See Me, Feel Me, Criticize Me

It's a challenge to objectively examine your own website as if a prospect or customer seeking information would. There's an approach you can follow to get ideas flowing though: Look at a direct competitor's online presence, trying to shoot holes in it based on how a customer might view it.

You should really be able to get into it by answering a few questions:

• What misleading or out-of-date information is presented?


• What's not compelling about the website?


• What's confusing about the navigation?


• How much unnecessary detail do I have to supply to get a copy of the "free" download?


• What questions do I have that the website doesn't answer?


• Do I know where to get my other questions answered?


• In what ways did I get smarter by browsing this website?


• In what ways were my information needs left wanting?

After doing this, go back and see how your own online presence compares. Looking at yourself from a customer perspective should now be much easier! - Mike Brown

The Second Day of Life-Changing Gifts - Focusing on What's Really Important

A friend from church gave me a tape several years ago by Fr. Larry Richards, a Catholic priest and evangelist, who does a broad series of talks on faith topics. In one about our "life’s purpose," he discussed the need for a spirit of sacrifice. In doing so, he talked about a poster in his office which said, “Every time I think I’ve sacrificed everything, God asks me for something I’m not willing to give up.”

Amid all the concerns vying to command our attention, this question is a constant reminder to embrace a sense of detachment from the falsely "important." And at a time when I was challenging myself on what WAS important, this statement had a dramatic impact. It was a big part of reorienting my life's goals and core purpose away from monetary concerns to spiritual and sacrificial ones, which have much more permanency. I've adapted the question for use in presentations, asking, “At the end of your life, what will you look back on from your life that will cause you to smile?”

Contemplating these questions is so appropriate this time of year when it’s easy to become enchanted with things that will be long forgotten when our time here is over.

Note: This is one of a series of posts on life-changing gifts. - Mike Brown

Getting Ready for 2010: Tools to Improve Your Success

With 2010 looming and the importance of approaching the year with creative business and competitive options, here are links to a variety of tools to help if you're under the gun to get a successful plan completed.

A Foundation on Strategic Thinking

• An Overview on What Strategic Means, Who to Involve in Strategy Development, and a Few Strategic Tools

Creating a Strategic Focus

• Steps to Re-evaluate and Focus on Important Elements in Your Business


• Better Understanding What's Strategic in Your Business

Contingency Planning

• Thoughts on Dealing with Uncertainty


• Steps to Deal with Planning Amid Uncertainty


• Quickly Developing Options When Your Current Plan Isn't Working


• Having to "Wing" Your Strategy Because of Uncertainty

Updating Your Current Plan

• Re-checking Your Marketing Plan for Completeness


• Reviewing and Modifying Your Strategic Direction


• Updating a Marketing Plan Under Tight Resources

Implementing Specific Strategic Thrusts

• Generating New Ideas When You Need Them


• When A More Aggressive Competitive Strategy Is Needed


• You're Fighting an Uphill Battle and Need a Contrarian Strategy


• Developing a Low-Investment Marketing Strategy


• You Have a Turnaround to Fix

Wrapping Up with a Smile on Your Face

• The Ultimate in Flexible Strategy

Additionally, Trendwatching.com has released its briefing on "10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010" covering impacts arising from (among other things):

• Urbanization
• Fragmentation in what constitutes luxury
• Increasingly complex online presences
• A push for mass IRL interactions emanating from online networks

There are certainly other Brainzooming articles touching on these planning topics, but ideally this short list will get you jump started for current planning efforts you have to complete. - Mike Brown

Getting Ready for 2010: A Strategy Foundation - Guest Post by Keith Prather

Keith Prather is Managing Director of Armada Corporate Intelligence, a corporate business intelligence firm that functions as outsourced members of corporate strategy groups and consults with companies of all sizes on strategy and implementation. Armada is sponsoring this week of posts on getting ready for 2010 planning.

