Ten tips on becoming a successful business leader

CEOs and their golden parachutes have become a staple news in the last few years. There is that Yahoo musical chairs and the HP fiasco just to mention a few newsworthy items. And who can resist the urge to be inspired from all those government officials spending enormous amounts of tax payer's money? After being bombarded with news about these "successful" leaders and having learned from the best in my own professional career, I thought it was time for me to write one of those "Ten things you absolutely must do to woo the love of your life" style articles. So here it goes...

Demonstrate incompetency in doing real work - If you learn anything from this article, this is the one that you must really grasp. People who do real work may climb the ladder to fix a light bulb, but they never climb the one that makes you truly successful. You must actively demonstrate your inability to perform even the routine work items. That way everything gets delegated to the real workers and you have plenty of time to manage others and focus on your own career advancement.

Lying is just stretching the truth - If you think that tiger in the cereal commercial really exists, you might as well give up and try to become a mathematician or something. It's all about advertising and here in the US we are really good at it. You must learn to successfully stretch the truth about your resume (so what if you didn't really have that degree in metallurgical engineering?), the size of the company, the revenue, etc. That's the only way of getting to the next and even bigger level of stretching the truth.

Control the information flow - All communication between the lower and higher levels in your organization must go through you. That way you can convince the people that work for you how every bad decision was made by the superiors and tell your superiors how every failure was the fault of XYZ working for you and that s/he needs to be fired.

Align yourself with success - Many people believe in this myth that the success has to be "earned". They clearly haven't seen the Staples "Easy Button" ad. You have to be smart enough to judge what's getting successful and what's failing. When you see something failing, get hold of the smartest person who works for you and tell him (in private) how s/he is the only one who can save the situation. If something is on track to becoming successful, jump on it with both your feet and widely publicize how you are the key driving force behind it.

Keep up the appearances - Always remember that it is all about the "image" and perception is reality. No one really cares if you understand the business. That's such an ancient idea. Everyone is hoping that you will follow my tips listed earlier in this blog and con a bigger fish so that they can get a few more pennies in their pocket.

PS: I did originally set out to write 10 tips on becoming a successful business leader. Unfortunately I do have to get back and do some real work. But some times less is better. Good luck with your careers and do mention this blog post in your television interview after you get indicted by SEC.

My three principles of new product development

Spigit recently released a Facebook application that exposes Spigit's social innovation management functionality on the platform. It is always thrilling when something you help create sees the light of the day. In this case it was particularly satisfying because we followed my three principles of new product development with a great degree of success (thanks to FacebookEngage product manager Nina Chai and Pratim Mukharjee, the lead developer on the project).

Simple but not Simpler
I have lead the evolution of the Spigit platform from an abstract concept to the leading social innovation platform used by over 100 organizations all over the world. Initially we had to take a leap of faith in creating the first version of the product. Combining idea management with social networking was a new concept for a lot of our prospective users. We certainly made a lot of untested assumptions to create that first version. We did strive, however, to minimize the number of assumptions and create something that was simple (with a minimal feature set) but not simpler, i.e. it provided unprecedented benefit to the end users. We have started Spigit's Facebook application development much the same way. The initial version exposes minimal functionality. It's a proposal to our customer base which they use, review, and evaluate.The rest of the course will be charted by combining customer feedback with our own intuition and understanding of the marketplace.

Native Experience
There are some products that are so revolutionary that they change existing interaction paradigms, processes, or even the way of thinking. Most others need to seamlessly fit into existing  lifestyles and usage conventions. They must blend with established usage patterns and feel completely native to the user. We had to be very careful about this blend for the facebook application. A large portion of Spigit's user base is in the enterprise space. Facebook users are significantly different in their expectations, attention spans, and motivation to participate. Spigit's Facebook application deliberately sports a non-enterprise, lightweight look. The primary motivation of Facebook users is keep in touch with their social circle. The Spigit apps plays into that by making the user aware of ideas posted by your friends and how many of them made into the top ranking list.The ideas are displayed very much in a wall-style format. When a user posts an idea, posting that on the wall or sending message can be done with minimal effort. In general, we have made every effort to introduce Spigit functionality in a way that is consistent with ethos of Facebook community.

