Josh Hurewitz – GrowBridge

With Growth, Companies Have Different Leadership Needs

Congratulations! You conceived of a business, started it and grew it. The business is continuing to grow in size and complexity.

Question: Are you still the appropriate person to lead it?

Leadership skills can grow with a business, or not, and in dealing with growing companies, this is one of the most personally difficult challenges that I help clients face. While this topic is important, broad and deep, I will point out a few aspects of leadership that repeatedly come up with growing middle-market businesses.

The tendency is for a leader to assume that he or she can continue to lead a growing company, even though the skills required might be very different from those required to start or initially grow the business. In trying to summarize some of the behavioral factors that relate to being an effective leader, I came across a very insightful, recent article that presents four factors in effective leadership for companies that are growing and becoming more complex:

Solving problems effectively. The process that precedes decision making is problem solving, which is when information is gathered, analyzed and considered. This is difficult to get right, as companies grow and the scope of responsibilities of managers narrows, yet leaders’ scopes remain broad. Resisting being over-influenced by a manager with a narrower scope by putting decision making into a larger company context requires discipline.
Operating with a strong orientation toward attaining results. Leadership is not only about developing and communicating a vision and setting objectives, but also following through to achieve results. Leaders with a strong orientation toward attaining results tend to emphasize the importance of efficiency and productivity and to prioritize the highest-value work. Simply put, if an approach does not affect results over the short or long term, get it off the leader’s agenda.
Seeking different perspectives. This trait is conspicuous in managers who monitor trends affecting organizations, grasp changes in the environment, encourage employees to contribute ideas that could improve performance, accurately differentiate between important and unimportant issues and give the appropriate weight to stakeholders’ concerns. Leaders who do well on this dimension typically base their decisions on sound analysis and avoid the many biases to which decision-making is prone.
Supporting others. Leaders who are supportive understand, even sense, how colleagues feel. By showing authenticity and a sincere interest in those around them, they build trust and inspire and help colleagues to overcome challenges. They intervene in the group’s work not to meddle but to promote organizational efficiency, allay unwarranted fears about external threats and prevent the energy of employees from dissipating into internal conflict.

This is not to say that different business situations don’t require different styles of leadership, but core leadership behavior that will be relevant for most growing companies include the four factors listed above. These four are not the be-all and end-all, but if you want to cultivate leadership skills, these four are a good place to start.

It May Not Be You!

More than once, I have hinted to a company that its leaders might be ill-suited to lead in the evolving organization. I then delicately suggested that different leadership would be needed for the greater good of the company. Sometimes, the hint was taken; sometimes, it was not taken until I very explicitly uttered these words or a variation thereof: “Leadership is required but is lacking – and you suck at it.” That did the job of impressing upon clients that they were the problem. There is nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about; not everyone is good at everything, and very few people are good at leading an evolving organization. Once they accept that they are inadequate to lead, leaders may need to get some training or must step aside in favor of someone with the temperament and skills to lead the organization.

Besides the direct benefits of improved leadership, a secondary benefit is that this change would allow the former leaders to focus on areas where they are skilled and experienced and their value to the organization is greatest. Leadership training generally has mixed results unless it is taken seriously. My experience is that leaders almost always knew this already deep down, but needed someone to be blunt to consider making a change.

Some content for this article was taken from “Decoding Leadership: What Really Matters,” McKinsey Quarterly, January 2015.

Why Do Business Planning if the Plan Will Change?

Those who have worked with me have undoubtedly heard me say that “a business plan is good for only the first 10 minutes.” The reason is that once execution starts, business leaders learn new things that cause them to consider deviating from the original plan. The reason for planning is not necessarily only to attain an outcome, but to launch a process. Formulating a plan establishes a framework to assimilate new information, which then might lead us to alter the plan.

Recently, a brief posting on Harvard Business Review’s HBR Weekly Hotlist (“Building a Flexible Business Plan,” April 4) addressed this very issue. The posting stated that in planning, business leaders need to take parallel paths of both doing and thinking: not blindly executing the plan and not ignoring facts on the ground. The posting raised the following key points:

Think big, start small, scale fast: Determine how big the business can realistically be, but don’t assume that it will get there quickly. Invest in a limited way until you see indications that the business has legs, and then have a plan to aggressively scale up.
Have a framework that includes these four elements: people, a business idea, a business model and a market. Understand the key tradeoffs between these four elements, and keep considering how tradeoffs are working. In my experience, people trump everything else. Attempting to implement good business ideas without good people to execute them is a recipe for disaster. Good people with the right business skills and experience, even if they are executing a mediocre idea, are a better bet than the reverse.
Keep the plan iterative: Continue to think and rethink the plan as execution commences. Adopt flexible thinking that will enable the organization to adapt and pivot at the appropriate time.

