HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
New INC Magazine Blog Post by Kaplan Institute Exec Director Howard Tullman
Put Down
Your Ping Pong Paddle and Get Down to Business
The
pool party's over, too. As we head toward the next recession--and we are--play
at work is going to have to give way to work at work.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation
and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
We've reached the official end of the ping pong and pool period.
Couldn't come soon enough for me. Something just feels different these days and
maybe that's the need to hunker down a bit and take the task of "taking
care of business" a lot more seriously. Let's dial back leisure in
the office, lower the volume on the whining and worrying about hurt feelings,
and double down on sweat and toil. We've always called it "work" for
a reason and, while it can certainly be plenty stimulating and rewarding, work
is not intended to be all fun, all the time. Never was. There's still no
substitute for hard, purposeful work and no more likely path to eventual success.
Talent and creativity are great, and should certainly be encouraged, but effort
and execution are what really matter.
If those happy and halcyon days ever made sense, they're already
on their way to the dustbin, soon to be long gone, and utterly un-mourned by
the people trying to build real businesses. These aren't the frothy,
kombucha-and-beer times of yore anymore. Global competition is rising, a
recession is almost certainly on the horizon (it's only a question of
"when"), and when the market and the investors start seriously
keeping score, all the touchy-feely awards for "the very best place
in the whole wide world to work" ain't gonna matter much if your team
isn't monetizing your business and putting some
real numbers on the bottom line.
The thought of a bunch of clowns playing pong (analog or
throwback digital) in the middle of the day while other team members are
busting their butts trying to get a new software release out the door no longer
computes. Camaraderie is critical in any new business, but it's important to
make sure that it comes from the shared pride of completing what needs to get
done, not solely from Thursday night shots, smelly cigars and card games. That
also includes the pinball machines, foosball games, and the old pool table,
which is just as passé today as the phony masse shot that Matthew McConaughey
makes in the latest Lincoln Navigator ad. Time to pull the plug, people.
Real company cultures are built on respect, recognition and
well-earned rewards, not free food, laundry services and recreational
resources. Your customers don't really care about the perks, the toys, or the
cereal selections in your break room or any of the other lovely snack options.
When their system's not working, they want the best software engineer on the
case, not the guy who racked up the highest score playing pinball.
And, even more importantly, your best and most important
employees don't really care about all this crap, either. They're the ones who
are head-down and have no time to fool around. These rabbits are worth a dozen happy and
sensitive little turtles and pong players. Businesses rapidly become the
behaviors that they tolerate, and it only takes a few slackers and snowflakes
to suck the life, energy and momentum out of any startup. Part of the job is to
make sure that doesn't happen.
When people are struggling to answer too many incoming customer
calls or polishing a PowerPoint for an important funding pitch, or cold-calling
piles of prospects, it seems somewhere between petty and perilous to show up at
a critical meeting with blue cue chalk dust on your fingers. You don't
really want to be the office's social director and party person. The goal is to
be the "go-to" guy - not the mope
you'd probably have a drink with, but never count on for much of anything else.
Late night and "after hours" bonding activities might
still be okay, but what authentic entrepreneur has ever had regular office
hours to begin with? In the real world, you work 'til you're about to fall over
and then you go home so you can pick yourself up in the morning and do it all
over again. And you desperately hope that your family recognizes you when you
finally do get home.
If you want to build a serious business, that's the behavior you
want to model. That's what people inside and outside the business pick up on.
Passion and commitment. You want to build a team that finds its satisfaction in
achievements and accomplishments and not one that's fixated on freebies and
fresh fruit. If you have to bribe your people with goodies or otherwise
convince them to work hard and do their best, you've got the wrong people and
you're sending the wrong message.
It's all about revenues and results, and not refreshments and
recreation.
PUBLISHED
ON: FEB 12, 2019
Sunday, February 10, 2019
Bret Stephens The Progressive Assault on Israel
The
Progressive Assault on Israel
A
movement that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely deaf
when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence.
Opinion
Columnist
·
Feb. 8, 2019
It happened again last month in
Detroit. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators seized the stage of the National
L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force’s marquee conference, “Creating Change” and demanded a
boycott of Israel. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they
chanted — the tediously malign, thinly veiled call to end Israel as a Jewish
state.
They were met with sustained applause
by the audience at what is the largest annual conference
of L.G.B.T.Q. activists in the United States. Conference
organizers did nothing to stop the disruption or disavow the demonstrators.
