Sooner or later all good things come to an end. Winners stumble, the mighty are fallen. People are at the top of their game for only so long. Companies that are the biggest, bestest, fastest growing one year are in the toilet the next.

Literature is filled with stories that teach this lesson. Shakespearean tragedies like Lear and Macbeth detail the challenges faced by those in positions of power.

In contrast, the message of the motivational speakers and books in the modern business world teach how to win, win, win. It’s all upside, baby. They ignore, or minimize, the downside.

So it is refreshing to read Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing–Yours Doesn’t Have To by Matthew Olsen and Derek van Bever. This book examines the fundamental reasons why revenue growth often stalls in successful companies. They identify four main reasons:

1. “Premium position captivity” - when a market leader fails to respond to a low-cost competitor.
2. “Innovation Management Breakdown” - where new product development fails to deliver an ROI.
3. “Premature core abandonment” - where growth opportunities in the core franchise are not exploited or new competitive challenges are ignored.
4. “Talent bench shortfall” - where a company withers due to a lack of leaders and staff able to execute strategy.

It’s interesting to review the history Silicon Valley companies and spot candidates for each of these mistakes. I would suggest that, in turn, we can see Sun Microsystems’s failure to anticipate the effect of Linux (#1); Xerox PARC’s famous inability to capitalize on everything from the mouse to the GUI (#2); MicroPro’s failure to hold on to the WordStar franchise in the 1980’s (#3); HP’s decision to go outside the company for the last two CEO’s (#4). In the latter case it can be argued that the stall resulting from the actions of the first candidate has been amply rectified by the actions of the second. The company Board learned from their mistakes.

(Full disclosure: I have not worked for Xerox PARC; at the others I had a ringside seat.)

What’s fascinating to consider are some of Olsen & van Bever’s prescriptions to avoid these all-to-common errors. These include:

• Being willing to review “belief’s that are so obvious and accepted that it is no longer politic to debate them.” Something most business cultures are loath to do.
• Writing a “pre-mortem analysis” - a newspaper account five years in the future describing why the company succeeded, and another account detailing why it failed. Not a prescribed activity by the power-of-positive-thinking brigade.
• Setting up a high-level “Shadow Cabinet” to discuss alternatives to current strategy and look for red flag indicators.

These are challenging ideas. One wonders if the mainstream American attitude of winning at all costs can stomach the process. In many organizations it’s considered career suicide to point out when the Emperor has no clothes. Think the DoD and Department of State. Likewise, East Coast financial institutions at the core of the current credit market melt-down seemed to lack anyone with this ability. They don’t hand out no stinkin’ bonus packages down on Wall Street for pointing out how things could go pear shaped. But at least they have the option to short the future and make a dime in the process.

Fortunately, it’s more in the nature of Silicon Valley to encourage and reward disruptive innovation. Out here, companies don’t stall as much as crash and burn. Out of the ashes, new ones are built. In the current wave of consolidations around the high-tech landscape there’s plenty of people making a good living catching the guys who are in stall mode and revving up the engines. In doing this, they often implement many of the solutions Olsen and van Bever proscribe: reviewing core assumptions; testing alternatives; scenario planning; zero-sum budgeting.

Driven by the relentless pace of technological change, business models learn from failure and reinvent. This is the competitive advantage of Silicon Valley.

I took time out this afternoon from my overflowing email inbox, endless string of to-do’s and overwhelming number of projects, to sneak into a Senior Leadership seminar at Hewlett-Packard. Since I’m neither senior (well, not in the terms the organization uses that term) nor a leader, I was flying under the radar. But it was a risk well-worth taking.

The speaker was best selling author and personal productivity guru, David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

Allen spoke for 90 minutes about the powerful methods he has created to vastly increase personal organization, efficiency and ways to achieve creative results. It was apparent that he is a masterful professional speaker in his own right, as well as an author and executive coach. Some of my favorite quotes from his talk:

• Good executives are like Teflon - nothing should stick to them. But it’s apparent in most organizations that the boss is the bottleneck.
• Stuff should not lie fallow in the upper levels of an organization until the heat is on. Then it spews through three levels of the organization creating stress and unreasonable deadlines for everyone. Managers should not let things blow up, they should take action when things first show up.
• To sit there and have the same thought twice is not productive.