Obviously, there is not a checklist or formula for a foolproof business plan. However, starting with leaders who are good at perceiving and acting on opportunities and challenges during the execution phase is a key factor in developing a successful business.

Understanding Workplace Automation

Working for many years in the commercial aviation industry, I witnessed profound changes in automation at almost every level. Ticketing counters gave way to self-service check-in kiosks. Passport control is dominated by document scanning, rather than human observation. Pilots manually control aircraft for only a few minutes at the beginning and end of a flight.

What will be the impact of the accelerated and the accelerating pace of automation across all sectors of the economy? Should we expect vast improvements in productivity and freedom from boring work, or should we fear threats to jobs, disruptions to organizations, and a strain on the social fabric?

In its November 2015 issue, McKinsey Quarterly presented a preliminary report on an ongoing study of automation in the workplace and reached two key conclusions:

Very few occupations will be automated in their entirety in the short- and medium-term.
However, certain activities are more likely to be automated, requiring entire business processes to be transformed and the jobs performed by people to be redefined – much like the bank teller’s role was redefined with the advent of ATMs 30 years ago.

The Magnitude and Impact of Automation

The study analyzed work activities for which current technologies could be deployed, and concluded that if automation were deployed in place of labor, its value in wages could amount for $2 trillion. Although we often think of automation as affecting primarily low-skill, low-wage roles, the analysis noted that even some of the highest-paid occupations (such as financial managers, physicians, and senior executives) perform a significant amount of activity that can be automated. The organizational and leadership implications of this conclusion suggest that organizations planning to take advantage of automation must implement significant process changes and even reengineer themselves – from the most senior positions to positons far down on the organizational chart.

Benefits of automation include labor savings, increased output, higher quality, improved reliability, and performing some tasks at speeds and at quality levels humans cannot. However, automation costs between three to 10 times what current manual processes do. The magnitude of the benefits and the costs required to attain the benefits of automation suggest that the ability to staff, manage, and lead increasingly automated organizations will become an important competitive differentiator.

This isn’t all-good or all-bad. Automation is our friend – think of E-ZPass at crowded highway tool booths. Automation is our bane – think of being chased through the maze of automated phone-answering systems, only to be looped back to the main menu.

According to the study,

Approximately 45 percent of work activity could be automated to some extent, using current technology.
Additionally, 13 percent of work activities could be automated, if we include emerging technologies that reliably understand natural language.
Fewer than 5 percent of occupations can be entirely automated through current technology.
However, approximately 60 percent of occupations could have 30 percent, or more, of their activities automated.

This means that automation is so far-reaching that it simply cannot be ignored. On another level, the rapid introduction of technologies based on artificial intelligence are challenging assumptions about what can really be automated. It is no longer the case that only routine, codifiable activities can be automated, and that activities requiring tacit knowledge or experience are difficult to translate into task specifications and so are immune from automation.

But beware. Automation is frequently oversold regarding achievable value and ease of implementation. It is almost always harder and takes more time than automation peddlers let on, and some \ expected benefits may be sacrificed in the process. There is also the potential for “blow back,” where automation actually makes things worse. Sometimes, staff even passively sabotages automation efforts to avoid the need to adapt.

Bottom Line

Company leadership must monitor the speed and direction of automation and determine when and how much to invest in automation. Making these determinations will require leaders who understand the economics of automation and the trade-offs between augmenting versus replacing some activities with intelligent machines. Growing in a competitive environment frequently requires leveraging automation to innovate, and fully understanding the implications for human-skills development. In our technological world, choices about automation can both sharpen and cause the loss of a competitive edge.

I favor companies’ analyzing whether, and how, automation can create a competitive advantage. I also see this analysis as vital to a company’s overall strategy. In developing strategies and plans for clients I typically ask clients to think about “looking around the corner” to see what is coming in the future – and automation is one of the first places I probe.