For Tyler Gregory, neither the behavior
of the protesters nor the passivity of the organizers came as a surprise.
Gregory is executive director of A Wider Bridge, a
North American L.G.B.T.Q. organization that works to support Israel and its gay
community. In 2016, his group hosted a reception at the Task Force’s conference
in Chicago. The event was mobbed by some 200 aggressive demonstrators,
and Gregory and his audience had to barricade themselves in their room while
those outside were harassed.
“Whether
you believe in the concept of intersectionality is beside the point,” Gregory
told me recently, referring to the idea that the oppression of one
group is the oppression of all others. “If this is your value system, you are
not following it. As Jews we were denied our safe space. We were denied our
place in a movement that fights bigotry.”
Scenes
of the kind that played out at the L.G.B.T.Q. conferences — not to mention
college campuses across the United States — are familiar to anyone involved in
the politics of the American Jewish community. They have burst into wider
consciousness in recent months, thanks to revelations that Jewish organizers of
the 2017 Women’s March were deliberately sidelined,
excluded and attacked by some of its founders, at least one of
whom, activist Tamika Mallory, is an unapologetic admirer of
Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam’s unapologetically anti-Semitic leader.
They have also burst into Congress,
largely as a result of the election of Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib
of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Both women support boycotts of Israel.
Both have also written tweets with
distinctly anti-Semitic undertones.
Far from being reproached or condemned by their party, as Iowa’s Steve King was
by Republicans, they have become Democratic rock stars. (Omar, to her credit,
recanted her tweet; Tlaib did not.)
Progressives — including presidential
hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren — also united behind
Vermont’s Bernie Sanders in a failed bid to block a Senate bill, passed on
Tuesday, that includes an anti-B.D.S. measure prohibiting federal contracts
with businesses that boycott Israel, ostensibly on free-speech grounds. One
wonders how these same Democrats feel about, say, championing First Amendment
protections for bakers who refuse to make cakes for gay couples.
All of this is profoundly unsettling to
a Jewish community that has generally seen the Democratic Party as its
political home. That’s not because American Jews are unfamiliar with the
radical left’s militant hostility toward the Jewish state. That’s been true for
decades. Nor is it because American Jews are suddenly tilting right: Some 76
percent voted for Democrats in the midterms.
What’s
unsettling is that the far-left’s hostility is now being mainstreamed by the
not-so-far left. Anti-Zionism — that is, rejection not just of this or that
Israeli policy, but also of the idea of a Jewish state itself — is becoming a
respectable position among people who would never support the elimination of
any other country in any other circumstance. And it is churning up a new wave
of nakedly anti-Jewish bigotry in its wake, as when three women holding rainbow
flags embossed with a Star of David at the 2017 Chicago Dyke March were ejected
on grounds that the star was “a trigger.”
How did this happen?
The progressive answer is
straightforward: Israel and its supporters, they say, did this to themselves.
More than a half-century of occupation of Palestinian territories is a massive
injustice that fair-minded people can no longer ignore, especially given America’s
financial support for Israel. Continued settlement expansion in the West Bank
proves Israel has no interest in making peace on equitable terms. And endless
occupation makes Israel’s vaunted democracy less about Jewish
self-determination than it is about ethnic subjugation.
There’s more to the indictment, but
that’s the nub of it. It would be damning if it were true, or even half-true.
It’s not.
A few facts ought at least to stir the
thinking of those who subscribe to the progressive narrative. Israel's enemies
were committed to its destruction long before it occupied a single inch of Gaza
or the West Bank. In proportion to its
size, Israel has voluntarily relinquished more territory taken in war than any
state in the world. Israeli prime ministers offered a Palestinian state
in 2000 and 2008; they were refused both times. The government of
Ariel Sharon removed every Israeli settlement and soldier from
the Gaza Strip in 2005. The result of Israel’s withdrawal allowed Hamas to
seize power two years later and spark three wars, causing ordinary Israelis to
think twice about the wisdom of duplicating the experience in the West Bank.
Nearly 1,300 Israeli civilians have been killed in Palestinian terrorist attacks
in this century: That’s the proportional equivalent of about 16 Sept. 11’s in
the United States.
Also: If the Jewish state is really so
villainous, why doesn’t it behave more like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Russia’s
Vladimir Putin — both of whom, curiously, continue to have prominent sympathizers and apologists on
the anti-Israel left?
