Musings on imitation, induction and how we perceive success

An idea has been afloat in my mind. What success means for us and how we go about becoming successful.

There are numerous systems, frameworks and theories of how to become successful. Your nearest bookstores, to be sure, contains – if it is a bookstore at all – at least few books about success theories or stories of those who became successful. Success theories are all woven around an abstract, feel-good, visionary set of terms, neatly connected and logically resound.

Steven Covey’s “7 habits of highly effective people” is perhaps the best one among those theories from the Western standpoint and “Karmic management” of Michael Roach is the best from the Eastern, both comprising the cumulative wisdom, philosophy, experiences and stories of countless successful personalities in the West and East correspondingly.

These two as well as many theories, like most of scientific theories, are inductive in their nature, i.e. you have a number of facts/experiments/information and you induce a logical frame, encompassing and describing them all. This is the status-quo mode of thinking about everything in our lives, and we love it because it is easy to grasp, intuitive and logical.

We connect dots, left by others who were successful before us. We draw a line and we think if we move along this line as closely as possible, we will arrive to success in our own lives. We also tend to think that the line we connected and are treading along is the only possible way of connecting those dots. We are wrong on both accounts.

We have idea of what our own, benchmarked with universal, success looks or needs to look like, and usually we are quite adamant about it.

Whether you know it or not, but inductive theories about success are usually aesthetically appealing, seemingly simple and logical, but are, with some notable exceptions, misleading. I am not saying that Covey and Roach are wrong, but that their theories are merely descriptive and need to be learnt/considered, not imitated/followed.

Induction is at the heart of imitation. Human history is one continuous story of imitation. It goes like this. There is someone visionary – what this term means is relative to the period and context of the history – who lives his life fulfilling his dreams and potential, and whose ideas/dreams/actions spill over – during or after his life – a certain number of peers, who find solace, appeal or hope in those ideas, internalizing them and in turn spreading them and sometimes building upon them. Religions are one example, science is another.

You no doubt saw (on TV or real life) a man sporting a beard, dressed in a traditional Arab white robe and who carries a book in his hand. A Muslim, you think. You think so because he fits the image of a Muslim that you read or saw. He follows the teachings of Islam and carries Koran. He follows those teachings. Whether he agrees, or is convinced is irrelevant, as he is pious and obeys those whom he considers wiser than him. His self-image is that of Muslim, and this is what he wants everyone to think of him. He treads the path (the line) recommended in teachings (points) in the hope of living a good, worthy life. Whether he succeeds in his life and lives up to his dreams is another story.

You no doubt saw a youth dressed up in what looks like the singer 50-Cent: a certain type of cap, seated above his forehead under a certain angle; a long lousy t-shirt and a baggy pair of jeans that look like they are about to fall down; colorful, shining pair of snickers. A hip-hop/rap fan, you think. Whether he is truly into that sort of music or even finds comfortable dressing as he does is another question. He follows the social code of those who are fans of that type of music and lifestyle, personified by the singer. His self-image is of someone stylish and who is into hip-hop/rap. Music is his thing, and he loves hanging out with those who are like him, i.e. appearance-wise look like him and have similar tastes in music, and thinks of those as his close circle/family and key to his future success. Whether he attains that success is another story.

We gather information, through our personal experiences, stories we read or hear about and we build our stereotypes about all aspects of life as well as success. We then dogmatize these stereotypes, build generalization upon them, draw number of characteristic criteria from those generalization and then freely apply those criteria in order to identify and describe multiple facets of our lives.

Wise words from the movie “Forbidden Kingdom” need to remind us what the success really is. The protagonist of the movie, American teenager Jason, who is a fan of martial arts, magically finds himself in ancient China and meets a number of idiosyncratic characters. Jason’s story-line resembles much our own. In one episode, while he is training in kung-fu, the background narration cites:

Learn the form, but seek the formless. Hear the soundless. Learn it all, then forget it all. Learn The Way, then find your own way.

Imitation, at its best, is the stage of “learning the form.” We learn what has been taught and reached us, the universal truths and wisdoms, the lives of success. 99% of us stop here. We live our lives following or imitating, never going any further.

The path to success goes further. It includes internalization of those wisdoms and experiences of others into ourselves, making the transition from mind (as a purely intellectual) to heart (realm of feelings and experiences).

