Writing for fun and profit
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I like to write. That’s why this website is here. But I’ve also written fiction, songs, a play, and a couple of technical books.
Publishing is harder than writing, I find. My first book, Electronic CAD Frameworks, was published by Kluwer—now Springer—(it’s out of print now, alas). Since then I’ve used lulu.com , which offers an easy interface to self-publishing, and it’s free to publish (although you pay for the books).
Here are some links to books I’ve written:
- Electronic CAD Frameworks .— this book describes the core technologies involved in electronic design ...
The Art of Flows
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Writing is a powerful and well-tested marketing tool. The use of extended written materials is a key part of much technical marketing: white papers, brochures, documentation, and more. Creating a whole book to tell the story of a product or capability is less common, but no less valuable.
Over the past several months I’ve been co-authoring a book with Andrea Casotto, founder of Runtime Design Automation. It addresses technical strategies for the management of complex computational tasks that involve multiple jobs, with dependencies and pre-requisites. The management of these jobs is an important part of the design of software ...
Marketing with integrity
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I’ve spent years in the marketing business, working with companies large and small. I’ve been on the inside as a Vice President, and on the outside as an Executive Consultant.
There’s a key problem with a lot of marketing.
Integrity.
It’s too easy to get hung up on making your product look better than it is, in the hope that people will be fooled into buying it.
The issue is that marketing is not just about “putting lipstick on the pig”-or making things look good. It’s about negotiating a relationship of value between your ...
Differentiation is the key to selling in a tough economy
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Great products always have a market. The question is this: What’s the value proposition that makes sense in difficult times? If your product is all about quality, you have two advantages over lesser products:
1. Your product can enhance your customer’s brand
2. You can offer risk-reduction purchasing strategies to your customers.
Both of these differentiators depend on the quality of your product. If your offering is really well-designed, and it stands out from the crowd, you can offer your customer a way to differentiate, simply because they own and use your product. This applies to furniture, lighting ...
Segmentation and the power of focus
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The more companies I talk to, the more convinced I become that thinking clearly about the segments you serve is the key to effective marketing.
The value of segmentation is really that it causes you to be objective about the kinds of people who will find your products and services interesting. Objectivity includes understanding the positive and negative aspects of each segment’s needs, frame of reference, and belief system.
I find that belief-based segmentation is the most powerful: if you can accurately characterize the beliefs of your various segments, you can build value propositions that speak to those beliefs ...
Customer relationship innovation
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There are many ways to innovate, but one of the most reliable is in the customer relationship. It’s reliable because you can quickly measure the impact of changes in the way you manage the relationship with your customers. You don’t even have to have a brilliant idea—your customers will often provide it for you (if you ask!).
Nordstrom’s is a great example of a retailer that has achieved differentiation through a unique approach to their customer relationship. Not only do they establish a customer-centric approach to doing business, but they specifically empower their salespeople to go ...
Innovation is not optional
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Most people would agree that innovation is important. But not every company takes it seriously. Innovation is what keeps your business relevant as the needs of your customer change, and as your competition evolves.
It’s tempting to believe that in a cost-driven, mature market, efficiency is the key – that close management of costs and efficient and predictable processes are what makes the difference. But this is a mistake.
Of course, efficiency and cost management are part of every company’s operational plan, and in the environment where there’s not a lot of overall market growth, cost overruns can ...
Pragmatic steps to strategy development
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Strategy is about making informed choices with limited resources, in ways that strengthen your business. There’s no easy way to be sure that you have the right strategy, but there is a process that yields consistent results. In this post I’ll summarize a proven process for strategy development. Then I’ll describe each step in turn.
The seven key steps are these:
- Problem definition – what’s the scope of the strategy? Who is the end customer for the information? What are the success criteria?
- Environmental scan – get hold of every piece of information that’s easily available. Talk ...
Strategy: Making your recommendation
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Once your strategy hypothesis has been presented and validated, it’s time to get on to implementation. But implementation in any organization requires buy-in and understanding from a lot of people.
The recommendation phase is the process of establishing common understanding and buy-in, so that implementation can proceed.
The good news is that you have gone through a thorough process already, if you’ve followed the seven steps have a good audit trail of information and ideas all the way from the original problem definition, and you’ve also taken the time to keep others involved along the way. If ...
Strategy: Validation completes the picture
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A strategic hypothesis lays out your view of the market, the opportunity, the risks, and a prioritized set of options. Once subjected to internal review and discussion, there are bound to be a number of additional questions raised, and perhaps some preferences expressed.
The purpose of validation is to test the preferred options with friendly customers and internal stake-holders, and to find answers to the questions raised in the hypothesis review process.
Validation can be short or long, depending on the scope of the strategic leap proposed, and upon the style of the organization. I always try to keep the ...
