You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the grass roots effort to capture Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.  A video posted on You Tube this week went viral, with over 56 Million hits (as of this writing.) In my case, my 15 year old daughter pleaded with me to turn off 60 Minutes to watch it; providing a stunning commentary on our movement to new forms of media.

The video, shot by a little known videographer is being promoted by the advocacy group “Invisible Children” and tells the story of a Ugandan child and others like him, who have been the victims of horrific crimes against humanity.

While the story and cause is compelling, it is the story telling that should capture our attention.  The 30-minute video is presented like a short, part documentary part sensationalism. The themes of children killing their own parents and mutilating others are shocking and captivating.

All marketers should become aware of this medium. The movie blurs the line between amateur videos on You Tube and professionally produced movies. Companies often attempt to tell their story through static documents that lack color and texture.  Those of us who are on the wrong side of aging must recognize that  those who we market to no longer process information in the form of static text. We have been conditioned to view our news, our sports and our marketing offers in multimedia form.  The marketing of the future will include many dimensions, including video, sound, and info-graphics launched online, rated by others and spread through sites that have not even been built yet.  Media will be in constant flux, with new views, tidbits and vignettes wetting our appetite for real time information.

The other thing unique about the video is its call to action; setting a very clear goal to capture Kony in 2012. If you think that this is just another cause being thumped by a set of leftist activists, think again. The U.S. military has dispatched 100 Special Forces “advisors” to Uganda in an attempt to find Kony, and senior U.S. officials are scrambling to harness the populism of the video.

As the video proclaims “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” View it here

There are many ingredients required to develop and execute a successful strategy; none more important than discipline. Disruptive innovations that reshape an industry are rare. Most innovation is incremental, and successful execution is a function of hard work, time and patience.

Jeff Bezos’s insight about selling books online (which resulted in the formation of Amazon) was conceived while he worked as an analyst at an investment bank. His conversion of strategy into tactics will go down in history, as Amazon took on all the best in retailing, seemingly overnight.

Bezos remains hungry and focused. Amazon’s top 5 managers meet every Tuesday for four hours to review and rebake strategy. Not once a year, not once a quarter – every Tuesday. Twice a year his team has a two day off-site to think about “big ideas” that may require 2-3 years to implement.

Alan Kay once said, “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”  Where the rubber meets the road in strategy is maintaining the right perspective – the intersection of strategic thinking and tactical execution.  Business owners can easily lose perspective when they spend too much time muddled in solving day to day operational problems.

To maintain strategic discipline:

Create a strategy committee, task force or executive management team (EMT).

Each member should have a role in strategy formation and implementation and be accountable for key initiatives of the company. Meet with the EMT monthly to review progress versus goals.

Engage mid-management in strategy formation and execution

Mid-managers are often insightful in identifying latent needs as they are often closer to the customer than their senior counterparts.  Many entrepreneurial companies lack management depth. They are well served to include mid-managers in executing strategy.  Provide learning opportunities for junior managers by delegating tasks for them to complete.

Hold your teams accountable

Results oriented organizations are built from the ground up to support execution, rigorously using scorecards that drill down to individual performance. Best-in-class organizations orchestrate goal setting for individuals that align with the broader goals of the organizations.

Include outside variables in your dashboard

While most successful companies measure internal activities, few score external variables. Seek out external metrics that may be predictive of future demand. Leverage the data to plan capacity, labor, facility expansion, procurement of equipment, etc.

Bezos said, “We are willing to plant seeds and wait a long time for them to turn into trees. Every new business we’ve ever engaged in has initially been seen as a distraction by people externally and sometimes even internally.”

Great strategies convert into initiatives that become the unifying vision of the strategically successful organization. Ideas that lack resources, energy and concentration are just a distraction.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that one needs to invest 10,000 hours in an activity in order to become an expert. I take solace in knowing that I am evidently both an expert in Strategic Planning, and overcoming the drama induced by teenage daughters.

The rapid escalation of global competition has brought about a new round of hyper-specialization.  The concept of specialization is nothing new; the division of labor has been a key tenant of economics since the birth of capitalism. Yet sites such as Guru or eLance, have propelled specialization to a new art form, where one can access dozens of specialists from around the world in any conceivable competency in a matter of minutes.

Specialties that do not require any special education (other than what is readily available on the internet) such as graphic arts have quickly commoditized. You can hire a graphic artist online for $15 an hour.  In cases where greater technical aptitude is required, specialists still out-earn generalists. The median Internist in the U.S. earns $176K per year, while Cardiologists earn a median of $403K (some make $800K or more). [i] If you had a heart attack, which would you see?