I was curious if the systems Allen teaches are as applicable to entrepreneurs and individual contributors as they are to managers in large organizations. To hear what he told me about this, click on the podcast icon below.

 

 Interview: David Allen [8:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the five themes of newly re-branded HP Labs is ‘content transformation’ - digitizing analog content from books and other printed matter into files stored on computers. Then transferring these digital files between devices (laptop, Kindle, iPAQ, iPod) and, finally, transforming the digital files (documents, photos) back to analog via digital printing technology.

Sounds marvelous. What’s not to like?

Well, the hubris of the high-tech industry is exposed by a telling comment in a book review in this weekend’s Financial Times. Lavinia Greenlaw, in reviewing The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, discusses the joy of “tumbling over authors” in libraries. The great libraries are, barring disaster such as fire (as famously happened at Alexandria), places where books endure for centuries. This has not been so with digitized content. Manguel notes:

In 1986, the BBC created a multimedia edition of the Domesday Book that is now unreadable as the technology with which it was made is obsolete. The actual book, almost 1,000 years old, is still perfectly legible.

Moreover, the Web, in contrast to physical libraries, delivers ephemera; 70% of its communications are destroyed after four months. “On the Web, where all texts are equal and alike in form, they become nothing but phantom text and photographic image.”

It’s been noted that the world will produce more content in the next five years than in all recorded history to date. Are we any the wiser for the flood of emails, instant messages, structured and unstructured data that this represents? Are we capable of absorbing the relevance of this digitized distraction?

The challenge for those who will provision the virtual libraries of the future, which could easily contain every book ever published for instant download and printing on demand, will be to ensure that the storage is as timeless as the shelves of the great libraries of history. No small feat in a world where uncertain supplies of energy power the vast datacenters where these digital records will be archived.

I’ve noted before that there are precious few women engineers in most American companies. This, despite women being in a majority on campuses, as they beat out their male counterparts in the increasingly competitive college admissions process. Indeed, women are substantially represented on the lower rungs of the career ladder in technical and engineering departments.

But the story changes as they reach their mid- to late-thirties. Over half of all women voluntarily quit their jobs. What gives?

Monday’s Financial Times has a detailed analysis by Columbia University economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett who identifies five factors forcing out female engineers:

1. Many are turned off by male behavior. A reported 63% of women in science and engineering experience sexual harassment.

2. Women feel isolated.

3. Many lack role models and no-one to mentor their career progression.

4. They prefer not to embrace risk-taking career gambles.

5. Finally, they are caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to maintaining 70+ hour work weeks AND managing child and elder care.

Hewlett offers some sound advice for companies who wish to maintain their pool of qualified female engineers and scientists past their 30’s. Failure to do so, she points out, is a national issue:

“In the US alone, reducing female attrition by one-quarter would add 220,000 qualified people to the science, engineering and technology labour pool.”

Kudos to John Kinde for a couple of full reports on the National Speakers Association (NSA) Presentation and Performance Lab which took place over the weekend in Las Vegas.

His report on day one of the conference shares a tip from keynote speaker Giovanni Livera useful for both speakers and speech writers:

…a storyboarding technique using colored Post-It Notes to visually see the flow of audience-impact-moments in your speech (color-coding each type of speech segment; stories from the heart, audience participation, music, etc. Pick categories most relevant to the texture of your speech.)

His second report covers the last two days of the event. Among the dozens of ‘keepers’ John records are many of equal value to speakers and writers:

• Make your spoken word imaginative and more precise.
• When you write a speech: Write it. Speak it. Write it. Speak it.
• Your job as a storyteller is to be an observer.
• Stories are not complicated. They are simple…but difficult to create.
• Transcribe your talk and then edit to eliminate the unnecessary words.

Thanks to John, this was one time when what happened in Las Vegas did not stay in Las Vegas.

One of the highlights of the Press Conference held at Hewlett-Packard earlier this month was the premier of a video showcasing the latest innovations from HP Labs.