And finally, it includes “finding you own way,” based on all that was learnt and internalized.

We are the ones that will shape the form as well as details of our own success, just like those great personalities and visionaries did back in their times – not one of them came to be successful, visionary, or important by imitation, but by creation and recreation of themselves.

Obama fails – America fails

A famous story from IBM told of a man who made a $10M error. He was hauled up before the big boss where he expected to be sacked. Pre-empting this, he apologized and offered his resignation. Refusing the resignation, the boss said ‘Goodness, man, we can’t lose you now! We’ve just spent $10M on your education!’

Have you heard? America and EU – the developed, 1^st world, civilized West – is on decline.

Let’s focus on America and its incumbent leader, the 1^st ever African-American to become a president of the US. Do you remember his promise and inspiration he induced in the entire world? Internet was abuzz with positivity, hope and visions of a truly positive America. That was back in 2008.

We are in the 3^rd quarter of 2011. A quick search of term “Obama failures” brings in an excess of 12 million search results on Google. Isn’t this something?

There is “Obama fail blog” which aims to document all Obama blunders and eventually publish a book with all stories.

There is also “Obama lies” which features an impressive list of lies and failures – videos and articles from WSJ, Huffington Post, CNN, and other non-scam or radical/extremist-type media – in addition to a “Submit Editorial” section, which starts off by saying that the online visitor is likely to be on that page “by searching for ‘Obama Lies’. ObamaLies.net is a stage for people upset with the unkept promises of this administration to share their frustrations.” Its “Obama lies directory” section contains a big number of resources, including blogs, video links, and articles. Not forgetting about its own “commercial” side, the site sells branded t-shirts with “Obama Sucks” and alike for $20-30 apiece. This site has been up – if blog archive is any indicator – since March 2008 but contains entries starting June 2008, in itself a telling sign.

Curious about this “blog,” I had a quick look at Alexa.com, the web ranking engine of the Internet. According to Alexa.com, the audience (with an estimated 86% being in America) of this website comprises mostly of 35-64, predominantly male visitors with some college education who have no children. Doesn’t this sound like a middle class, average-educated, unemployed/freelance divorced/single American?

Is this all? Few blogs and other peripheral hate-mongering – even Mohandas Gandhi and even till now has his haters gather here, or more social ones here.

There are high flyers. Last year, Arianna Huffington, founder of Huffington Post who ranks 28^th on “The world’s 100 most powerful women“, gave an interview to the Time magazine about her book “Third World America,” in which, the first 165 pages look like a catalog of horrors describing the decline of America and an undeniable and obvious role of Obama 2008 campaign and its subsequent “execution.”

There are the Republicans. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who currently leads in early polls for the Republican nomination, issued a video of a shuttered steel plant (that closed down in January 2011 after struggling for years) Allentown Metal Works, which Obama visited in 2009, to attack the president.

There are heavyweights. Nouriel Roubini aka Dr. Doom, the influential Italian economist who predicted the current economic recession, was forthcoming when he said, among others, that Obama’s presidency was heading for “fiscal trainwreck,” that his economic proposals “won’t make a difference” and that Obama’s spending freeze is just a “spare change.”

There are creative Wall-Street types too who churn out both wheat and chaff. A recent WSJ article, features “Snapshots from President Obama’s efforts to improve America’s standing in the world, 923 days into his administration” and an alphabetic list – all English letters are present – of info snippets offering statistical details, historic comparisons (not in Obama’s favor), and broken promises. Conspicuous are some comparisons such as the fiscal deficit of 3% in 2008 as opposed to an estimated 11% of GDP in 2011 and the then (November 2008) president-elect Obama’s promised creation of 2.5 million new jobs by 2011, whereas having shed 3.3 million jobs by October 2010.

Let’s be frank. We all commit mistakes, some big, some small; our employers, families and spouses, being considerate, shoulder those mistakes and think of them – best case scenario – as “investments” in our education like in the opening story about IBM or sunk costs/wasted resources – worst case scenario – which entail lay-off/other forms of downgrading.

Obama is no exception. Admittedly, he made and still makes errors, but with the particularly burdensome fiscal debt, the reeling economy, the ever-increasing unemployment and the real scope of the 2008 economic crisis finally unraveling itself, his (under) reactions might eventually have an even more grave consequences for America and the world. As it succinctly points out here, it is not clear

which tragedy is the more troubling: the failure to see the true scope of the disaster when accurate numbers weren’t available, or the failure to see it now that they are.