I've known Keith for nearly a decade and have worked with him closely on a variety of strategic and market planning efforts. Today, I'm excited he's sharing his professional perspectives on getting a better understanding of your external environment during this period of dramatic global change in business and consumer markets:


A critical component of a successful strategic plan is a well-established strategy foundation – a compilation of information and intelligence covering your industry, global markets, customers, and the environment. Particularly relevant this year is the need to produce an accurate economic forecast with meaning and relevance for the business. And given the uncertainty surrounding the global economy, this can be a daunting task.

Following the most basic tenets, forecasters need to identify the supply and demand drivers for an industry, and capture meaningful data describing the condition and outlook for them. Sometimes though the most impactful elements on a business are not what we think. Going to the expense side of the income statement and understanding the biggest cost items in your business will help determine the real key elements of supply – those you rely on.

For instance, one client believed steel (which was one of the company's top expenses) was the primary input for its business, with countless hours spent monitoring, forecasting, and negotiating steel prices. Energy costs, on the other hand, were not considered to have a material impact, and were lumped into utility and overhead costs. In 2008, however, consumption of oil-based resources drove prices up significantly. As a result, oil costs had to be factored much more directly into forecasting models to improve their accuracy. By not anticipating this significant change to the company's business mix, however, it was caught flat footed.

On the demand side, the challenge is more complex. While providing future economic insights for clients, several fundamental items seem to be driving things developments. First, everything ultimately circles back to consumers. You and I, spending money, drives more than 70% of the nation’s $13 trillion in GDP. Watching consumer spending, consumer confidence, housing, and several other metrics tracking consumer activity are useful in helping gauge future activity. One great aggregator site for basic economic information is the US Census Bureau’s Economic Indicator page.

There are some other great free aggregator sites providing solid current economic news and explanations of some of the items driving current activity. One of my favorites is the RTTNews Daily Market Analysis. We also pay a lot of attention to the Financial Times, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, and Global Insight for forecasting information.

For manufacturing, the Institute for Supply Management publishes one of the most accurate gauges of manufacturing activity, the Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI), on a monthly basis. You can read about the PMI in simple, easy to follow prose at the ISM website.

Calculating risk is also an important component to a well-done strategy foundation. With a wave of new legislation floating around in Congress, it is important for companies to use scenario planning in considering impacts of various regulatory actions on the company. From health care to energy legislation, companies will be hit with direct and indirect risks as a result. Using a system such as the Lockwood Analytical Method for Prediction (LAMP) can help in gauging which scenarios provide the greatest risk – and the greatest likelihood of occurring.

It can’t be said enough, a solid strategy foundation is the underpinning to a successful strategic plan. Woodrow Wilson once said: "We should not only use all the brains we have, but all the brains we can borrow." If you can’t build the strategy foundation in-house, it’s worth getting help to make sure that the business landscape is being accurately portrayed. Otherwise, you might be building a ship when what you really need is a bicycle. - Keith Prather

You Never Know

Cleaning offices isn't a distinctive talent for me; it's a chore from beginning to end. Yet, as you learned this week, it's necessary right now.

Among my files was a notebook from a Statistical Process Control training class my first weeks on the job. Inside the notebook was a section on conducting brainstorming along with handwritten notes from the class.

I don't remember learning brainstorming in grad school, and we didn't have training at my first job, so this had to be my first formal exposure to brainstorming. There in the notes are the familiar admonitions I use all the time: listen intently to all participants, capture what they're saying in the words they use, encourage and reinforce all comments, don't judge prematurely. Everything's there for getting innovation started.

While the class (and some of the great people I met there) is as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday, this specific topic isn't even a vague memory. Back then, it was something my boss was making me go to. In retrospect, it was life altering day.

The moral - you never know.

You never know which days will change your life. So never write off any day as a throw-away. Go into each one with a sense of wonder. Look for who you may meet or what you might learn that will fundamentally shape the rest of what you'll ever do. - Mike Brown

Research Review Week - Keep Going!

