Spanish Dancer: Business Plans as Microsoft Fiction
Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics
Business Plans and Other Works of Fiction
The purpose of a business, Peter Drucker famously said, is to create a customer. Yet, rather than creating customers, many innovators create a fantastical piece of what you might call Microsoft fiction.
This hit home for me during a recent client project. I was working with a team that had been tasked by the company’s CEO to develop a new venture in a promising market space. Its three members had been working for about six weeks. They’d conducted detailed research, talking both to prospective customers and numerous industry experts. And then they used Microsoft’s most popular products to produce what they thought was a business plan. But it actually was a kind of fiction built in three chapters: an Excel spreadsheet with sophisticated analyses showing breathtaking financial potential, a PowerPoint document blending facts and figures with compelling videos and pictures, and a Word document summarizing all of it in prose so lucid Malcolm Gladwell would shed a tear.
Still, it isn’t a business until you create a customer. After listening to the team describe its work, I asked a simple question: “Who is your first customer?”
The team turned to page 12 of chapter 2 of their Microsoft fiction, proudly displaying a PowerPoint slide citing detailed demographic figures. The slide said that 60% of the target market would be 18-to-34-year-old males with annual incomes within a certain range.
So I asked the question again. Instead of summary facts and figures, I wanted the team to be very precise. What is the customer’s name? Where does he live? What does he look like? What are his hopes, dreams, and aspirations? What does he love? What drives him crazy? How would the team’s idea fit into his life?
Read the rest at Harvard Business Review.
Scott Anthony is the managing partner of Innosight.
Penguin: Our Veterans, Our Blood, Our Soul
Ethics, Military
This captures my continuing anguish.
How American Troops in Afghanistan became Unreal (Jones)
Ann Jones writes at Tomdispath.com
Informed Comment
Posted on 11/08/2013 by Juan Cole
The last time I saw American soldiers in Afghanistan, they were silent. Knocked out by gunfire and explosions that left them grievously injured, as well as drugs administered by medics in the field, they were carried from medevac helicopters into a base hospital to be plugged into machines that would measure how much life they had left to save. They were bloody. They were missing pieces of themselves. They were quiet.
It’s that silence I remember from the time I spent in trauma hospitals among the wounded and the dying and the dead. It was almost as if they had fled their own bodies, abandoning that bloodied flesh upon the gurneys to surgeons ready to have a go at salvation. Later, sometimes much later, they might return to inhabit whatever the doctors had managed to salvage. They might take up those bodies or what was left of them and make them walk again, or run, or even ski. They might dress themselves, get a job, or conceive a child. But what I remember is the first days when they were swept up and dropped into the hospital so deathly still.
Continue reading “Penguin: Our Veterans, Our Blood, Our Soul”
Marcus Aurelius: Five Takeaways from a Decade of War [Defense One] Plus Blistering Alternative View from Phi Beta Iota Editors
Ethics, Military, Peace Intelligence, Strategy
Five Takeaways from a Decade of War
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, in a keynote address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week, signaled to military commanders that they should assume the across-the-board, automatic spending cuts imposed by sequester over the next decade will remain in place indefinitely. “We do not have the option of ignoring reality, or assuming something will change.” Before they decide how to shrink U.S. military forces and allocate scarce resources, however, uniformed leaders will have to decipher the lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to apply them to the coming era of austerity and global instability.
Hagel gave a preview of his own thinking when he argued that the Pentagon should protect investments in cutting edge technologies that are central to the evolving, network-centric model of warfare honed in those conflicts — to include space systems, cyber capabilities, “ISR” (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), and special operations forces (SOF).
Following Hagel’s speech, three senior retired generals offered their own thoughts on battlefield lessons. Here are five takeaways from the discussion by Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Peter Chiarelli, former vice chief of the Army; and Gen. Ronald Fogleman, former chief of staff of the Air Force.
