one result is here

WebWorker Daily has two recent posts about how the internet is leading to many new ways of making money (a living?) through your browser. I can’t help but believe that they will have an endless stream of new pockets of opportunity to write about for years to come as the corporate value chain continues to offer APIs at different points in the chain for third parties to offer professional services through their browsers. The posts:

• 5 New Jobs of the Web 2.0 Generation

• 10 New Ways to Make Money Online

From a business perspective, how can you open up your value chain to third parties (via browsers) so that skilled individuals can contribute to your business on a full or part time basis? There are many great opportunities to extend and enhance your workforce!

We all have goals for thinks that we need to get done. When was the last time that you had a goal to undue something? If you are not careful (and even if you are) activities build up, particularly as your company grows and time moves on, which raises your level of complexity and lowers your level of productivity.

Think about it. If you have ever tried to stop eating, stop smoking, or stop drinking, you understand how difficult it is to UNdo your personal habits. Businesses habits are similar, as most activities get started and then have a particular inertia to them. Most businesses don’t keep track of all their cumulative activities…much, much more often they focus on what they should do in addition to what they are currently doing.

It is much harder to stop doing something than to start doing something when it comes to business process, as employees get a “this is how we do things” mindset and they have a need to feel that the things that they are doing are valuable to the business (which leads them to have a high perceived value of the lower value activities)….net, net it is extremely difficult to UNdo things!

The only management systems that most companies have that help to manage the UNdoing of things is cost budgeting systems, but most emerging growth companies are not very sophisticated with this type of management AND very very few management teams budget from a zero-base (their starting point is past activities).

So, how do you manage to get things Undone? There are only two management approaches that I have seen work:

• The best approach is when you can zero-base activities relatively frequently and be absolutely clear on what your people are working on and what the short-term priorities are (generally easier in development, sales, and customer services groups than in Marketing, Finance, IT, and Admin functions). This will allow you to explicitly stop certain activities and allow more time for the high value activities (this works particularly well in agile development environments for development, well managed sales groups, and well defined customer service processes).
• If you can’t for some reason do the above, then put enough goals on everyone’s plate so that they have too much to do…this approach generally leads to a prioritization conversation (or more resources if you are not careful!), which leads to activities being dropped off the plate (the lower value activities if you do this right). Not perfect, but it works! (a related approach is to keep your hiring extremely lean vs. demand as you grow…it will keep the focus on the high value activities).

I read Don Dodge’s post on Microsoft not suffering the innovator’s dilemma and had a similar reaction to Robert Scoble’s. I am a big fan of Microsoft and use their software every day on my Mac. It is great software from a great company full of great people.

That said, the issue is not whether they are suffering the innovators dilemma (all large companies suffer), the issue is what they should optimize their innovation given the limitations that large companies have (the innovators solution can help, but does not nail the solution in my opinion). Well run small companies will beat large companies if their angle of attack is right (see my “How David Can Beat Goliath” series on the topic), but well run large companies can stay relevant (and important) if their angle of defending attack is right. My sense is that Microsoft is trying to win all of the games all of the time rather than focusing on playing the games that it will win!

Microsoft needs to optimize its place in the “food chain” by considering what its natural advantage is, where it is disadvantaged, and how they should capitalize on this advantage. Microsoft has several natural advantages from its location at the extreme end of the food chain (see list here) and also has natural disadvantages (some listed here but written more from the reverse perspective). The net of it is that it is extremely difficult (impossible?) for the large companies (even the great ones) to create, develop, and test out the hundreds (thousands?) of innovative ideas that it takes to get one or two “hit” products/companies because most of the best ideas grow from the other end of the food chain!

Net, net, if I were the decision maker at a large technology company like Microsoft, I would put aside 2-3% of my market cap each year to purchase the innovative companies that have grown (and evolved) to the point that Microsoft can either

• Put them through its current technology, sales and marketing, and customer service engines to supercharge their performance, or

• Develop them (in whole or in part) independently to create new technology engines, new sales and marketing engines, and/or new customer service engines (depending on the uniqueness of these engines).

if they did this with the proper focus and magnitude, then we all would look at them as more innovative, even though a lot of the innovation would have been incubated by external parties (at the other end of the food chain).

(Yes, Microsoft will say that they are doing something like this, but they are not doing it with either the focus or the magnitude that is necessary to win the innovation game, at least right now.)