Too many research reports are train wrecks of charts, arrows, and statements that simply play back the graphics, or even worse, regurgitate the detailed methodology with no forward looking implications.

For senior executives, it means a confusing (and at best, boring) jumble of information – pointing in all kinds of directions without really saying anything.

If you have research responsibility, apply this maxim for great strategic thinking from Gary Singer, a wonderful strategist and former Chief Strategy Officer at Interbrand. His comment to me was:

• Good researchers go to the edge of the data and step back – to be cautious & statistically sound.
• Good consultants go to the edge of the data and stop – to be sure they’re on solid footing & that the client will buy off.
• Great strategic thinkers go to the edge of the data, formulate a sound next set of assumptions that the audience can comment on & agree to, and then keep going to expand understanding & get to revealing insights.

It’s a simple statement and hard to do, but done successfully, it promises incredible business results. Use it as your new strategic hurdle to clear! - Mike Brown

Remember to check out the American Marketing Association Marketing Research Conference website for updated tweets, videos, and articles from the conference. You can also track the conference at #amamrc on Twitter.

Research Review Week - Design Driven Deliverables

W5, a market research company based in Durham, NC is a strong proponent of “design driven deliverables,” defined as “any method of communicating research findings that goes beyond the standard research report.”

In a time when it seems like attention spans continue to decline, it's fundamental to be able to form research results into meaningful stories that carry an impact with your audience. Very often, if you're willing to push your thinking and spend some time on a deliverable, the right communication vehicle is anything but a standard research report.

W5 considers four types of design driven deliverables:

• Graphic – Results depicted visually in posters, booklets, stickers, note cards, etc.
• Sensory – Stimuli that engage the senses in various ways, including textures, audio, video, and smells.
• Experiential – An interactive presentation of results in ideation sessions, dramatization, experiential tours, immersion rooms.
• Installation – Physical environments that convey understanding, including displays, large scale murals, shadow boxes, and artifact installations.

You can check out more information through W5 white papers on this and other topics at company’s website. - Mike Brown

Remember to check out the American Marketing Association Marketing Research Conference website for updated tweets, videos, and articles from the conference. You can also track the conference at #amamrc on Twitter.

Getting Ready for This!

Today includes a lunch presentation at the Fort Hays State University Business and Leadership Symposium. The presentation title is "Getting Ready for This," and it focuses on six vital success competencies for graduates coming into the workplace amid a dramatically changing business world.

The premise is that it's fundamental for new graduates to own skills in co-creating, contorting, and abandoning ideas and strategies based on what's relevant at any time. It's not so much "what" they know, as "how" to continually deconstruct and reassemble their knowledge in dramatically new and relevant ways throughout their careers.

It starts with several amazing factoids from the video "Do You Know 3.0?" recounting dramatic demographic, technology, and information-based changes worldwide. It's been viewed millions of times, and in the event you haven't seen it, take a few minutes to watch it.

As a brief overview and reference for the presentation, here are the six areas for educators and students to more concertedly embrace:

1. Knowing Answers Is Good - Knowing How to Find Answers Is Vital

Since facts change and information deteriorates, it's vital to be able to know how to seek and vet potential answers since no one can be expected to have a full command of all available knowledge.

2. Balanced Thinking Allows You to Be More Strategic

USA Today featured an article in July on retraining a left brained orientation to a right brained one in order to cope with a changing job environment. We talk plenty about the importance of knowing your thinking orientation, surrounding yourself with a complementary team, and the strategic impact of being able to work with contradictory points of view.

