Barry Diller and the IAC

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Fifteen years after Barry Diller had gone to see QVC the home shopping network, he was on CBS 60 minutes today. Within minutes of being on 60 minutes the Internet search engines were buzzing with searches for "Barry Diller" ! How much the media consumption experience has changed over the last 15 years !

And Barry Diller a former media executive  guessed that there would be some kind of technology convergence in consumer buying behavior. I liked the way CBS showed the QVC format which historically involved infomercials,call centers and computer screens. Add the Internet and you have the huge and growing IAC portfolio. You would have used at least some of the famous IAC brands like Expedia,Ticket Master if not many others.

I also  enjoyed the admission by Barry Diller and the clarification by his wife Diane von Furstenberg that he starts with only a fuzzy idea of where he is going to go. He "fakes it till he makes it" – I suppose all kinds of visioning is like that- you have to believe in something and see how you go, but keep going. In parting, Diller made a wonderful and thoughtful comparison between Google and IAC.While Google was a mega brand people didn’t know about IAC but if IAC became like Procter and Gamble ,which has so many famous brands – it would be great.I thought , this was a rather neat way of looking at a portfolio of Internet brands.

Implicit Assumption Test- IAT and our hidden biases

The Implicit Assumption Test from researchers at  universities including Harvard,Yale,Wisconsin is making news about something that we know but do not realize. According to their information page (as of 2007)   80% of the web visitors have negativity towards the elderly. As web users get older this should change! Interestingly, 75-80% of self identified whites or Asians  show an implicit preference for whites over blacks. Just count the relatively large number of white models in Asian TV advertising and you’ll know that this data is correct.

Having become an academic relatively recently and always trying to get through the academic publication process I can say that we may not like the test’s results but it is a pretty reliable test. It has to be if the authors have been publishing academic articles from the results going back to 1998. I thought this blog should weigh in on the validity of the test because there  is  some dispute in  blogosphere because probably the results tend to shock you.

Anyway the IAT is free, takes five minutes. It basically tries to classify various stuff into “good” and “bad”. Then it classifies images into European American and African American. Then it tries to figure out what racial type you tend to associate with “good” and what racial type you tend to associate with “bad” and whether you are biased towards one race or the other. The thing that surprised me the most was that only 17% test takers are really unbiased. But take the test- it’s worth your five minutes. The IAT is here.

About StratoServe.

Google Street Map and privacy concerns

Google Street Maps has been received with mixed responses. On one hand folks are furious about privacy issues, while others  hold that this is not really a problem. I think the truth is probably, somewhere in the middle. Privacy as it existed before the Internet is literally non-existent today. For example, you’ll be amazed by the number of "confidential- in company use only" presentations you would find on the web and the "for fee " services that will offer you all kinds of information. In fact, googling someone is standard practice before a business or even social meeting. Academics check out each other’s scholarly standing by a quick search on Google Scholar and act appropriately because Google Scholar tells you the academic pecking order, in no uncertain terms! But then, I am somewhat biased about the possibilities of the Internet. I am, perhaps overly, optimistic that more good than harm will come out of products like Google Street Maps. Given that everything is public, one needs to be comfortable with one’s behavior,actions and even intentions because all of these can be tracked and shared ,pretty easily. The other alternative is to appropriately change ones behavior,actions and intentions lest it show up on YouTube, complete with audio- which is worse that Google Street Maps!

So what is the big deal with “Sterling Service Contracts” ?

Well for one,  the new Sterling Service Contracts , gets linked to many of the categories that I blog about! And that is a lot of categories…

Some of the things that Sterling Service Contracts will do includes, and I quote from Sterling’s press release:

START QUOTE:

  • Storefront capabilities that provide customers and partners with a personalized and branded buying experience increasing loyalty.
  • Intelligent order orchestration that determines the most efficient and least costly location to fulfill an order.
  • A 7000+ member logistics network that reduces the cost of inbound and outbound shipments through optimization, automation, and collaboration with carriers.
  • Network-centric WMS that reduces inventory levels at each stocking location by managing inventory across all locations as a single inventory pool.
  • Supply Chain Visibility capabilities that balance supply and demand by collecting, summarizing and displaying inbound supply information in a usable, understandable and actionable format.

END QUOTE

Sterling is probably not the only supplier offering this bundle though Forrester Research does think that the product is a step closer to the "perfect order". What’s "perfect" about the concept and so fascinating is that it brings alive a lot of organizational theory that was developed for years and years before IT and the Internet made all this a reality.

John Seely Brown to join John Hagel at Deloitte Technology and Strategy Center

Just as things were slowing down for the summer I read the exciting news that John Seely Brown is joining John Hagel as Co-Chairman  at the Deloitte  and Touche Technology and Strategy Center.
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Readers of this blog might remember John Hagel ‘s great book  Net Gain which talked about communities in 1997, a full decade before communities on the web really started taking off for various business purposes including customer community, word-of-mouth, new product ideas and co-development of new products. Not to forget that between Hagel’s book and Web 2.0 we had the dot com meltdown and a phase where many seemed to doubt if the Internet was going to go anywhere.

But it is John Seely Brown to whom I owe an intellectual debt. It was during my PhD years in the late nineties that I was groping for theoretical work to ground my thesis on Global B2B innovation in what was a "round" vs today’s "flat" world. It was by chance that I read a reference to some of Seely Brown’s work with Paul Duguid which went on to give me a good foundation to develop my own ideas on collaborative learning and innovation. My own experience in high value packaging machine installations and servicing seemed to parallel the experiences of Julian Orr, an anthropologist at the Zerox center, then headed by Seely Brown. I  then went on to write several journal articles which presented my own extensions of collaborative "situated" learning popularized by John Seely Brown and his associates.