If Obama only did?

Curiously though, does Obama Google his name from time to time? What would he think/do if he saw what there is to see?

How and why America is declining

“One man with courage is a majority.” Thomas Jefferson

My last post was about the disarray in Europe. What about America?

Let’s start with some interesting statistics. The famous American “fruit” company, Apple, according to the latest financial report, now has more cash to spend than the American government. While in itself not a critical factor, this still poses a sort of dilemma – is business so much ahead of the government in America?

In the backdrop of the on-going debt debate, Barack Obama looks like a man who picked a fight he is unable to finish. But wait. Obama just announced that Republican and Democratic leaders reached an agreement on raising the US debt limit and avoiding default. The deficit reduction is meant to happen over the period of 10 years. And both sides went to a seemingly lose-lose compromise just to get the deal. Will it hold or even pay off?

The debt-related stand-off in Washington is political in nature, having been initially thrust upon incredulous investors. Increasing America’s overdraft (which, according to Government Accountability Office, GAO, has been increased 74 times over the past 50 years) beyond $14.3 trillion (or facing the very 1^st default in its history) should have been relatively simple. But Republican congressmen, furious about big government, have recklessly used it as a political tool to embarrass Obama.

America’s fiscal problem is not now — it should be spending to boost recovery — but in the medium term. Its absurdly convoluted tax system (allegedly changed 579 times only during last year) is very inefficient, and there is speculation that ageing of its baby-boomers will push its big number of entitlement programmes into bankruptcy. Obama set up a commission to examine this issue and until recently completely ignored its sensible conclusions. For long time, Obama also held the illusion that the panacea to the deficit is to tax the rich (top 5% who already pay 60% of taxes).

The problem, in America like in Europe, lies not just in the weak/inconsistent leadership and inability to commit to radical economic measures necessary to cure the ailing economy, but also in the political structures. Just like in Japan, its dysfunctional politics were stemming from its one-party system, in American Congress, the (moderate) centre — conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans — has collapsed, in part because partisan redistricting has handed over power to the extremes, ushering it into a radical quasi-one-sided system, not unlike the Japanese.

But American politics is less broken than many think or allege. Since 2009, Congress has passed a huge stimulus bill, ARRA (although there are 1.3 million fewer private-sector workers today than when the ARRA was passed), aimed at economic recovery, evidence that the legislature is still able to get things done.

American economy is becoming increasingly vulnerable. New data continue to reveal just how weak growth was in the 2^nd quarter of 2011. The economy has expanded at a 1.3% annual pace. Markets are declining, and businesses are building up cash reserves as insurance against the worst. After two years of pitifully slow recovery, while tens of millions of workers are unemployed (currently at about 14 million) and wages are flat, the government is doing little to get back to economic growth.

Some possible solutions to the ailing American economy include:

Government size to be reduced (public sector, expenditures) in order to put a dent in this debt.
Congress to accept cuts on entitlements.
Government to create a favorable environment for job creation; the private sector does the rest (recently, McKinsey conducted a research asking, “What is the single most important step the U.S. should take to create more jobs” and published the responses here).
Continue pursuing/following-up with taxes for the top 5% (to be invested, for example, in increasing financial aid for college students).
Move some (according to certain criteria) of 46% of American population, who pay no Federal income tax, into the ranks of the remaining 54%.
Impose a national sales/VAT tax. Tax consumption (not investment) and reward savings.
Let the capitalism (supply and demand) solve the housing problem instead of introducing artificial measures.
Let the zombie (aka bailed out) banks/firms go, which might result (for some of them at least) in chapter 11/bankruptcy and making them (in majority of cases) downsize and restructure rather than liquidate.
Wind down American military engagements abroad (two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, would save up to $150 billion/year in addition to withdrawing, at least partially, 53,000 military personnel from Germany, 36,000 from Japan and thousands more in another 133 countries).

I started by quoting Jefferson and so I shall finish, hoping that Obama and Congress will act before it is too late.

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” Thomas Jefferson

How and why the EU is declining

Europe is in disarray.