3. Possibilities and Emotion are Important in Business

From someone whose more natural orientation centers on facts and logic, this has been the most challenging of the 6 areas to retrain my own view. The best place to go on this topic is Benjamin Zander, who has been mentioned frequently here. As a homework assignment for attendees at the FHSU presentation, I asked them to watch these two Zander videos and get a genuine sense of the importance of emotion and possibilities thinking:

• Benjamin Zander on the Art of Possibilities


• Benjamin Zander on Emotion and Possibilities

4. You Have to Be Able to Communicate in Multiple Ways

Communication is in the top 10 topics addressed on Brainzooming so far because it's so critical to successful creativity, innovation, and strategic thinking. Students need to be pushed to go beyond the typical team presentation that summarizes a semester-long project. They need to be adept at using formats of varying lengths (simple recommendations, elevator speeches, tweets, etc.) and mediums (songs, video, acting, etc.).

5. Leadership Starts Day One on the Job

Leadership is about service, not titles. That means day one is the time for new graduates to start leading on the job. Taking on a strategic leadership role can be simple. You just have to be willing to do something about it!

6. People All Around You Are Making Decisions Based on Personal Branding

Personal branding isn't a meaningless concept authors dreamed up to sell more books. It's truly the driver behind why anyone gets hired, advances, and has intriguing opportunities develop. Step one is understanding your talents and exploiting them. Here are two great books to read on how to further develop and sustain a personal brand:

• "Radical Careering" by Sally Hogshead


• "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" by Gordon MacKenzie

I look forward to comments from those in attendance (and non-attendees as well) with thoughts on the topic since it applies to all of us as dizzying changes occur around us. Stay close to the Brainzooming blog for more on change and dealing with it in the near future! - Mike Brown

Storytelling to Frame Research Reports - Guest Post by Sean Buvala

I'm chairing the American Marketing Association Marketing Research Conference October 4 - 7. It's going to be a great event, with three educational tracks all tied back to theme, "Making Business Sense of What's Next."

Our main programming objective for the conference is providing ideas, tools, and networking to help researchers approach business more broadly and with a clear means to help lead their companies successfully into the future. Through the conference social media effort, you'll be able to track the conference's progress using the hashtag #amamrc on Twitter and on the conference website, where I'll be blogging along with others next week.

To give you an early sense of the conference tone and content, today's guest Brainzooming columnist is presenting a workshop this Sunday at the conference's start. Sean Buvala is an award-winning trainer who teaches businesses and nonprofit organizations how to improve their business results through the power of storytelling. You learn more about his work at www.seantells.net.

In this piece, Sean challenges researchers (and really anyone communicating in business) to better incorporate framing to fully realize the impact of great storytelling.


The more esoteric your work, the more you need storytelling in your job. Those of you in research, I am talking to you.

Sometimes it is hard for others to understand the ins, outs, and mysteries of research. By using the power of storytelling in your communications, you can create "frames" to highlight, carry, and explain bigger concepts.

Every house I have ever been in has place filled with pictures of family and friends. Rather than just glue these pictures to the wall, the pictures are placed in frames that help draw the eye to the subjects within. In the most artistic homes, frames surrounding pictures have been carefully chosen to emphasize the content of the pictures. More important pictures (the "everybody in the family" type) have the most expensive and sturdy frames. Done well, frames are an extension of the pictures.

Just like picture frames in someone's home, framing complicated and important data in the context of a memorable story protects and carries your message to your listeners. Here's an example.

You could talk about the collection methods used to complete a survey and how that proves the validity of the data. However, folks want results first. So, instead of talking first about how the data means you must completely drop an ingrained and "sacred cow" program from your company, you could start with the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk," (JATBS) emphasizing how Jack's mother was furious with Jack for trading her sacred cow for a few magic beans. In the end, however, Jack ends up with a goose that lays golden eggs, giving Jack and his mother more than they ever dreamt.

You'll still present your data, but after you tell your version of JATBS, showing the data that correlates to your conclusion. Then, you might lead a discussion based on the data asking, "Just like the mother in JATBS, what do we fear in what the data tells us? In what ways is this data like magic beans for our company's future?" Finally, end your presentation with a recap of JATBS.

Now, you have framed your data (which is important and needed) in the center of a very familiar and comfortable story. I can assure you the first time you do this you will wade through some discomfort and come out with a presentation that will cement the conclusions into the minds of your listeners.

