Monthly Archives: December 2012

December 6, 2012 · 10:18 am

Time Spent Apping

A piece came out in TechCrunch yesterday concerning the increased time people are spending in mobile apps.

Kicking Television

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According to their analysis time spent with mobile apps (127 minutes a day) has surpassed time spent on the web via a desktop (70 minutes) and is gaining on TV usage (168 minutes).  It’s an interesting comparison and the piece goes on to say the usual things about how mobile may be the future but it’s still an unknown business model for marketers and investors (except for the carriers – that business model seems to be pretty well-defined and pretty damn good!).

I have a few thoughts I’d like to share.  First, while the piece implies that TV is somehow threatened by this, the fact that TV use has not declined should demonstrate that it’s not going anywhere.  In fact, according to the data presented in the piece, TV usage has increased over the last two years.  What’s not clear from the piece is what is being consumed on the TV.  Does watching streaming video via Netflix on my TV count as TV?  I’m assuming this does include time-shifted TV which may or may not include watching the commercials that are a piece of commercial TV’s business model.

Second, as someone who rode a train two hours each day for many years, I can tell you that there is an awful lot of downtime.  For the last few of those years when I had a smartphone, I began to use some of my commuting time to do some of the things cited in the study – social networking, catch up on news, etc.  No streaming video then but I’m sure I’d be watching it now.  All of those minutes are incremental involvement with content (and the marketing that supports the content) I otherwise might have foregone.  It’s pretty easy to spend a few minutes of downtime at lunch on your mobile device.  I don’t see these numbers as negatives.

Finally, the piece does ask the right question which is how companies can capitalize on all of this mobile activity.  There is too little information  it’s too hard to scale, and the marketing model within apps is still not impactful.  The app world is way more fragmented than is the TV world or the worlds of other “mass” media.  Then again, the app world is only five years old (dating it to when the first iPhone came out).  The commercial web is still searching for a business model in many ways and it’s going on twenty.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.  What do you think?

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December 5, 2012 · 10:23 am

Failure And Feedback

One topic that’s near and dear to me is innovation.

Innovation and Evaluation

(Photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg)

Throughout my time in business the issue of how to do or produce something in a new, better way has always been front and center.  That’s why when I read that the Economist Intelligence Unit had conducted a survey of senior executives to explore the characteristics of companies that are adept at promoting innovation, I checked it out.  You can read the entire study here.  The study was sponsored by the Oracle folks, and not surprisingly it found that most companies struggle with innovation. The report says it’s really hard  to keep coming up with new ideas, particularly ones that people will pay for.  I know what you’re thinking – any of us could have told them that without a lot of research!  It’s what follows that I find of interest.

It turns out that the most innovative companies not only permit failure, but welcome and harness it to come up with more successful ideas. Yet nearly half of the respondents to the survey  say their companies have no system in place that helps them learn from failures.   Highly innovative companies also actively gather feedback and ideas from everywhere they can. Fifty-four percent of the top innovators they surveyed said they pour over customer comments, whether gathered in direct interviews or on social networks, and scrutinize customer data for clues to effective future innovations. They recognize that collecting many ideas is the first step to identifying the great ones.

There’s quite a bit more in the study but those two points are of most interest.  How many of us can truthfully say we work in an environment where failure is welcomed much less have a system in place from which to learn from those failures?  Nearly half (49%) of the companies in the study said their company had no system to deal positively with failure. Among companies that do have such a system (38%), redeploying employees involved in a failed innovation from one business unit to another has been a successful strategy.  Contrast that with the reports we read each day of companies jettisoning employees or products rather than making a pivot of some sort.

We’ve touched on the notion of feedback quite often here on the screed.  I’m a believer that a company can never have enough and we ought to look at every opportunity to get it.  The study confirms this as a key to innovation.

Help your folks to be free to fail.  Encourage them to get feedback in great quantity and with increasing frequency.  Do so and you’re well down the road to innovation, which becomes more important each day.   Make sense?

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December 4, 2012 · 8:27 am

Take Up The Trombone

I had lunch with an old friend yesterday.

trombone 025

(Photo credit: Angela Hawkins)

As we were discussing business he told me the story of a guy he knows who had a brilliant life strategy.  As soon as I heard it I told him it was going to be today’s screed so here it is:

Take up the trombone.

A reasonable person might ask, aside from the hours of musical enjoyment mastery of an instrument might provide, why that’s such a great idea.  As it turns out, proficiency in the trombone is a great gateway into a job with high level symphonies.  Apparently, there are just not a lot of trombonists who carry on with the instrument beyond high school, so college bands are always looking (this helps with the admissions people) and professional music organizations are in dire need as well.  There are a lot of flautists and trumpet players but very few skilled trombonists.

As I thought about it I realized that my daughter’s proficiency in an unusual instrument – the bassoon – did become a topic of interest when she was looking at colleges.  The baseball fans among you will immediately think of left-handed pitchers, many of whom have terrible statistics but the demand for a lefty starter outweighs their apparent mediocrity.

The point is that as we’re undertaking new products or new businesses we’d do well to consider the empty seats in the orchestra.  Rather than “me too” ideas we ought to be thinking about the trombone player.  How can I do something that’s both in demand and gives me a reasonable chance of success even if I’m not perfect every time?  This doesn’t imply lowering one’s standards.  In fact this strategy often requires a complete rethinking of the obvious and extra time to develop the new skills.  It does, however, improve one’s chances for lasting success.

What instruments are you playing today?  Maybe it’s time to change?

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