Last Friday's Wall Street Journal's book review section contained a nearly-hidden piece of interest. The book is entitled, "Change By Design," by Tim Brown. Mr. Brown is the CEO of IDEO, a design consultancy.
As early as perhaps four years ago, I began to take a stronger interest in the MFA degree than an MBA. There was, I believe, even an HBR article extolling the value of a Master of Fine Arts degree for its integration of design as an inherent value-adding component of products.
It is very much along this line that Mr. Brown's book is reviewed. Rather than treat product design as an afterthought, it is, with the aid of firms like IDEO, being used in the early stages of concept and product design to add features and functionality.
The review mentions a technique used by IDEO which is a direct implementation of a very old (c1975) marketing concept called Tauber's Problem Inventory Analysis. The consultancy shot video of a mock patient entering an ER facility to identify problems confronting the patient not currently addressed.
Often, breakthrough products and services are identified by this type of analysis where focus groups fail. Perhaps the most famous example of such a difference in approach is that of air travel.
It's a commonly-held tenet that air travel could never have been produced by focus groups, because it was a solution that simply did not yet exist in any form. But, as a problem analysis, the characteristics of air travel as a solution could easily be seen to fit various business problems.
As with many good management practices, the irony and disappointment is that they are the exception, rather than the norm. Otherwise, Mr. Brown wouldn't need to write a book about it, would he?
But, then, it's these type of exceptions that drive some companies to deliver consistently-superior total return performance, while most do not.
Showing posts with label Business Schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business Schools. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
NBC's New Ad Sales Approach: What's Old Is New Again
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal carried an interesting piece in the Media&Marketing Section regarding advertising.
The piece, by Brian Steinberg, featured the changes in ad marketing and sales being wrought by NBC's new ad-sales chief, Michael Pilot, late of GE's Commercial Finance Group.
Apparently, Pilot has "a history of using sophisticated analytical methods to generate sales growth."
Twenty-odd years ago, when I was a graduate student at Penn, we learned these sorts of techniques from the then-resident expert Professors, Len Lodish and Jerry Wind. The use of prior sales data from which to build models of most-likely buyers, and more productive sales and marketing efforts, is hardly new.
I think it's wonderful that NBC is making use of someone with Mr. Pilot's tendencies. Beyond his focus on more analytical sales planning, Pilot is also redesigning the entire sales and fulfillment process, something consultants like my old outfit, Andersen cum Accenture, likes to call 'business process re-engineering,' to be more efficient, automated, and electronic.
All this is, frankly, pretty obvious, low-hanging fruit. The question you should have, that I have, is, what took GE, the parent of NBC Universal, so long to effect this change? As I've written in prior posts, GE is too large to be effectively managed anymore for consistently superior total returns to shareholders. This is an excellent example of why I believe this to be so.
How does one justify viewing GE as either visionary, or well-led, if something so large and prominent as the ad sales function in one of its six business groups, is so hopelessly antiquated and poorly-managed?
I think this also speaks to the reality of business education in America, and, possibly, the world. Michael Pilot is most certainly not the only business school graduate to have learned these techniques over the past thirty years. Where are all the other graduates with similar knowledge, and their successful sales management changes?
Where does all that learning, knowledge and skill go? Thousands of graduates from the top ten or so US business schools in the past few decades, and when one of them actually implements a decades-old idea, it's considered breaking news in the Wall Street Journal.
How sad.
The piece, by Brian Steinberg, featured the changes in ad marketing and sales being wrought by NBC's new ad-sales chief, Michael Pilot, late of GE's Commercial Finance Group.
Apparently, Pilot has "a history of using sophisticated analytical methods to generate sales growth."
Twenty-odd years ago, when I was a graduate student at Penn, we learned these sorts of techniques from the then-resident expert Professors, Len Lodish and Jerry Wind. The use of prior sales data from which to build models of most-likely buyers, and more productive sales and marketing efforts, is hardly new.
I think it's wonderful that NBC is making use of someone with Mr. Pilot's tendencies. Beyond his focus on more analytical sales planning, Pilot is also redesigning the entire sales and fulfillment process, something consultants like my old outfit, Andersen cum Accenture, likes to call 'business process re-engineering,' to be more efficient, automated, and electronic.
All this is, frankly, pretty obvious, low-hanging fruit. The question you should have, that I have, is, what took GE, the parent of NBC Universal, so long to effect this change? As I've written in prior posts, GE is too large to be effectively managed anymore for consistently superior total returns to shareholders. This is an excellent example of why I believe this to be so.
How does one justify viewing GE as either visionary, or well-led, if something so large and prominent as the ad sales function in one of its six business groups, is so hopelessly antiquated and poorly-managed?
I think this also speaks to the reality of business education in America, and, possibly, the world. Michael Pilot is most certainly not the only business school graduate to have learned these techniques over the past thirty years. Where are all the other graduates with similar knowledge, and their successful sales management changes?
Where does all that learning, knowledge and skill go? Thousands of graduates from the top ten or so US business schools in the past few decades, and when one of them actually implements a decades-old idea, it's considered breaking news in the Wall Street Journal.
How sad.
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