The Marketing Department alone is not Responsible for “Branding”

When companies want to establish a “Brand”, it conjures up the advertising-driven practice of brute-force, repetitive, mind-drilling messages. However, a brand is not limited to an image that a company wants to project, but in the mind of the customer, it is a subjective view of the combination of all direct and indirect interactions that a customer has with the company. Also, while a company may assign branding to a marketing department, a brand is actually established by a broader range of interactions with customers.

· A brand is subjective because a customer may be influenced not only by company-driven activity like advertising, brochures, websites and salespeople, but also by recommendations, casual observation of the product, experience with the product and a host of other conscious and subconscious factors. In fact, some of the interactions with the company might have profound influence and some will be ignored. A customer’s impression of a brand therefore is much less controllable and could be much closer to a minor/insignificant influence as a result of company promotion.

· Not only is the marketing-driven approach to branding a weak strategy for establishing a brand, but a company actually needs to examine all of its potential direct and indirect influences and determine if they are consistent with the brand. In his compelling book Brand Harmony, Steve Yastrow describes how companies can successfully create a singular reinforcing image of themselves, that is, the entire organization needs to think of itself as “being the brand”, in order to create comprehensive, company-wide, reinforcing image that customers will understand and believe. This means that a company should state what its brand is, and then against that standard, consider if a company activity is consistent or inconsistent with the desired projected image. While this does not guarantee that a desired image will be generated in the mind of customers, it increases the chances.

Brand is very difficult to establish and it is very perishable. Think about how a company’s image might have cost significant dollars to establish, only to be branded negatively by a single rude interaction with a company employee. Or for example, McDonald’s advertising could all be wasted on one customer if the rest rooms were not clean.
Take away idea:

A brand is subjective for each potential and existing customer. Companies need to craft a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach to influence individuals across a wide range of interactions. At the very least, every controllable market interaction and operational touch with customers should be considered as an opportunity to reinforce the brand. Though not foolproof, it is an approach that makes a lot more business sense than asking a marketing department to establish a brand, independent of everything else a company does.

Can You Tell Me About Your Market?

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been asked one question and received off-target responses. The question: Can you tell me about your market?

The question and the answers lie in a lack of understanding of what a market is. On a high level, a market is the sum total of interactions of sellers and buyers. Markets and market structures shift in terms of overall share, product share, product positioning and other aspects based on the interaction of what sellers do (i.e., promote products, position products, price products) and how customers react (i.e., choose one alternative over another, or choose neither or a substitute).

The reason that this question is answered unsatisfactorily, so often, is multi-fold:

Middle-market companies tend to define their markets in terms of their offerings and not the overall market. Substitute products are most certainly part of the market landscape, yet they are rarely considered. A well-known example is a company that produced oats. It defined the market as the “oats market,” not as the transportation fuel (for horses) market. Had the company fully understood that it was in the transportation fuel market, it might have taken a different tack and either developed other products (oil) to satisfy its market or relented on the market as it shrank.
Assuming that a company has a starting point from which to understand a market, which is not really a good assumption at all, it would need to have the ability to detect whatever it can in the market. Then, based on what it learns, and on what it knows that it doesn’t know, it develops a sense of how the market has changed and is likely to change. Middle-market companies rarely invest in updating their intelligence; even if they do, they might not have the skill to interpret what combinations of market factors’ movements are relevant in forecasting how a market structure might change. Ignoring market shifts is usually the default position.

A sophisticated, comprehensive approach to understanding markets can be approached through reading Michael Porter’s classic book, Competitive Strategy. However, it might not be practical for most busy executives to read it. A much simpler version of the same notion rolled off the tongue of Michael Corleone in The Godfather II: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Many potential clients approach me too late, long after detectable market changes were either unnoticed or ignored. They react much later, after the changes have had substantive negative effects on the bottom line. Many times, it is too late, and companies simply “run out of runway” to turn things around. If you sense that market changes need to be monitored more closely, and then need the changes to be interpreted to support forecasting, give me a call: 410.598.0719.

Surprises Make You Stronger

A popular Kelly Clarkson song, “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger,” contains the age-old message that dealing with adversity builds resilience and character. A more in-depth and nuanced understanding of this notion is presented in a recent book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Antifragile is not quite resilience or robustness, but really connotes something that gets inherently stronger under pressure.