The Wow Factor
A new product should have at least one or two features that make a user go "Wow that's useful!" when s/he uses the product. When I started using iPhone, I had that reaction when I realized that unlike my previous mobile windows-based phone, the screen goes dark when I put it to my ear but it comes alive when I hold it in front of me. With Spigit's facebook launch we did not have a problem introducing the Wow factor. We pulled in some of Spigit's key features deemed relevant to Facebook. We included idea theme clusters that allows administrators to get a sense of emerging trends and topics. Reputation scores identify key contributors in the community. Spigit's social analytics is available to the administrators via Spigit's regular user interface. Subsequent versions of the app will track user feedback and will build upon the initial feature set to make it even better.

Shortening attention spans, multitasking, and the rise of Twitter

Number of theories abound regarding why Twitter has become so popular including this one that claims that it is because it is designed to have social intent. I started thinking about this and in particular thought about why I am not hooked on to Facebook but find Twitter useful. I came away with three reasons for Twitter's success: overabundance of information, shortening of attention spans, and the desire to create personal brands. Twitter thrives in this environment because it offers the most efficient way of discovering pertinent information via social curating.

The problem of information explosion predates the rise of the Internet in the consumer space; it just got worse with Internet's ubiquity and ease of access. A number of mechanisms have evolved in the Internet age to help improve information discovery as shown in the figure below. Note that the new mechanisms haven't replaced the older ones but simply expanded available modes of discovery.

Release of Netscape browser was the first sign of impending rise of the Internet. I remember getting excited about this cool new browser that was much better than Mosaic. Netscape was a great improvement over its predecessor but you pretty much had to type in the URL of a Web site until Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (Yahoo) came along and started "organizing" the Web into a hierarchy of categories. Now you could traverse the categories, find a topic of interest and browse available web sites pre-classified to be in that category. The next step in the evolution was Google with its PageRank based technology that was very effective in adding relevance to search. This provided a much better mechanism to find information in which "reputable" Web sites related to search keywords were listed at the top.

When Web 2.0 arrived on the scene, we saw the emergence of folksonomies (tag clouds) and social bookmarking/tagging sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg. These sites gently introduced Web readers to the notion of social curating when they started following bookmarks, posts, etc. created by people they trusted. Twitter perfected this art by providing the most efficient way of filtering information via social curating. Each Twitter user follows other users in the"circle of trust" that includes his friends, colleagues, and experts in the areas of interest. Resulting twitter feed then provides a much better way of finding interesting and useful content since it is either published or recommended by the people you trust.

Twitter is also very efficient in the way it gets information to you. Since the tweets are limited to 160 characters, it forces publishers to be succinct in their messages, a valuable gift for the recipients in the age of shortening attention spans. In general we are all getting used to and expecting instant gratification. Five day cricket test matches have for the most part been replaced by 20-20 games that last for about three hours; average movie lengths have been descending; younger generation talks in short bursts that almost sounds like an audio Twitter feed.

In a sense a Twitter feed is like the front page of a newspaper. The front page displays introductory portion of a number of news articles, most of the remaining article is on other pages. With Twitter, you get only the headlines and if you find that interesting, you click on a link that takes you to another place that shows you all the details.

The third reason for Twitter's popularity is that it is the most efficient way of advertising your personal brand. With Web 2.0 came a wave of new individuals that finally had the opportunity to create and maintain a personal brand. A number of now-famous individuals rode the blogging wave to make themselves into famous journalists, political analysts, critiques, reviewers, and advisers. The blogging revolution created a tournament (read more about the tournament behavior in Freakonomics) of information hawkers in which people compete to get rich in the information economy. Most competitors become part of the long tail and eventually stop playing. Some make it big and live on. From the information publishing viewpoint, Twitter  offers a very efficient mechanism to advertise your offering. It is also very effective since information consumers increasingly rely on these headlines to get to the content they ultimately want to see.

Although Twitter founders must be quite happy with its success, the underlying trends that make it popular are a bit disturbing. It's rise is accompanied by addiction to passive information consumption, shortening attention spans, and increased multitasking. Addiction to Twitter is probably best explained by the theory of unpredictable rewards (the same rationale that explains email addiction): you get rewarded with really interesting piece of information at a random frequency, so you keep reading hoping to find that next reward.