Appearance-wise and disregarding petty differences, the EU-27 are marching on the spot on foreign policy, defence, Schengen and the single market with the exception, notable but again not yet really convincing, of progress on financial regulation and supervision.

A layer deeper though, one encounters seemingly impassable hurdles of sovereign debt, vulnerable and domino-like arrangement of banks, and a poorly-designed Eurozone, the combined effect of which risk to disintegrate the Euro (for which the crisis was originally brought on by investors with genuine worries about the solvency of several euro-zone countries), on whose foundations the united European economic system was built. It is clear that economic integration has exhausted its potential, which is more limited than anyone had imagined at the beginning, for ensuring structural convergence of industry between Member States and ameliorating weak growth performances.

Presently, Europe appears to be heading towards a decade of stagnation with the triple threat of nationalism, populism and protectionism which is being dragged behind unemployment (9.9% and among young workers, more than twice that much). Industrial activity is already shrinking in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The time is coming when a new path towards integration, political this time, will reveal itself as indispensable. But no consensus exists for a new treaty. Ad-hoc formulas will therefore have to emerge as short term Band-Aids, exploiting the existing potentialities of the Lisbon treaty to be followed by long-term formulas, based on a complete revisit and revamp of European economic, social and political values and vision driven by a need for sustainability and prosperity.

Europe also finds itself faced with the colossal challenge of having to mobilize public opinion. But because of the lack of a real consciousness of European citizenship, public opinion is at best passive and at worst euro-sceptic. To mobilize it will demand the unveiling of a “European plan” and the rallying of a majority buoyed by the perception of a commonality of destiny on the economy and defence, two inseparable pillars.

European politicians, led by Angela Merkel, have gone to absurd lengths to avoid admitting two truths: that Greece is bust; and that north Europeans (Germans in particular) will end up footing a good part of the bill. The current rescue package reduces Greece’s debt, but not by enough to give it a genuine chance of recovery. As a result, Greece, and maybe other European countries, will need another bail-out rather sooner than later. To face this (upcoming) problem in a united manner, Europe might get “tighter together” by spawning a fiscal union, hitherto unprecedented, while trying to run away/re-distribute immediate problems.

There is also a part of blame to be laid on dysfunctional politics. In Europe national politicians, answerable to their own electorates are struggling to confront continent-wide problems – thus a crucial misalignment between expectations (by national electorates) and commitments (towards European policies) yielding, on average, ”value-less” results.

European leaders do however know what they need to do. They have been slow in doing for two reasons:

magnitude of the commitment necessary to save the union is uncertain, and they don’t want to pay a penny more than is necessary, and;
distribution of commitment costs is uncertain and not guaranteed, and no individual entity wants to pay a penny more than is necessary.

So what are those possible solutions to the ailing EU economy that EU leaders so far fail to carry out? Some might be:

Peripheral debts to be addressed through austerity.
Like in case of Ireland, to drop all unsustainable debts, not to continuously slowly the economic recovery.
The Euro to compete with the national currencies, putting pressure on the ECB, which will ensure that the Euro is a low-inflation currency.
A form of Eurozone bond, which would largely replace the national eurobonds issued by the individual countries.
To bolster European emergency funding, which fight failing European banking contagion.
Financial/fiscal integration to take place, including fiscal transfers to support peripheral economies while they get their budgets in order.
European Central Bank to stop raising interest rates and being illusioned about inflation.

Just as in Japan two decades ago, politicians have failed to make the structural labor- and product-market reforms essential to spurring growth. Lack of strong leaders was the underlying problem of Japanese economy, which has not recovered yet. The turn has now come for European leadership to show what it is capable of, but there seems to be no leadership.

How admitting a failure can lead to success

Launched in the beginning of 2011 by Engineers Without Borders Canada, Toronto-based Admitting Failure is intended to be “a collaboration between like-minded NGOs, governments, donors and those in the private sector,” in the site’s own words.

Those involved with charitable development groups can visit the site to submit their own stories of plans gone wrong, or they can browse through the stories submitted by others, rating and commenting upon them along the way. Either way, failures are bound to be exposed and lessons learned.

But why admit to or even share with others a failure?

Failure and success are two sides of the same coin called life, be it a human life or that of an organization. Failure is as natural to humans as it is to organizations consisting of humans. Just like all humans are resistent to failing (and even more so to admitting it) so are human organizations.