Taleb argues that antifragility is the secret to success in a world full of uncertainty. Using nature as a model, he points to evolution as a system in which seemingly random mutations lead to a lasting advantage. To be sure, “bad” events often contain useful information that enables future advantage. Pain teaches us to avoid things that might cause more serious injury. Business start-up failures steer those who learn the lessons from making the same mistake again.

Most interestingly, he argues that trying too hard to avoid shocks is a big mistake. The argument goes as follows: Long periods of stability allow risks to accumulate until a major disaster occurs, while volatility means that things do not get too far out of kilter.

Examples are plentiful. Eliminating forest fires leads to large-scale ones. Economies that cut interest rates store up more trouble for later. In markets, getting rid of speculators means that prices are more stable in general, but any fluctuations cause major panic. In political systems, artificial stability brought about by autocratic regimes can lead to instability once a credible challenge to the status quo is mounted. Career choices also demonstrate the principle: A secure job in a large company disguises a dependency on a single employer, but losing that job will cause a sudden and steep drop in income.

The heart of antifragility is that being in a position where the unexpected allows improvement, where the potential gains from surprising events, outweigh the potential losses. I listen very carefully to how people articulate the situation when confronted by a significant challenge. That enables me to better understand how fragile or antifragile they are. I reach my determination as follows:

If someone calls a challenge a “problem,” he or she seems to define the challenge as being counter to an existing structure that needs to be preserved; defending that structure becomes the goal, which limits the opportunity to change and grow. This person, therefore, is “fragile.”

If someone refers to it a challenge as an opportunity, I interpret that as a revealing insight into his or her ability to adapt and change. This person definitely is antifragile.

Nobody needs me to tell them that not only is change a constant in the business world, but the rate of change continues to increase. Attitudes that embrace change as a means to morph into what they want to become will be winners. Those who doggedly defend the status quo, and yearn and plan for the return of the good old days, will almost certainly become extinct much sooner.

Where are you on the fragile/antifragile scale, and are you satisfied with your positioning?

This article is excerpted, in part, from “The Economist,” November 12, 2012, page 76.

Staffing for Growth: A New Paradigm in Hiring

One of the most vexing challenges for growing companies is how to deal with people – both current and new employees. While some of the former have the skills and are ready to increase or change their scope of responsibilities, others may resist. Reassigning existing employees who are not up to the task is only part of the problem. Another challenge is this: setting expectations for new employees.

Let’s say that the manager determines that a new employee needs to be hired. The relationship of that new employee to the company might need to have a different understanding than the employee-employer relationship which has historically been in in place. This is especially true when hiring young employees who have different expectations of what the employer-employee relationship should be, as will be highlighted below.

In the books The Startup of You and The Alliance, Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linkedin, demonstrates clearly that while the actual relationship of employees to companies has changed dramatically, the legalistic and transactional nature of the relationship generally has not. Whether regarding the idea of lifetime employment, the expectation of moving up within a company (the corporate escalator) and providing training to the employee in exchange for loyalty, both employers and employees know full well that in the new economy, neither party is really that invested in the other – no matter what each says. Employers have short-term horizons that might mean dramatic and rapid changes to the current business, including altering the staff and eliminating positions. Knowing this, employees, if they know what is good for them, are in a constant “scouting mode,” seeking the next, better opportunity because they never feel secure. This is really a “lose-lose” situation..

So what should the relationship be between a no-longer paternalistic company and the employee, not wanting to make a full commitment for fear of being jilted down the road? In The Alliance, Hoffman and his co-author argue that the relationship should be similar to a “tour-of-duty”: a relatively short-term assignment that gets the employee to focus and support the company’s goals for a defined period of time, in exchange providing the employee with additional skills and experiences that make them more valuable at the company or with a new employer. It is also a way to build trust incrementally and bi-laterally so that the most valuable employees have a path to longer-term retention if they want to make a commitment to the company.

Implementing a tour-of-duty relationship requires moving past the lifetime employment expectation framework. For example, employers operating in the paternalistic mode once viewed job hopping as negative, demonstrating either a performance or commitment issues. Presently however, job hopping may signal something very positive – that the individual is constantly pursuing new challenges and could be a short-term asset, which might indeed grow into a longer term asset after their tour-of-duty is completed. Human resource departments need not have a largely obsolete discussion that uses terms like “team” and “family” when doing so is disingenuous.