Here are three things you should know about story and narrative as framing tools:

1. People just want to know, "What's in it for me?"

Co-workers aren't as interested in you job's mechanics as you are. I know you have gone to school to learn how statistics work. However, the people you work with haven't. For most of them, how you collected the data is not nearly as important as what the data means for their work. Storytelling lets you talk about benefits of research, not just mechanics.

2. Stories remind you to speak in the language of the people: your fellow employees.

Although stereotypes of overly detailed researchers may seem unfair, there are those in your company still slightly afraid of you. When they know you will speak understandably, they are more open to hear what you have to say. When you share the story of how others have benefited by what you are proposing, they will feel better about providing tools and time to fulfill your projects. It's far better to talk to others about how Susan at the other office was twice as successful after incorporating research results you reported. In a sense, storytelling allows others to know you are "on their side."

3. Your CFO approves funds for results not information.

Most people hate the process of change. Results are better than promises. Stories are frames that carry results. You will get much more support for a project when folks know how others have benefited from your proposals. How the office across the city became so successful that they now have doubled sales is 100% more effective in getting results than any presentation mired in how the research was conducted.

Your work in research and statistics is vital. Even more vital is your ability to communicate the benefits of your work to the rest of your company. Information framed in the context of story, information carried by understandable narratives, will stick with your fellow staff members much longer than data alone. Take a chance and frame your next presentation in a story. - Sean Buvala

Be Lazy, Sort Of

Next time you get a new assignment, project, or question to answer, ask yourself: Who knows more about this than I do? Consider all the possible answers you can think of to the question:

• People you know personally


• People you know online


• People networked with people you know


• Current experts


• One time experts


• Journalists, authors, bloggers


• Anybody else?

Now, get lazy, and reach out to the people you've identified and see if they can do a better job than you in helping complete the task more effectively.

I'm not completely advocating being lazy, because you still have to distill their insights into a coherent response. But there's nothing wrong with letting real experts weigh in with perspectives when they're better informed than you are. - Mike Brown

What Will It Take to Cover Me?

The past few weeks, I've been schlepping around fabric stores since Cyndi wants to recover several pieces of furniture. This is unfamiliar territory for me, which usually means an opportunity to hunt for different takes on Brainzooming-related ideas.

One can imagine the most asked question in a fabric store is, "How much material is it going to take to reupholster __________?" With many ways to fill in the blank, store staff must spend a lot of time answering the question, especially since customers could likely struggle to accurately describe (from memory) items they're looking to recover.

That's where this photo shows such an innovative services marketing idea: a poster depicting 60 pieces of furniture with the approximate square yardage needed to recover them.

With the poster in place, the exchange on "How much material is it going to take to reupholster __________?" becomes a smile and a finger point to the nearest poster where a customer can find the item and the answer with much greater speed and certainty.

The poster creates higher performing customers which turns into time savings for customers and staff, which leads to better service and lower staffing costs. That's a strategic idea put into practice.

So what stumbling blocks to efficient customer-employee interaction exist in your business? What simple ideas might be lurking to address these issues as effectively as this poster does?
Spend a few minutes thinking about it and see what you can do to improve how you cover the situations you face. - Mike Brown

A Career-Changing Business Quote - 10 Years Later

“Forecasters who extrapolate from today inevitably get tomorrow wrong…(but) by pitting multiple scenarios of the future against one another and leaving many different doors open, you can prepare yourself for a future that is inherently unpredictable. Brainstorming pays off. And the more possibilities you can entertain, the less likely you are to be blindsided.” - Peter Coy and Neil Gross, Business Week, August 30, 1999

I use this quote often in presentations because it has so dramatically shaped my thinking. It's at the heart of the philosophies, disciplines, and tools I've sought to learn, compile, and develop in the past 10 years.

And when nothing is getting more certain, there's even greater value in bringing smart, multi-disciplined people together to expand your view of the future, work through possibilities, and act on them.