Perhaps the most common strategic blunder I observe within entrepreneurial companies is a penchant for addressing overly broad targets. Marketers, seeking the largest audience cast too wide a net. In their need to satisfy the largest number of prospects, they become de facto generalists. That is, instead of addressing a niche market with specific solutions, they try to satisfy a larger audience with a multitude of products and services. At some point, the value they can provide suffers from diminishing returns.

The more crowded a space, the more difficult it is to differentiate, and the greater the need for expertise. Before its bankruptcy filing, GM attempted to sell within every segment, from sub-compact to Hummer. GM experienced what is often referred to as the peanut butter effect; the wider you spread something, the thinner it gets. GM’s branding was diluted and ability to control quality constrained.

Many small businesses may employ generalists because of their lack of talent depth. To have one IT professional manage a network, build the company website, select an ERP package and fix all the desktops is an archaic paradigm worthy of recalculation.

The reason that specialists are worth more than generalists is that they have a deeper subject matter expertise that drives:[ii]

Quality-Processes replicated over time promote less deviation, less defects and fewer errors.  The specialist thinks deeply about an area of expertise in which they have experience and are less likely to make mistakes.

Speed- Specialists do not need to reinvent things. Cycle times on proposals and product delivery is faster. If a company offers 50 stock products instead of 500, they can manage less inventory and ship items quicker. For every new project outside the boundaries of a company’s expertise there is resource draining learning curve that costs time and money.

Relationships-As the specialist is highly respected, their opinions are sought after by the media and people who want to know them, hire them and refer them to others.

The realities of outsourcing and off-shoring are driven by these phenomena. It is inherently inefficient to participate in activities that are not within a firm’s core competency and do not directly contribute to the bottom line. Thus, the migration of labor (outsourcing) will rise at a fervent rate.

In fact, the entire concept of the corporation, with its multiple functional departments (such as accounting, sales and marketing, design, operations, engineering, manufacturing, etc.) is under some attack. Social norms around what constitutes a working environment are shifting quickly and enabling greater specialization. Collaboration tools make the world of work far more virtual, which will continue to feed the frenzy.

Think about how to specialize as to optimize your revenue, margin and profit.

Revelations about Apple and Google tracking the movements of mobile devices has caused quite a stir. It seems their mining of data and ability to construct complex algorithms that can predict future behavior incited outrage on the part of privacy and civil rights groups. In a bit of a twisted irony, it turns out that the very apps that have enabled smart phones have also provided a wealth of data for inquiring minds who want to know.

The confluence of social media and cloud computing is shaping a new world order, where marketers have access to relational databases and a litany of information that has until now been seemingly unfathomable. The implications are extraordinary, as emerging technologies will propel mind numbing analytics about how we work, live and interact.

Consumers are fearful of things like electronic medical records which evoke an emotional response about our privacy, even though they are nearly certain of advancing medical science and improving patient outcomes. Business owners must embrace the potential of a new universe of analytics that will open a window to insight on customers unlike any we have ever seen.

The current debate centers on whether such mining is legal and ethical and how it could be abused. Attorneys search the Facebook pages of potential jurors to determine their biases. Cellular phone providers track which users are most likely to switch carriers based on the behavior of their friends. While these unseemly usages of data may threaten our sensibilities, social norms are shifting to the point that privacy is becoming an expectation of a past era.

Physicists at Northwestern University tracked the movements of over 100,000 people and 16 million records, and assert that they can predict (within 93% accuracy) the location of a user at a given time in the future[i]. Those with an entrepreneurial bent will find productive uses of such information and will find legal ways to exploit it. Microsoft, Apple and Google rank in the top 10 amongst the world’s most valued companies because they are the ones that allow us to organize our information.

Those seeking competitive advantage will invest more heavily in technologies and analysts who not only tell us how our customers have behaved but how they will behave in the future, and react to the stimuli we produce. Decisions ranging from inventory selection, marketing spend, labor utilization, etc. will be driven by more precise data, promoting further improvement in U.S. productivity.

The use of such data will become the keys to the castle.  As Bill Gates once said, “be nice to the nerds, chances are you’ll end up working for one.”

[i] The Really Smart Phone by Robert Lee Hotz Wall Street Journal April 23, 2011

The protesters marched on the highway, despondent about rapid inflation.  They shut down the thoroughfare for hours. 1000 miles away, protesters flocked the capital and drove the legislators to safe haven in neighboring territories.

These were fundamentalists in Tunisia or Libya; they were students in California and state workers in Wisconsin.

The impetus for civil unrest in the Middle East is that of the “lost generation” of unemployed misdirected youth.  In some regions of the world, unemployment is 40% or more.  In the U.S. , it is not just the young that face underemployment but generations of workers whose skills have become irrelevant.  The U.S. has the western world’s widest income distribution. The Top 10% make 6 times that of the bottom 10%, compared to 4.2 X for Great Britain and 2.8 X for Sweden[i].  The labor market has hollowed, as wages earned by shop floor workers have actually declined (when adjusted for inflation) over the last two decades.