Self-Education; Growing in Importance

There is an age-old argument of school smarts versus street smarts; that is, theory versus practice. In a provocative book, The Education of Millionaires, Michael Ellsberg argues that, especially in the ever-flattening world, formal education as a ticket to success is less of the sure thing it once was. He further argues that informal education is more important than formal education on a cost-benefit basis.

Ellsberg argues that succeeding in the 21st century requires soft skills and attitudes like motivation, networking, passion, comfort with failure and persuading others to believe in you more so than what schools generally emphasize: content-focused information[HK1] and, in some rare cases, reasoning. Cutting through the hyperbole of why college is a poor investment in time and money, which on its face is somewhat supportable, his real point is that every person should take responsibility for their own self-education. The approach Ellsberg recommends can be summarized as: Don’t show me your transcript or resume; instead, tell me who you are, what your attitudes are, how you can adapt, and what you can do. He argues that the grand bargain of getting into a good school and achieving good grades no longer is enough to guarantee success in the emerging world. Other skills that have always been important, he states are now the key factors in attaining success, especially in business.

The bottom line in the college/advanced degree-or-no-college/advanced degree question is more relevant now, in a changed and rapidly changing business environment: School should be approached as the student’s opportunity to be exposed to ideas, get inspired and gain basic, mostly theoretical, knowledge only. Ellsberg offers important – and, I think, valid – critiques of our educational system and how it establishes unproductive patterns that do not serve students well, especially in business:

Start-ups, in particular, are creative endeavors by definition, yet our classrooms are geared towards preparing students to take tests on narrowly defined academic subjects. This stifles students’ creativity.
Learning from failure, when not fatal, is reported by some successful people to be one of the key experiences that lead to future success. However, our educational system encourages students to play it safe and retreat from the first sign of failure, because we assume that failure will look bad on one’s college applications and on future resumes.

Of course, such fields as medicine, law and engineering must continue to be highly regulated and licensed, and the educational and training paths leading to them must remain well-defined and rigorous. For most other fields, however, the notion that formal education is the only path to stable employment is misguided. As both an employee and a business consultant, I have worked closely with some excellent business minds. These were people lacking in formal education, whose other skills might have been ignored and neglected to a company’s very real detriment. Fortunately, those companies recognized the person’s brilliance and experience for what they were – vital assets – rather than typecasting based on limited formal education. On the flip side, educational credentials have a lower correlation with real business success than our venerated educational institutions would lead people to believe.

In our highly chaotic, unpredictable economy, learning entrepreneurial skills will be more valuable than in the past, even for some highly regulated fields. This is because of the informal job market that employers know about and tap into, the one that operates thus: You need a position filled, so you ask employees and colleagues to recommend someone they know. In this market, one’s resume and SAT score, or the quality of school attended, actually is much less important than one’s enthusiasm, ability to work as a team member and creativity.

Ellsberg’s book does not come close to settling the argument of education of theory versus other real-world skills and experience, but it does challenge some tightly held, historical assumptions and offers suggestions for developing “success skills.” It is a must read for college students (and their parents) and future entrepreneurs who need to understand that the content of their informal education could be a critical factor in contributing to their ultimate success.

Avoiding “Groupthink,” With a C.I.A. Hat Tip

Gathering information and making quick decisions are at the core of management. Entrepreneurial companies welcome new ideas. But as the companies grow, they may be less accepting of initiatives that challenge the status-quo thinking. Status-quo thinking, also called a “company culture,” can be harmful. That’s because it’s really “groupthink,” a barrier to new and better ideas.

Groupthink occurs when the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in dysfunctional decision-making. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically evaluating alternative viewpoints. Indeed, they can actively suppress dissenting viewpoints and isolate themselves from outside influences.

Avoiding groupthink is especially critical during periods of growth, when parts of the company are evolving at different rates and when lost opportunities or missteps can be devastating.

A cautionary example comes from a source we in business wouldn’t expect: the U.S. national-security apparatus.

I have studied how national intelligence-gathering and military and security decision-making have evolved in the past 15 years. I came to understand that flaws in making rapid decisions are applicable to businesses that are growing and changing.