Ideally, you're finding that's what Brainzooming is all about. - Mike Brown

Lessons from Kansas City Infobank - Secondary Research Techniques

Secondary research was the primary approach at Kansas City Infobank for completing projects. We informally defined secondary research as "finding what you're looking for among answers to questions that had already been asked and answered by others."

Secondary research was ideal for me since it was similar to school (which I always enjoyed) and required a strategic, problem-solving approach that's been valuable not only in business, but in many other situations. There are several keys to secondary research effectiveness including strong skills in anticipation, visualization, detecting clues, and making sound assumptions. Here are some principles Bill McDonald taught for doing it that I still use all the time:

1. Start by anticipating what your ultimate answer will be. Approximate the answer and its form: If it's a prediction, what's it likely to be? If it's a recap of something, how extensive will it be? Approximating what you're looking for helps you know when you've found the answer and aids directly in step 2.
   
2. Anticipate what components that could make up the answer will look like and where they might be found. Rarely do you find the exact answer; instead, you need to piece it together as you would a puzzle. Start by thinking through what the "puzzle pieces" look like: quotes, number, expert names, trend information, news, etc., then map out where the pieces will likely be located.


3. Armed with hypotheses on the answer and its pieces, begin quickly searching and scanning information sources. Having imagined the information upfront allows you to get through a search more quickly, i.e. if you need numbers to develop a forecast, it's easy to look at articles online and see right away if numbers are included. The key is grabbing as much information as appears relevant early on and leaving heavy analysis for later.
   
4. When you've captured these first sources, review them for more clues on where other information may reside. Are there sources or experts mentioned you haven't explored but need to? Where are they located and how can you get to them?
   
5. While scanning sources, start piecing the answer together. Ideally, you should be able to begin constructing the answer in parts, even if it doesn't look like the final form. Doing this effectively means making sound assumptions to start filling in the answer. This is where your initial hypotheses come in handy as a springboard for constructing the answer and providing a check on how the pieces are fitting together.

There's certainly more to be written about secondary research techniques, but these five tips will help you be more successful whenever you have to find out an answer online or in printed material. - Mike Brown

Lessons from Kansas City Infobank - Get on the Phone

I’ve done several posts on strategic mentors who've fundamentally shaped my thinking and approach. In an early one, I mentioned multiple posts could be filled with lessons learned from Bill McDonald when I worked for him at Kansas City Infobank. The next few days will feature several great lessons I'm sure you’ll benefit from as much as I have.

Get on the Phone and Ask Your Question

Bill had an amazing ability to phone total strangers, chat with them, and prompt them to share incredible information through asking questions. Listening to these calls made a strong impression on me about the value of directly asking great questions of knowledgeable people. I've never matched Bill's skills, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate the gift he has for conversation and questioning.

Today, however, since it’s so easy to email someone a question – type a few lines, hit send, and wait for a reply - fewer people seem to phone directly when they need information or something resolved.

But just because you sent an email doesn’t mean you really asked a question. That implies the recipient actually read the question, and is in a position to adequately respond without ongoing dialogue.

Despite the apparent ease of email, it's often a much better alternative to pick up the phone and call. If you can talk live, you’ll at least know they received the question, find out if your question prompts questions for them, clarify any confusion, and engage in a dialogue that could provide a much richer understanding.

So put down the Blackberry or push away from the keyboard and call with your question! - Mike Brown

Go Ahead. Prove Me Wrong.

Don't underestimate the tremendous motivational force of challenging someone to produce facts to try and prove you wrong. Most people like to be right and will expend at least some effort to support their point.

If you can get someone to do this, you'll benefit in multiple ways:

• You'll better understand counter arguments against your point of view.


• There's the opportunity to learn more about your topic from a different perspective.


• You might discover you are actually wrong and be able to correct your own misunderstanding of the issue in a lower risk situation.

