First Serve Strategies

Archive for June, 2009

As the Executive Director for the Laurence A. Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship at Drexel University, I incorporate our guiding principles of “always rich content” and “excellence in everything we do” into all of our events. At our recent annual entrepreneurship conference I was struck by a recurring thought. As one might expect, a significant amount of research, thought, planning and coordination took place long before the day of the event to make it successful, but that is not the theme that kept playing through my mind throughout the day.

Like the tune that stays in your head, long after the song has been heard, the concept of transitions kept tickling my gray matter. As important as the registration process, the audience, the panel, the presentations, and the food, the transitions were what brought it all together. The transitions were an important differentiator.

This should not come as a surprise. For three decades I have been heavily involved in strategic management. Strategic management inevitably results in change—sometimes very significant. Change causes stress for everyone in the organization, and those not involved with architecting the change feel the stress more intensely. When planning, communicating and implementing change it is important to focus on the transitions.

Television networks carefully manage the placement of their commercials to entice the viewer to stay tuned for the next show. With the advent of technology and the increase in choices the phrase, “don’t touch that dial” is no longer sufficient to hold the viewers attention.

Successful novelists focus on the transitions from the end of one chapter to the beginning of the next. A fluid transition entices the reader to rush headlong into the next chapter. The objective is to ensure that the reader “can’t put it down.”

Change requires everyone to move from one chapter in the organization’s life to the next. In order to manage it successfully, stakeholders need to be motivated to rush forward into that next chapter with enthusiasm. If you do not want them to “put the book down” focus on making the transitions as fluid as possible.

©Mark P. Loschiavo

This often misquoted line from the movie Field of Dreams (“Build it and he will come”) has led to the demise of more than a few entrepreneurial ventures. The sentiment is actually much older than the movie. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who first said, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”

Any high school graduate in the U.S. should remember Emerson as a famous American essayist, philosopher and poet. Few people, however, realize that in his early career he co-founded and ran a school for young ladies. That said, he might have made a dismal entrepreneur in today’s world with his “mousetrap” philosophy. With today’s increasingly crowded markets it takes much more than a better mousetrap to get customers to beat a path to our door. With so many products, options and features, just creating customer awareness of your product can be a daunting task.

Following the dot com bust, the idea of “eyeballs” and “clicks” as a barometer of company valuation became laughable to many. In retrospect the concept has merit in one particular arena.

Take a moment to reflect on how villages, towns and cities form. It always starts with a group of settlers, brought together in community based on location. Location may be decided based on trading routes, access to natural resources or common interest. Once the community is in place commerce ensues. Said differently, where there is a common community, there is a place and an opportunity for entrepreneurial ventures to flourish. If we transpose this same concept to the electronic age, we start to see the value of “eyeballs” and “clicks”.

A recent article in CNNMoney.com entitled LinkedIn’s startup story: Connecting the business world, Ellen Lee describes how LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman built his company around the single goal of getting to 1 million members. “I’m a huge believer in getting a million people, getting them engaged, and then building a business model on top of that,” he says. Forty-one million members later that is exactly what he has done. With the community in place, the opportunity for commerce ensued, and entrepreneurship flourished.

The difference between online communities and physical communities is that online communities are typically built around a common interest. In the case of LinkedIn the common interest is professionals wanting to connect. Facebook, on the other hand was based on a particular demographic—college students. One could argue that Twitter is based more on a specific psychographic.

So, the next time you are tempted to scoff at a business idea based on a business model that is built around “eyeballs”, you might want to first ask, “will these eyeballs lead to a community of people with a common interest, which once in place, provides an opportunity for entrepreneurial ventures?”

©Mark P. Loschiavo