None of this is to embrace the “Likud
narrative” of the conflict, or support the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, or
reject the idea of Palestinian statehood, or suggest that Israel is above
criticism and reproach. For the record, I support a two-state solution, just as
I supported Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip when I was the editor of
The Jerusalem Post.
What it is to say is that
the Israel-Palestinian conflict is far more complicated than the
black-and-white picture drawn by Israel’s progressive critics. But the deeper
flaw in progressive thinking on Israel — the flaw that has resulted in this
efflorescence of bigotry — isn’t that it rests on a faulty factual foundation.
It’s that its core intellectual assumptions are wrong and rotten.
The
first assumption is that Israel’s choices toward the Palestinians aren’t
agonizingly hard (as they are for some of the reasons mentioned above), but
actually are quite easy — just a matter of stopping settlement construction,
reaching a reasonable settlement with the Palestinians, making peace, and
living relatively happily ever after. But this is a caricature, and it’s one
that quickly descends to calumny: That is, the idea that Israel’s failure to
make the “right” choice is proof of its boundless greed for Palestinian land
and wicked indifference to their plight.
Next is the belief that anti-Zionism is
a legitimate political position, and not another form of prejudice.
It is one thing to argue, in the moot
court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being, at
least not where it is now. It is also fair to say that there is much to dislike
about Israel’s current leadership, just as there’s much not to like about
America’s. But nobody claims the election of Donald Trump makes America an
illegitimate state.
Israel is now the home of nearly nine
million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli
as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less
than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those
who cherish it, with no real thought of what would likely happen to the
dispossessed. Do progressives expect the rights of Jews to be protected should
Hamas someday assume the leadership of a reconstituted “Palestine”?
Then there’s the astounding view that
anti-Zionism bears only a tangential relationship to anti-Semitism. Hatred of
Jews is a shape-shifting phenomenon that historically has melded with the
prejudices of the time in order to gain greater political currency. Jews have
been hated for reasons of religion, race, lack of national attachments, and now
an excess of national attachment. The arguments for hating Jews vary; the
target of the hatred tragically remains the same.
Of course, it’s theoretically possible
to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism, just as it’s theoretically
possible to distinguish segregationism from racism. But the striking feature of
anti-Zionist rhetoric is how broadly it overlaps with traditionally
anti-Semitic tropes.
To say, as progressives sometimes do,
that Jews are “colonizers” in
Israel is anti-Semitic because it advances the lie that there is no ancestral
or historic Jewish tie to the land. To claim that Israel is committing genocide in
Gaza, when manifestly it is not, is anti-Semitic because it’s an attempt to
Nazify the Jewish state. To insist that the only state in the
world that has forfeited the moral right to
exist just happens to be the Jewish state is anti-Semitic, too: Are Israel’s
purported crimes really worse than those of, say, Zimbabwe or China, whose rights
to exist are never called into question?
But
the most toxic assumption is that Jews, whether in Israel or the U.S., can
never really be thought of as victims or even as a minority because they are
white, wealthy, powerful and “privileged.” This relies on a simplistic concept
of power that collapses on a moment’s inspection.
Jews in Germany were economically and
even politically powerful in the 1920s. And then they were in Buchenwald.
Israel appears powerful vis-Ã -vis the Palestinians, but considerably less so in
the context of a broader Middle East saturated with genocidal
anti-Semitism. American Jews are comparatively wealthy. But wealth
without political power, as Hannah Arendt understood, is a recipe for hatred.
The Jews of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh are almost surely
“privileged” according to various socio-economic measures. But privilege didn’t
save the congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue last year.
Nor can the racial politics of the
United States or any other country be projected onto the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, as some have desperately sought to do. Nearly half of all Jewish
Israelis have Middle Eastern roots; some, in fact, are black. Martin
Luther King Jr. preached nonviolent resistance; Yasir Arafat practiced terrorism.
The civil rights movement was about getting America to live up its founding
ideals; anti-Zionism is about destroying Israel’s founding ideals.
As
for the oft-cited apartheid analogy, black South Africans did not have a place
in the old regime’s Parliament, as Israeli Arabs have in the Knesset; nor were
they admitted to white universities, as Israeli Arabs are to Israeli
universities. Israel can do more to advance the rights of its Arab citizens
(just as the United States, France, Britain and other countries can for their
own minorities). And Israel can also do more to ease the lives of Palestinians
who are not citizens. But the comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa is
unfair to the former and an insult to the victims of the latter.