In his book The Head Game: High Efficiency Analytic Decision-making and the Art of Solving Complex Problems Quickly, ex-CIA official Philip Mudd discusses failures in the agency related to information-gathering and decision-making. He cites as an example the agency’s seeing fundraising as a pretty good indication of a terrorist group’s likelihood of carrying out future attacks. However, by focusing primarily on fundraising, the CIA ignored a more acute problem of fighters being recruited. Fundraising and recruitment were not closely related at all, he writes. Making poor assumptions or asking the wrong questions narrowed the agency’s understanding of a situation and left it unprepared to detect activity that indicated a terrorist attack being planned against a government target abroad – one that was carried out but could have been prevented.

When faced with an ocean of information or apparently conflicting data, he writes, several key questions need to be asked:

What is the problem?
What are the “drivers” − the important characteristics that define the problem?
How will performance be measured?
What data will be collected in relation to the defined problem?
What important information is missing?

The last question is most important. It’s the one managers tend to ignore, but it’s crucial because 1) we tend to overestimate what we know and 2) we often weigh information based on “availability bias”, that is we tend to consider information we know and weight it heavily, as opposed to leaving room in the decision process for what we do not know. The notion of asking oneself what is not known about a problem can lead to a completely different decision-making path. This was articulated a decade ago by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as “unknown unknowns,” which I believe poses the biggest challenge for decision makers in many company situations, including growth.

Mudd’s remedy is to bring in a fresh team of renegade thinkers (or a reputable consultant – hint, hint) who will purposefully challenge prevailing ideas. To get to “unknown unknowns” (assuming that they are knowable in principle, if not in practice), thinking needs to come from outside conventional boundaries. This means listening carefully to the outsiders’ questions and challenges, and probing their thoughts instead of defending one’s own point of view. I would go a step further and say that after bringing in fresh eyes, a company should prove the outsiders’ challenge to be correct, instead of attempting to refute it.

Admitting that your assumptions may not be appropriate – and especially saying, “I don’t know” – are first steps in correcting the decision-making process. I implemented this in the 1990s when I hired new staff. I told them, “I am the boss, but I am wrong at least half of the time – but I don’t know which half! It is your job to tell me when I am right and wrong.” I did that to prevent their descent into groupthink in which everyone becomes conditioned to think the same way and not let creative thinking influence group decision-making.

That approach didn’t always work, but it was a start. Would you like an outsider to help challenge what you assume to be true? If so, call me.

Metrics-Driven Marketing

Those of us who got education and training in marketing more than 10 years ago are likely having a “Rip Van Winkle” experience as we try to grasp how marketing has changed in that period due to the impact of the internet and then more recently social media apps. Though the same ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is the key metric for marketing managers, it is much harder to actually understand and measure.

ROMI is the measure to which marketing dollars contribute to profits. In the old world (30+ years ago), it was hard to associate a marketing cause with the actual effect. A question could be asked: “How much of sales was a direct impact of a single marketing effort, a billboard or an advertisement, for example”. Even using a lot of assumptions to relate the cause with the effect, there were questions in the direct nature of the relationship between the cause and effect – but at least we knew that no one else could adequately relate marketing to results.

Internet purchases, that were preceded by a number of clicks, brought some never-before-available relationship between purchasing and the marketing chain that led up to it (the breadcrumbs). It is understanding the trail of breadcrumbs and developing real insight that can help marketing managers better understand and manage their ROMI. And for a while, it was adequate.

There is however a new complication in all of this – a huge complication. Metrics-driven marketing, powered by analytics, affords companies the opportunity to engage customers in entirely and personalized ways. However, companies need to a approach multi-channel marketing very differently than they have with traditional marketing. Marketers have unprecedented access to an enormous amount of customer data including search patterns, engagement patterns, demographics, social connections and campaign responses. The complication is that to access customers’ pocketbooks, they need to understand direct and an indirect interrelation between these data points to determine what is it that leads to a purchase. Only then can marketers effectively allocate their marketing budgets, and direct all related efforts to the right combination of activities that will drive ROMI.

And now, just as we are getting comfortable engaging customers with websites and SEO efforts, (Search Engine Optimization), the website-centric paradigm is being replaced by an application-centric engagement: Social and mobile apps are taking center stage. Leverage it or ignore it at your own peril.

Concepts for this article were derived from the article “Metrics-Driven Marketing Meets the Multichannel Challenge”. Cornell Enterprise, Fall 2012.

Author: Josh Hurewitz