Admiting failure enriches and brings one closer to success as formulating and clearly understanding a problem brings closer to its solution.

This is not just to make us feel self-satisfied or justified in front of our consciousness. It is as real as you’ll get. A recent article on HBR, for example, shows how Dominos Pizza – not just some small and insignificant company at that – after much public flogging, condemnation (lot of it online) had its CEO Patrick Doyle admit failure, and not just any failure, but the very essential point of having a rather inferior quality of pizza, on TV. This pain-point served it a good lesson, and Dominos quickly turned itself around and is again living its stellar time.

IBM did it back in 80s under Louis Gerstner Jr.

GE did it under Jack Welch in 90s..

Daimler and Ford did it in 70s and 80s…

A route to success, whether personal or in business, lies in admitting a problem, failure or pain-point.

Why not you or your company? Start anew by submitting your past failures, mistakes and pain-points.

Attitudes of failing companies and Sisyphus

I came across a nice article on Digital Tonto about how companies fail. I previously posted about why smart people and companies do dumb things, eventually ushering in failure. The article however shares some interesting insights and examples of how companies, even very successful ones, eventually commence their decline by following one of the below “attitudes”/approaches (comments are mine).

Overconfidence: mostly driven by past success and self-confidence.
Overvaluing Strategy and Undervaluing Process: companies that are obsessed by grand visions and strategies tend to underestimate the incremental changes and the process itself which are the drivers of success.
Looking for Dragons to Slay: this quality is typical of few very successful companies such as Google who, once at the summit of their success, look into going after other markets, products and companies.
Disruptive Competition: which might or might not bring value to end users.
The Lambda Response: instead of solving the problem at hand, it becomes more exacerbated by internal confusions, inefficiences and panick.

Some of those attitudes leading to failure are among the famous Ten Commandments for business failure of Mr. Coke.

The article offers a solution to embrace, a corporate equivalent of Sisyphus:

When company leaders are like Camus’ Sisyphus, they are most likely to be successful. Companies who are focused at the task at hand, rather than building empires and seeking out the “Next Big Thing” are doing their shareholders the greatest service. For a company to be profitable over the long term it has to perform and that can only happen if the organization is united in its purpose.

Constant focus on creating value for existing and potential customers, unity of purpose, corporate humbleness and perseverance are the generic vaccines for companies successful but not yet narcisstic or obsessed by self-grandeur.

Top 16 reasons of innovation failure

Is your company struggling with coming up and implementing innovative ideas?

Does innovation sound good for you but you still have to reap any tangible profit from those nice-looking, suggestive and “innovative” ideas that you hear from your employees, employers and read on Internet?

Do you think that innovation sounds good is but hard to capitalize on?

Before drawing any foregone conclusions and debunking anything dubbed innovative, please check whether your company’s approach to innovation is sound.

The seven deadly sins that choke out innovation in all sorts of companies and industries include:

Thinking the answer is in here, rather than out there
Talking about it rather than building it
Executing when there is need for exploring
Being smart
Being impatient for the wrong things
Confusing cross-functionality with diverse viewpoints
Believing process will save your company

These are common in both brainstorming, analysis and execution stages of implementing innovative ideas. Additional reasons why (supposedly) innovative ideas might fail are:

Ideas don’t solve an important and relevant problem
Ideas take too long to get to market or needs shift
Ideas are poorly launched
Understand the adoption cycle or barriers

In my previous post, a recap on Umair Haque‘s article, following strategic factors yield failure if present during implementing and managing innovation in your company:

Focusing on short-run numbers
Applying surface economics
Being strategy-blind
Failing to see the right context
Never having an ideal

Use this “innovation failure” checklist of factors to make sure your company is not trapped in or following one of the above factors.

Bouazizi, Ghonim and MENA regime failures

There is a change in the Middle Eastern air. It is getting “purified” of its autocrats.

Tunisia (with its subsequent toppling of regime) and now Egypt is on fire, with further political ripples spreading all over the region. Given that Middle East features a number of dictatorial/autocratic/monarchic regimes, it is not surprising that some of those rulers – six out of top ten autocrats being from the MENA region – stay in power for decades or for life.