The labor imbalance in the U.S. has far reaching implications, not only for the unemployed but for our economy as a whole.  The inability of low wage earners to consume is a strain on U.S. growth.

While there is plenty of banter about the need for jobs, there is no systematic solution in place for retraining American workers such as displaced auto and steel workers. President Obama has called on U.S. business leaders to: “generate ideas for creating jobs, sustaining the economic recovery and making America more competitive”[ii].

Of course the notion of “creating jobs” is a little too convenient. Jobs are created when there is a need for them, and Americans get the jobs when they offer the most value. The problem is not that there are not enough jobs; it is that the cost-benefit for the employer often tips towards off-shoring.  If our workers do not offer enough value in the form of specialized knowledge, ability to use technology, etc., jobs will continue to be shipped overseas.

This is not a protectionist rant, and my comments aren’t intended to incite a riot on free trade, or China manipulating currency, etc. I am focused on what we can control.  What our nation needs is a retraining effort. The money we are spending on unemployment and other services would be better spent invested in people so that they can acquire new skill sets that are relevant in an ever changing world.

The question is who will lead, and who will pick up the bill?  To prepare our workers for the future will require collaboration across business and government. Tax and other incentives need to be in place to encourage the retooling of America. So as GE Chairman Jeffery Immelt and the rest of the White House Council of Economic Affairs weighs in on jobs, I hope they emphasize that we need to create opportunities for workers, and provide them will the skill sets required to compete.

Otherwise, the marches may extend to Washington D.C. and a state capital near you.

[ii] Obama wants business world’s best ideas on jobs USA Today

One of the bi-products of our caffeine crazed, media blitzed economy is that we have virtually no attention span. It is as if we have a collective form of ADD.

Over time, customers get bored with their vendors, alliance partners and trade associations. Client relationships have a natural tail.

The ability to continuously delight customers is a skill mastered by few. Clients need some type of stimuli that reinforces the value we provide them and it needs to come in different forms at different times. Variety is not just the spice of life; it is the remedy to overcoming the dreaded inevitable customer fatigue.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that challengers are incented to barrage prospects with new offers and discounts. In relative terms, the incumbent can easily become complacent and offer clients much of the same. As the old adage goes, “if it isn’t broke…”.

Customer fatigue only magnifies themes we have often shared in this space. The number one rule of customer relationship management is to take better care of the customers you already have than new ones you might attract. Offering special discounts to new customers flies in the face of this principle.  Organizations often position their best people as hunters, and lowly customer service agents as the face of the company with current clients. An organization can easily lose sight of its most precious possession, its most profitable customers.

Vendors should track the average length of their relationships and take actions to prolong them. The element of surprise is understood by entertainers and magicians. Similar tactics can be applied from our business gifts, customer reviews, plant tours and the like. Customers should be treated differently based on their lifetime value, and perhaps even receive different benefits based on their tenure. Find a way to shake things up and keep customers coming back for more.

In Intended Consequences, I illustrated how our economy had endured a period of unparalleled turbulence. From Y2K to 9/11, the wars in Iran and Afghanistan, the Asian Financial Crisis, Katrina, Mad Cow and Enron/WorldCom we have experienced a decade of volatility. Recent history has presented the Gulf spill, the Haiti and Chile disasters, and now civil unrest in the Middle East. Volatility has become the norm.

The violence in Egypt is particularly daunting because we don’t have a sense of the extent to which the unrest will spread to other nations in the region. Even the White House seemed surprised as stories spread of the President watching television like the rest of us, trying to make sense of it all.

The passage of time has only magnified the “strategy paradox”. How can an organization plan for a future that is impossible to predict?  I believe that in the face of such uncertainty there is a compelling need for more examination, reflection and planning.  Uncertainty should prompt us to think more provocatively about how changes in our environment will manifest within our businesses and our society (one lesson we learned from protests in Egypt is that social networking is not only a tool, but a potential weapon).

Raw materials continue to be unstable, as prices from oil to cotton have moved sharply higher.  If you were a business dependent on such materials, you may need to rethink your pricing strategy, positioning, marketing, etc. in an effort to weather the storm, or perhaps take advantage of new opportunities (to raise prices for example).

One of the ironies of global events is that we cannot comprehend their severity in midstream. When we initially heard of the first plane striking the World Trade Center, we didn’t understand the implications. It was only after time that the terrorist plot and its affect on the world crystallized for us.

So as the events in the Middle East unfold, we must be more thoughtful about what might change. Will civil unrest further American interests or de-stabilize the region? What will be the affect on the stock market, currency markets, energy prices and raw material costs?  How might the U.S. and its allies react?

Only time will tell.