None of this should be hard for most
progressives to understand. Indeed, progressives have no trouble spotting
anti-Semitism when it emanates from the political right — the effigies of
George Soros, the attacks on “globalists” with names like Blankfein and Yellen,
the social media memes borrowed from neo-Nazis. Yet it seems that a movement
that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely
deaf when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence. And
even when it does hear it, it doesn’t have the sense to banish it.
This
is dangerous, and not just to Israeli and American Jews. In Britain, the Labour
Party is now led by a militant anti-Zionist whose deep-seated
anti-Semitism occasionally slips out. And yet Jeremy Corbyn
remains in firm control of his party, is reshaping it in his image and may yet
become Britain’s next prime minister.
The prospect of Corbynism coming to
America may still seem remote. But that can’t be counted on in an era of sharp
and rapid polarization. When New York Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted recently
about the “honor” of her “lovely and wide-reaching conversation” with Corbyn,
it was a sign either of indifference or purposeful alliance that ought to
profoundly alarm every sensible Democrat worried about the ideological
direction and moral health of the party. Now is the time for party leaders to
make sure that doesn’t happen by insisting that anti-Zionism has no more a
place in the Democratic fold than any form of prejudice.
American democracy is already in
jeopardy for having one party that has surrendered to the politics of ethnic
bigotry disguised as social concern. To have two such parties would be fatal.
Saturday, February 09, 2019
Thursday, February 07, 2019
Tuesday, February 05, 2019
New INC Magazine Blog Post by Kaplan Institute Exec Director Howard Tullman
Follow These
Three Rules to Make Sure You Retain the Right Customers
Because
if you end up the wrong ones, they'll kill your business.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation
and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
Ideas
for new businesses are a dime a dozen; they change about as often as the
weather and just as radically. If you thought fashion was fickle, it's got
nothing on A.I., blockchain, or cannabis. They're the ABCs of awesomeness, but
only for a moment. In today's startup world, you're impossibly hot one day and
a glacier the next. Nothing's "the future" for long; the present has
never felt more temporary. The trick is to catch the gravy train and hop aboard
before it leaves the station. The market doesn't care that much where things
are headed-- up or down doesn't really matter. For the money men, there's a
train every day, leaving either way and a whole world of places to go.
Funding
for new ventures isn't much different. It comes and goes. Sometimes it's
fast and easy and appears abundant and sometimes it's flat-out impossible to
raise another nickel just when you need it the most. A few bucks to keep the
doors open and the story alive is harder to come by than a fortune when things
are fat and happy. The money is always there, but the pockets and the velocity
of movement change, and you quickly learn that money doesn't really care who
makes it. The trick with any early-stage investment is to take the
cash when it's offered, take as much as you possibly can, and don't be a pig on valuation. A part of
somethin' is always better than a whole lot of nothin'.
If and
when you make it and until you're up for sale, the interim valuations and all
that fancy paper money don't mean squat. That's just a bunch of people living
in a filtered bubble, talking to themselves, trying to make themselves feel
better and smarter than the rest. But if you blow the chance to build a war
chest before the war begins, your business could be over before you really get
going. There's only one fatal error a startup can
make: running out of money. Everything else (albeit
over time) can pretty much be fixed with a check.
Teams
and new technologies are going to be built as you evolve and hopefully, they
both get better over time. There's always a risk that some
competitor's new tech will jump over yours and technology
teams - especially on the coasts - aren't exactly known for their
longevity. But the one thing that no startup can ever succeed
without - the absolute sine qua non for
survival - is customers. And not just any assortment of purchasers.
If you don't have a critical mass of the correct customers, you don't
have a viable company or much of a chance to succeed.
Too
many startups make the mistake of taking all comers. They think that any
customer is better than none. They don't understand that it's
important, right from the start, to focus on attracting, connecting with, and
above all retaining the right customers. You need to get it right at the
beginning - before you think about scaling and growing the
business - because you're trying to build a replicable model that makes
sense and profits in the long term. Every business with a brain is focused on
the lifetime value of customers and not on the quick hits and the inflated
customer acquisition numbers that mean nothing when they melt away after the
incentives, discounts, bundles and other props disappear. Businesses succeed
because they give their customers long-term value and benefits, not short-term
price breaks.