What is interesting to witness however is not that semi-oppressed/disgruntled nations are not prosperous/happy – a rather expected outcome – but that they are able to express themselves and use (with increasing efficiency) Internet as a tool to get concessions from or even changes of regime (as with Tunisia kicking off and Egypt and other countries following in step).

Tunisia, a country of 10 million, with more than 30% of it on Internet and 18% on Facebook, succeeded in using Twitter and Facebook to self-organize and centralize protests and manifestations. The regime’s clamp-down came a little too late – the incumbent president got ousted.

Egypt, on the other hand, is a country of 80 million, with about 25% of it on Internet and an estimated 6.25% (5 million) on Facebook. Egyptian unrest really started on January 25, 2011, by peaceful marches and manifestations organized in the center of Cairo accompanied/coordinated by Facebook groups such as April 6 movement and #jan25 Twitter activism. There was, as in Tunisia, no real/serious political power behind it, initially (Muslim Brotherhood, El Baradei and other opposition groups joining in later). But Egyptian government was more “proactive” in its response, with gradual slowdown of Facebook/Twitter, followed by a complete closure of Internet and mobile services from January 28 and until February 2.

While Tunisian regime change was spurred by and centred around the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi (an unemployed college graduate), Egyptian voices escalated after the arrest (by Egyptian authorities) of Wael Ghonim, Google MENA’s marketing boss, on January 28 and release on February 7. During this time, he has emerged as an inspiration/idol, especially for Egyptian Internet-savvy youth who were a significant force behind two weeks worth of manifestations and protests in downtown Cairo. One telling sign and a measure is Ghonim’s astronomic growth in popularity online (and subsequent “offline”): his Twitter following grew from about 4,400 on January 29 to more than 23,000 currently (more than 12,000 of them on the day of his release) and a Facebook fan page in his honor grew, in only 4 hours, to 84,000 fans and counting.

Which direction do these two cases point in? To me at least, that given a right cause, an accumulated discontent and an inspirational/visionary persona with whom to identify, a little spark can ignite not only a fireworks but a complete purge/revamp of a regime in however big a country. And while the outcome is not clear yet for Egypt – according to likes of Fisk, the regime is “on its final cusp of departure” – the people’s path (so far, ministers sacked, promise from Mubarak and his son not to run for office in few month, Mubarak’s resignation as a head of NDP and counting) is being paved.

Let’s wait and see.

Update (February 11, 2011)

Ghonim’s Facebook fan page reached a staggering 285,000 and counting in addition to his Twitter followers of almost 54,000. From the moment of his release, his stance changed from a humble “I am not a hero” to a rather self-righteous claim of “Revolution 2.0. Mission Accomplished.”

However, in yesterday’s much anticipated televised appearance of Mubarak, he conceded to relish only some of his powers to the VP Soleiman, without an immediate abdication as was demanded and expected by demontrators in Tahrir square. This latest move on part of Mubarak left a bitter taste and a sense of deception – even the US president Obama “seemed to be euphoric, preparing for Mr Mubarak to step down”. Many predict that Friday (today, February 11) the masses would explode and Mubarak might try once again to sow dissent among protesters and bring in the army to contain the “chaos.”

It seems that everyone, including foreign powers, underestimated tenacity, stubbornness and will of the incumbent Egyptian president. Besides the fact that few organizations initiated strikes (thousands of Egyptian railway workers went for strikes yesterday) and that a group of protestors slept, for the first time, in front of the parliament on February 9, not much has been accomplished.

Update (February 12, 2011)

Around 7pm on February 11, Mubarak’s abdication was announced by the VP Soleiman. The power passed to the Defense Minister Tantawy (Egyptian Army), absolving the rest of existing structures of the government.

Since that moment on the crowds went crazy celebrating on streets till little hours of the next day. Music, songs, poems, dancing – a nation-wide party where all differences, problems and obstacles are forgottten, at least for the time being, in their unity of celebration and moment of euphoria.

Congratulations Egypt! Revolution 2.0 – as it became known online – was just the preface in the book of Egypt 2.0. It is time for the new Egypt to start writing its first chapter.

Will Google fail… again?

If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s said. Google founders loved their search engine. Today Google seems to love money more than anything.

Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Google Wave and even the most recent, hyped up Google Buzz feature on a growing list of Google flops, with, on average, 200 projects that are being worked upon at any time at Google.