Del Spurlock: Call to Arms — The People’s Army
Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Military
The Objective force is one which maximizes the SECURITY of the American people. The American Security regime is a con and has been since Korea. All players–including Zion and Saud–have an interest in maximizing the INsecurity of the American people. DHS was the last imperial structure to be put in place. PRISM,et.al. was designed and implemented to enhance domestic domination and insecurity. So long as these “domestic” pieces remain in place and unchallenged there will be no honest assessment of force projection requirements.
Roughead's [February 2013] assessment of Army Force Structure is about right in my estimation, but as far as I know he never comes to grips with a honest assessment of total force requirements which must include a significant growth in an integrated reserve-guard force structure which assumes (from contractors–who profit only with increased insecurity) over the POM the bulk of DHS functions and structure AND simultaneously builds the only force structure sustainment functions (i.e., nation-building)possible for land forces–engineering, civic institution building and maintenance, dispute resolution,etc.
No matter what, there will be no honest assessment of the way forward without an honest lessons learned from the last ten years of institutional manpower failure. The problem? The perps are still in place perping.
The broad outline of citizen-soldier force projection–the most difficult concept to grasp–was surfaced over 25 years ago in this 1986 San Francisco Army Day Speech. This is the only speech I gave that the W-H chopped on. [Speech Below, and as Online PDF]
DLS
Armies are not inherently disciplined, nor responsive to the will of the people in whose name they purport to act.
Armies are not innately well led, nor representative of the societies from which they spring, nor humane in the treatment of those, within or without their ranks,
subject to their power.
Yet all of these characteristics have become accepted norms of performance, duty and responsibility for our Army. When there is deviation or perceived deviation from those norms, it is known to the world, and not simply within the platoon.
This is as it should be for an Army exercising the will of a free people. In this, our Army sets the standard.
Continue reading “Del Spurlock: Call to Arms — The People's Army”
Marcus Aurelius: SecDef – Six Points, No Bench, No Plan, No Joy — Can CSA Mobilize Carlisle and Re-Invent the US Army in 6 Months?
Ethics, MilitaryAttached is a SECDEF speech from two days ago — six main points and the major thrust is things are not going to get better any time soon.
PDF (10 Pages): (U) SecDef Six Points 5 NOV 13
Six priorities:
First, we will continue to focus on institutional reform.
Second, we will re-evaluate our military's force planning construct – the assumptions and scenarios that guide how the military should organize, train, and equip our forces.
A third priority will be preparing for a prolonged military readiness challenge.
A fourth priority will be protecting investments in emerging military capabilities – especially space, cyber, special operations forces, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Our fifth priority is balance. Across the services, we will need to carefully reconsider the mix between capacity and capability, between active and reserve forces, between forward-stationed and home-based forces, and between conventional and unconventional warfighting capabilities.
And our sixth priority is personnel and compensation policy. This may be the most difficult.
Mini-Me: NYT Discussion of Cutting Military Flag Officers + Meta-RECAP on Flag Waste and Corruption
Ethics, Government, Military
Huh?
New York Times, 5 November 2013
One of the hardest-hit areas being discussed in federal budget talks is the Pentagon, which would take an automatic $20 billion cut in January under sequestration. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel proposed a 20 percent cut in his own office’s budget, but command headquarters around the world doubled in cost from 2007 to 2012, the Government Accountability Office found. And while Hagel’s predecessor, Robert Gates, said at least 50 generals and admirals should be eliminated, few of the cuts have occurred.
Trim the Top, Like Most Innovative Organizations
With cuts coming, the best junior officers will see a surfeit of generals and seek a future elsewhere than in a top-heavy bureaucracy
Why Cut the Leaders We May Soon Need?
The past isn't a model for the future. More troops and money on the battlefield might not be the most efficient allocation if more drones are used
The bureaucracies that surround top commanders have grown drastically, and the taxpayer-financed perks these commanders enjoy is immense
Cuts Are Needed, but Shouldn’t Affect Diversity
The number of minorities serving in the military's highest ranks has risen, but there are still so few, that cuts, without care, could almost eliminate them.