The video features some of the 600+ scientists and engineers from around the world who work at Labs explaining their research in nanotechnology, sustainability, predicting the behavior of crowds, context aware computing and more. But this is not just a dry ‘talking heads’ film. The video uses creative animations to make each invention come alive. The researchers show what inspires them and explain how they turn their dreams into reality.

My favorite segment is Philip Stenton’s stunning demonstration of Mediascapes. This context-aware solution transforms the quotidian into the phantasmagorical. He illustrates how the technology is “like rolling out a digital carpet on a physical landscape” as the downtown street around him morphs into a medieval castle with fire breathing dragons. Gamers, eat your hearts out! Philip then shows how the same technology can be used in the business world as he uses Mediascapes ‘X-Ray Vision’ capability to uncover wiring schematics buried behind walls and conduits beneath the city streets. Coming soon to a city maintenance department near you?

I was also fascinated by Andrew Bowell’s explanation of BookPrep digitization which takes print-on-demand to a whole new level. This makes it possible to bring back into print every book ever printed. The possibilities for people to build profitable small businesses catering to niche markets with customized reprints of books are endless. Mash-ups of recipe books (pun intended) are first out of the chute at the Foodsville community portal.

The video lasts just under seven minutes. Take the time to witness state-of-art in high tech research profiled in a state-of-the-art video. Click the play button below.

In addition to the video of Shane Robison, Foremski’s blog has a longer clip of Head of Marketing Michael Mendenhall, Labs Director Prith Banerjee and CEO Mark Hurd discussing the new blueprint for R&D in the Labs:

Silicon Valley watcher Tom Foremski (a former FT columnist) brought a video camera to last Thursday’s HP Labs launch and posted a clip of Chief Strategy Officer Shane Robison discussing HP’s strategy. Says Foremski:

This is one of the most lucid accounts of HP’s strategy that I’ve come across.

Watch the YouTube video and see what you think:

E Pluribus Unum - Out of One, Many
HP Labs Pluribus - Out of Many projectors, One super-screen

Super-bright, large-scale, and very high-resolution digital projectors are indispensable tools of modern communication. They help CEOs wow audiences of analysts. They make rock concerts intimate. They turn computer gaming into a spectator sport. And they can make digital cinema an instant reality.

They are also very expensive. Prices for high-end projectors run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which keeps these devices from being widely used.

HP Labs’ Nelson Chang and Niranjan Damera-Venkata had a hunch they could make a much cheaper projection system by combining the outputs of several smaller projectors to create a single, high-quality image. They work in the Multimedia Interaction and Understanding Lab in Palo Alto on a project code-named Pluribus.

Seeing Pluribus in action, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the huge, crystal-clear picture it creates. Hook a 16-foot screen up to a game of Madden NFL Football, for example, and the players are life-size - putting you front row and center at the same scale as the real thing.
Although Pluribus looks great, its true appeal lies in the cost savings it offers anyone in the business of projecting large images. How so? For example, Pluribus can combine ten off-the-shelf projectors costing $1,000 each to project an image as bright and sharp as that created by a single high-grade projector costing $100,000.

Once this technology reaches your local Best Buy it will cause the prices of what is possible with high-end home theatre to be reset to a new price-point. You’ll just have to be patient. Hear Nelson and Niranjan discuss their work in the podcast.

 

 Pluribus - Video Projection on Steroids [4:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Bernardo Huberman is one of only four Senior Fellows at HP Labs - the most distinguished technologists in the company. He runs the Social Computing Lab. His research focus is on the behavior of millions of people using the internet and how this can be analyzed and predicted. He is recognized around the world as an authority on how people communicate and collaborate on the Internet. His lab has recently developed Cloudprint, which lets you store documents in the cloud so you can retrieve and print them on any printer using a mobile phone.

One amusing way of illustrating his research in everyday terms is the choices people make when they place bets. Using the patters of behavior that the bookmakers need to understand to make a living, he looks at predictions we can make in corporate purchasing departments and other business settings.

To hear Bernardo’s remarks click on the podcast icon below.

 

 Bernardo Huberman - Social Computing [3:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download