Twitter joins the crowded ranks of other competing sources of information like email, television, etc. that are fragmenting attention spans. These "distractions" coupled with the increased pace and complexity of modern life are forcing multi-tasking behavior and frequent context switching. My sense is that these conditions are seriously affecting the ability to focus on and adequately examine important tasks. Some of the research in this area cited in this New York Times article concludes that multi-taskers are worse at filtering out irrelevant information and switch tasks. You can even test yourself on these abilities here.

Since going back to stone ages is not a particularly good solution, the only option is to adapt to the new reality and find ways to minimize its impact on productivity. To that end I leave you with the following techniques I personally employ that allows me to be a player an not just a spectator:

• Shop when you need something, not when there is a sale - This works with information as well. Instead of continuous looking for information, I choose the most effective way of information retrieval that helps me with the job at hand.
• Play only during recess - I reserve my random explorations (twitter feed browsing, searches on innovation, etc.) for selected time periods
• Publish less - I am not on the frequent Twitter plan. For the most part, I try to tweet when I think it is of broad relevance to reduce information pollution.
• Avoid reciprocal follower-ship - I am a bit choosy about who to follow leaving me with relatively less number of tweets to browse through

You can have your cake and eat it too

I am currently in the middle of reading "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholos Taleb. The author talks about how a few unpredictable high impact events that underlie our lives. Just when you are convinced of the unpredictable nature of life, he advises not to stop predicting! Off course it all makes sense when he elaborates further and asks to continue forming opinion about future events that will affect your personal life on a smaller scale but avoiding unnecessary dependence on large impact predictions based on economic and social theoretic models.

This got me thinking (I know, always a bad sign...) about some other things that seem contradictory at first but seem to make sense once you delve deeper. Why is this important? Every pithy saying that I have ever heard makes sense only within a certain context and we can learn far more by examining the "flip" side and understanding how seemingly opposite viewpoints can co-exist.

You must have heard about Perfection being the enemy of Good Enough. If you haven't, just ask the folks who preach product strategy. Contrast this with my personal favorite advise to my kids: Almost Done is Not Done. Clearly achieving perfection is impossible for us mortals in quite a few cases; which means you have to be pragmatic in your decision making and not wait until eternity before you disclose your work to others. At the same time, you cannot make that an excuse to be sloppy or start watching Hannah Montana when your homework is almost done.

Being proactive is considered a good trait. In fact that is a crucial factor behind the success enjoyed by Spigit. We have built the leading social innovation product that pioneered several new concepts that now define this market. A lot of that success can be attributed to our proactive efforts. I built the product by combining my past experience with my intuition about what might work. In more scientific terms, I kept making S*** up and some of it stuck. When I look back at my experience in the last three years, it strikes me that equal share of our success came from reacting quickly and effectively to contingencies. It is certainly not good idea to be reactionary, but it is great to be opportunistic (something my co-founder really excels in). In fact that's a key message of the book "The Black Swan". You cannot really predict the next Black Swan event , but you have to be ready to take advantage of one when it happens.

The following stanza in Bhagavad Gita captures it's essence (at least according to me)

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।

मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोस्त्वऽकर्मणि॥

Here's a loose translation: You have the right to your actions, but never to its result. Don't be attached to the fruits of your labor but at the same time don't let that detachment lead you to inaction.

Does that mean you should not have goals, stop being ambitious, cease to strive for excellence? What happened to "keeping your eye on the prize"? Even if you ignore or disagree with the deeper message about "detachment", there is still something to be said about focusing on execution without getting distracted by visions of glory that might follow. If a basketball player focuses completely on making that last second shot that will win the championship, he is more likely make it than if he is already thinking about the post-win celebration. A football receiver must first concentrate on catching the ball before he sprints to the end zone (that just about completes my quota of sports analogies for this year).

I will leave you with one last thought before I let you escape this prison of co-existing contradictions. Please remember that you can have your cake and eat it too, but you cannot eat your cake and have it too!

Acknowledgment: Cartoon illustrated by Milind Ranade who happens to be a good cook in addition to being a filmmaker and a cartoonist.