts with his wife Michelle. Every time, a little bit of their methodology about building effective teams is revealed. I haven’t read his book Software For Your Head yet so sometimes I have no clue what they’re talking about. It’s some cryptic language around “protocols” and terminology such as “checking in”, “alignment”, “decider” and more. But I get the gist of it and I usually find something useful in there.
The best one so far was the piece about meetings and in particular about discussions because they usually don’t resolve anything and is basically a waste of time. Michelle summed it up nicely for me: “What I’ve come to notice is that lack of awareness on most people’s part is that time and energy, what is precious, is being wasted [on meetings] and the higher the number of people the more time and the more energy that is being wasted”. So meet to resolve instead of instead of meet to discuss would be my summary without all the crypto talk.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years is that the most important aspect of a successful project is having an effective project team. That means smart, competent, committed team members that share a vision, work toward that vision, help each other and have fun in the process. I believe if you achieve this, everything else flows out of it. So if you’re working with teams, listing to Jim and Michelle will definitely provide you with some ideas around creating effective teams.
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William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog
William Bakker is Chief Strategist at Destination Think!. These are my personal thoughts.