I am sure that John Seely Brown and John Hagel will do a great job at the new Center, particularly since they have been thinking of these issues decades ahead of the technology really becoming available. The question is : will Deloitte do a better job than Xerox in "absorbing"  and then "executing" these ideas ? I sincerely hope so…..

Skype in Salesforce.com

The news that Skype is available with Salesforce.com is interesting for two reasons. First, Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems can be introduced with or without ERP particularly if they are web based like salesforce.com. Second, innovators  who really use SFA will certainly try Skype particularly calling computer  to phone.  I use red italics for "really use" because there is large evidence that Sales Forces are wary of SFA adoption- but perhaps the Internet and easy applications and the benefits of collaboration might be helping the adoption of SFA along. I am sure that time will tell but going by some of the comments on this interesting development on the web, the jury is still out on how the Skype and Salesforce.com alliance will pan out.

Supplier Relationship Management

I guess it was my particular managerial experience with high value packaging lines involving major installation, servicing and material supply that made it natural for me to look at SRM and CRM as pretty obvious things to do even in the "round"  world ( as opposed to the flat world ). Frankly, as any system supplier of equipment that requires installation, service and consumable supplies will tell you – you need to have the appropriate multi-level deep customer relationships to make things work. Things become interesting , for the buyer, if it is not a system that the buyer buys but tries to aggregate components from different suppliers. (Hint:think of the time you had more than one contractor doing home improvements, at your home, simultaneously !!). Starting here, the buyer needs to become active in keeping up with multiple suppliers through appropriate Supplier Relationship Management (SRM).

A recent article in the Boston Herald makes the interesting point that while sourcing has developed into a fine art, supplier relationship management is evolving and is in the early stages. Naturally, with outsourcing on a global scale in multiple tasks  the need to pull together supplied services, components,products,ideas,feedback,intelligence from global suppliers is becoming really challenging.  Is it necessary to know what your suppliers are discovering ? You bet- because suppliers are operating at a point in your value chain where you are simply not there. To stay on top of your value chain you need to listen as closely to suppliers and you should be listening to your customers. An added advantage with suppliers is that the are generally more willing than your customers to follow reporting and metrics if you work to set them up at contract renewal  or start-up points. SRM systems are rapidly evolving to have an IT handle on the complex  global supply scenario that is becoming routine in organizations.The prospects of saving 20-30% of contracted work value is a very real incentive to accelerate to enhance organization wide SRM adoption.

SAP Sapphire 07 Atlanta- creating a platform and applications

These days , my organizational studies and interactions encourage me to think as to what would be the situation if every organization had every process completely captured on an ERP system that was web based. These include internal processes like production planning, procurement, manufacturing, accounting and finance, sales and distribution. Also could include external stakeholders like the supply chain, customers, shareholders. In such a perfect world , there would be no "transaction" cost and managers would focus on their particular area rather than just trying to figure out their own page and whether everyone else was on the same page. SAP has been trying to achieve this utopia for its clients over the years.Here is Hasso Plattner’s piece on communities from YouTube:

The reports from Sapphire 2007 at Atlanta indicate that the long years of hard work by SAP have started paying off ; and SAP has become a technology platform beyond just an application provider. Details of various proceedings of the conference appear here . Being a platform  is naturally much greater than being merely  an application provider  and combining applications with in-depth understanding of client businesses is the key to the success of SAP. As the report in Industry Week suggests, Coca Cola explained to Sapphire participants how their business works. With 1.3 billion units sold (per day) any simplification of Coca Cola’s processes just drives directly to savings and enhanced customer satisfaction with better service. Guess what ? my friends at Pepsi tell me that they have moved to SAP and undoubtedly would benefit from the experience of SAP in that industry. This way Coke and Pepsi can focus on developing interesting offerings like "Coke Zero" and "Tropicana Lite" – core to their business !

Globalization – the perennial China India question

Globalization as we treat it in textbooks and the classroom seems pretty exciting and don’t get me wrong- it is! But what amazes me is the wide mis-understanding among faculties, company executives and small business owners about what globalization offers as opportunity to the American enterprise. Let’s face it , notwithstanding every criticism lately in the world America and American brands are considered "cool" in every country of the world. Certainly in China and India.

Companies look at outsourcing only as cost reduction, China as a cheap manufacturing base and are generally paranoid about Intellectual property. But just imagine, if you are able to deploy a thousand trained folks to design and prototype stuff in India and China for the cost of a team of 100 what happens to your innovation cycle? It zooms ! That probably is great in defending intellectual property than constant paranoia as this WSJ article suggests. 

In a similar vein the opportunities in the Europe , Middle East and Africa can be tapped with a base in India and China. Frankly till we all start looking at the overall opportunity in globalization we are missing the potential for growth and market dominance.

Earth day and the supply chain

Today is Earth day and I found these great images on YouTube that make things look so cheerful. There is an increasing yearning among consumers to go green with 11% Americans considering themselves "green" and another  43%  who feel that they’ll be green within 5 years. Indeed, when you see consumers happily doing without plastic bags at the warehouses like BJ’s,Costco and Sam’s club things look good for the environment!Perhaps consumers need to "go green" when doing regular shopping as many in Australia and Europe, do.