A seeming common denominator of all its failed attempts is its chase of existing and successful business models or competitors. Google Wave was to reinvent email; Google Buzz was to be a direct response to Twitter; Google Answers was to counter Yahoo! Answers and so on.

Since 2001, Google embarked on acquisition of middle and small size companies, in its bid to enhance the range of its services both vertically and horizontally. More than 80 acquired companies and 10 years later, yet its strategy, approach and mentality have hardly changed.

In a certain sense, Google stopped innovating. Many of its failures could be somewhat explained away by looking at how it tries to go about chasing others’ success. An enlightening interview with a Google exec revealed some crucial points – scope of work, team size and usage of infrastructure, etc. – of how Google cannot, for example, build an Instagr.am equivalent.

And now Groupon. Google’s unsuccessful story of trying to buy it for USD 6 billion did not finish there. It now decided to come up with its own answer. A déjà vu?

Of course, Google did and does good things. Adwords, Adsense, Analytics, Android and its transformation of online advertising using acquired DoubleClick technology, have done and will continue bringing value to businesses and end users.

But, is the value offered by Google justified by the growing number and impact of its flops?

It all boils down to a company’s DNA. Google’s DNA is search, and it built around it, growing and becoming successful. Now it tries to “go out” of its DNA and diversify, not an unusual drive for a company of its size and track record. It needs t keep in mind, however, that similar attitude brought down other big and successful companies in the past. Instead, what it could do is to make its own search smarter and richer (in relevancy, targetting and search result contents).

The usual question that Google and other failed/successful entrepreneurs/businesses ask themselves daily is, “Should we Innovate or Copy?” The word “Innovation” became a cliché, despite the fact that innovation wars lead nowhere and hurt everyone.

Perhaps it is time we start to mInnovate.

How companies fail in commonsense marketing

Beware of making five-year projections, unless you’re thinking of leaving the company after four years.

These words belong to the King of Manhattan, David Ogilvy. Perhaps what he meant is not to go without planning, but plan carefully, adjust consistenly and execute relentlessly, all of it driven by commonsense.

Commonsense indicates a certain approach to marketing: figure out your company’s goals, then decide on what and how (communication, advertising and contact) to market goods/services your company offers. Drayton Bird’s book “Commonsense direct and digital marketing” puts it in the following order:

business mission (what do you want to achieve?)
business objectives (are your goals SMART?)
marketing aims (ex. get new customers)
marketing strategy (ex. how you will market)
communication objectives (ex. tell your existing customers about your new products)
communication strategy (ex. building up a new database of customers via limited offers)
advertising objectives (what do you want to achieve by advertising, a general, mass communication weapon?)
advertising strategy (via channels will you advertise – TV, online, print?)
creative strategy + media strategy (how will you convey your message? + which media and how much?)
contact strategy (points of communication between your company and your customers – when/how you will use selected media to reach out your target?)

You work your way from business mission, answering all relevant questions to business objectives and so forth. Your end result, after going stage by stage, is a well-conceived and solid marketing plan.

Yet, as simple is this sequence looks, it is regularly and sometimes consistently violated/omitted/ignored. An impressive list of small, medium and big brand and product failures is a testimony to that. Financial and other consideration matter, but marketing represents a big chunk of and reason for failures both for new and existing products/services.

According to one research, fewer than 10% of all new products/services survive past the 3rd year, some of the reasons being wrong assessment of existing markets, insufficient awareness generated by advertising, and wrong target group. Even the largest (and most successful) direct-selling, person-to-person marketing company and manufacturer of health/beauty/homecare products, Amway, has not been immune (Amway’s China failure).

The recurring theme among the most famous product failures is also conspiciously featuring wrong pricing, erroneous market assessment, ambiguous positioning, unclear message and wrong naming.

The underlying logic (and its failure) is notably manifested in the online part of marketing planning and execution. Inappropriate channels, wrong targeting and poor execution are prominent in social media marketing failures.

To conclude, marketing planning and execution errors originate either while not following the inherent commonsense order of marketing mentality (in accordance to the list above) or in insufficient, erroneous, unclear research, planning and implementation of one or more stages of marketing.

Commonsense is indeed a sum-total of logical thinking, gut feeling and intuition. Unless we use commonsense in our marketing efforts, we will be a man Nietzsche had in mind when remarking:

To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.