But
they also need to have a business model that can successfully serve a growing
number of customers in a consistent and satisfactory manner. If only the CEO or a genius can sell your product or service; if it's so bespoke and
personal that you'll go bankrupt trying to build a base of happy clients; or if
the costs of delivery consistently exceed the price anyone's willing to pay,
you're never gonna make it up in volume. And, as often as not, the customers
you think you have aren't going to stick around either. Remember that,
ultimately, good business isn't about what you're selling; it's about what the
customers are buying.
Churn
is beyond costly, it's killed more companies than just about anything else you
can imagine. You waste enormous amounts of time and money on people who don't
matter; your own employees get confused, depressed, and start to take it
personally; and you find that you're trying to hold on to hopeless causes or
convince customers of something they didn't buy into in the first place. It's
simply too hard and not worth the effort or the price you end up paying.
The key
to corralling the right customers from Day One, to making that sure you get off
to a strong start on an aggressive retention program, is a 3-step process: (1)
understanding the customer attachment characteristics of your particular
industry; (2) appreciating your own customers' specific kinds of
connection to your product or service; and (3) making sure that your own
actions continually strengthen and reinforce your relationship with each
individual customer. If you don't understand and focus on the unique nature of
the customer engagement that you're trying to build, you can waste a tremendous
amount of time and money paying attention to the wrong behavior drivers and
levers. This is a complicated area, but here are a few headlines to get you
thinking about how these buckets make sense for your own business.
1. Industry-Specific
Customer Attachment Characteristics
When we
look at different industries, there are typically a few aspects of the
customers' behavior that can significantly influence the degree of attachment
each customer has: (a) how often are the purchases made; (b) how frequent are
the other interactions with the customer; (c) how important is the
purchase - financially and emotionally -to the customer; (d) how
much differentiation is there in competing market offerings; and (e) how easy
is it for customers to switch to another vendor. Each of these
attributes impacts your approach and strategy.
2. Customers' Connections
to Your Offering
When
you look more closely and try to get inside each customer's head and their
connection to your product or service, there are also distinct categories to
consider. The best and most loyal customers have an emotional connection.
They're convinced believers who know they made the right choice and they're the
most likely to stick around. The next group is basically too lazy and
comfortable to look elsewhere-- unless you give them some reason to move. You
don't want to take them for granted, but in most cases, they're not a big risk.
Cable subscribers are an interesting subset of this group. Cable TV today is
what we would call a "grudge buy." You're not that happy and you
feel that you're being ripped off, but for now it's too much trouble to
switch. But switching costs are constantly shrinking, which is why
the fat and happy days of cable are coming to an end. Once the dam
bursts, the flood of cable-cutters will be unstoppable. Another, even bigger
challenge are the "smart" customers who bought your product
or service because it made sense at the time, but who are always scanning the
horizon to make sure their choice still makes the most sense for them from a
price and performance standpoint. These are the most critical folks to hang on
to. And they require the most attention and service. Finally, there's a cohort
of customers on the bubble because of changes in their lifestyle or
circumstances, which you can't control or avoid. You can, however, anticipate
their behavior and head them off before they leave.
3. Steps
to Lock In and Increase Retention
As you
might imagine, the way you address the concerns regarding each customer cohort
is going to differ dramatically-- and that's probably a lengthy subject for
another post. But in the simplest terms, you need to double down on what's
driving the desired behavior. So, for emotional customers, it's all about
highlighting how special their choices have been and how they're part of an
elite and highly-selective group. For inertial customers who are content to be
left alone as long as things are working, it's all about friction-free
delivery, ease of use, and automation to speed up the pace of any necessary
interactions. For your smartest and most analytical customers, you've got to
keep raising the bar, improving your products and services, and communicating
constantly, but painlessly with them so you're always "top of
mind" when they're ready to buy or reassess. And finally, for
the customers who are aging, starting families, moving to the suburbs,
etc., if you're smart, you make it your business to know who they are and where
they're headed. Your job is to get there before they do with new offerings that
meet their changed demands and desires.
If you
do this all right, you end up in a wonderful place where you get to sell through your
customers rather than to them. Because they become an army of
enthusiastic and authentic endorsers as well as increasingly valuable and loyal
for a lifetime.
PUBLISHED
ON: FEB 5, 2019
Monday, February 04, 2019
Saturday, February 02, 2019
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)