So go ahead and issue the challenge to try and prove you wrong. In so doing, you'll set your challenger up to make your day. - Mike Brown

Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way In

Someone told me about his new company where they do entrance interviews. In contrast to an exit interview, the objective is to get a download of potentially innovative ideas when someone starts a job, before there's time to develop a point of view biased by the company's culture.

What a great strategic thinking approach!

Given the current hiring market, entrance interviews may have limited applicability right now. It's a wonderful idea though for increasing the diversity of an organization's creative learning during the narrow window when a new employee is approaching things from a completely fresh perspective. - Mike Brown

What Did You UNLearn at the Conference?

3 Days of UNLearning at the Business Marketing Association Conference

"UNLearn" was the theme for last week's national Business Marketing Association conference (quick disclosure, I'm a board member for BMA). The theme emphasized the importance in today's environment of challenging existing knowledge, assumptions, and beliefs to lead & grow businesses more successfully.

The conference delivered on the theme in multiple ways, and each day, I challenged myself to articulate what I had "unlearned." Here are the top unlearnings from each of the conference's three days:

• Day 1 - UNLearn Control: A major conference topic focused on how new communication channels have handed control to the audience for what have traditionally been company-driven messages. Operating successfully in this environment requires authenticity and openness to being part of the conversations taking place, irrespective of whether they are flattering or hurtful. For marketing & branding control freaks, it means learning new tools and means to engage in dialogue.
  
• Day2 - UNLearn “Resources Before Results” Thinking: Everybody has fewer resources. One marketing VP said his budget was 25% of what it was in 2008. If defining your ability to make a positive, business-growing impact is based solely on budget & people resources, you'll beat your head against a wall. The alternative is to realize key success factors for today's market dialogue aren't resource-driven. You can't buy authenticity, experience, or passion, yet they all correlate strongly to creating results.
  
• Day 3 - UNLearn "Piecemeal" Marketing: It was fascinating to hear other marketers wrestling with the expectation of delivering programs that are close - maybe 60-70% of what might traditionally be considered as ready for "prime time." The push now is to introduce them early to try to drive sales while additional learning and tweaking go on once in market. A balance to this approach is to make as sure as possible on the front end an effort integrates with other things being done across the business. At least then the 30-40% uncertainty can be partially mitigated through strategic ties to other efforts and investments already in place.

Easy? No. Comfortable? Absolutely not!

To me though, the big learning is nearly all business marketers are facing comparable issues, and finding dramatically new ways to deal with them is what success is all about today.

Share Your Complete Message in a Powerpoint Headline

If you have to create a written report in PowerPoint, here's a good discipline to enforce on yourself for clarity and flow:

Write the headlines on each page in such a way that if they were the only things read, your audience would get the report's main messages.

Since many readers will do little more than a quick scan of the document, this approach creates a greater likelihood you'll get your points across to both skimmers and those who do spend more time with the report.

Strategic Thinking Snippets - Direction and Change

Here's another installment in Strategic Thinking Snippets - ideas first shared on Twitter and now collected and arranged for Brainzooming. This Strategic Thinking Snippet installment focused on identifying strategic direction and managing through change.

• A lot of effort gets spent solving wrong problems. Important Safety Tip: Invest the time to figure out the right thing to fix.
• If you don't start with questions, it's really easy to solve the wrong problem. Go ahead...ask questions.
• Without a strategic foundation, even bad ideas can masquerade as great ones. Don't skip the strategy step.
• Being able to recall past patterns is key to strategic thinking, no matter how you're able to recall them.
• As important as recall is for strategic thinking, looking at things anew is vital also. Together, they're transforming.
• Be careful of "never" & "always" statements. The real frequency is "almost always" between these 2 extremes.
• Sometimes you need a mini-crisis to drive change. Know how to create one, if necessary.
• Force yourself to put things you think are really good in new settings. You'll find many new ways to improve them!
• Get comfortable with the intriguing twists life takes that you could never anticipate. Simply enjoy them!