Agency pitch mistake #13: showing way too much “stuff”

In the “final round” of presentations in a review, agencies have a Pavlovian tendency to show excessive amounts of spec work. (It’s one of 3 causes for new business presentations always running overtime.)

They do this because they’re “lookin’ for the love” from the prospect and believe that showing more work will increase the odds of that “love” being triggered.

But research shows that clients make their selection decision almost entirely based on “I trust them and I like them.” And that’s not about the work. It’s about the people who do the work. (If it was all about the work, then why is it that the work presented rarely ever appears.)

Less is more. Increase your win rate by showing just a handful of executional ideas and concentrating instead on how they’re being presented. It’s the “actors” on the “stage” that they’re buying.

Farzana makes the semi-finals! Amazon breakthrough contest

Heya Bonfire Family,

Happy MLK Day…I have a dream!

As many of you already know, I entered the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. And wahoo, I made it so semi-finals!!! Now, I need the support of my friends and all their friends, to help me realize my dream/goal of becoming an international best-selling author ;0)

5000 writers entered. 836 made it to semi-finals….one of whom is ME!

So, I was going to wait until Amazon uploaded my book cover, but it seems that may be a while. Check back often ;0)

Check out my page. Read my synopsis. Download the PDF excerpt, by following instructions. And most important, review me. 5 stars. And tell all your friends and family and their friends and family to review/rate me too. Thanks.

Any PR/marketing tactics are welcomed. Other contestants are getting hooked up on local papers, radio shows, etc. etc.

Ok, on with the show. Read the excerpt!
Similarities to real events and people are purely coincidental, remember, it’s fiction. ;0)
http://www.amazon.com/Regeneration-Official-ABNA-Entrant/dp/B00121WE00/

After reading the PDF, rate and review my book, “Regeneration.” 5 stars please!
Make sure your review says something to the effect of how the writing pulled you right in and you wished you could read more.
Here is a link about writing review. http://www.amazon.com/b?node=332264011

If you have more than one online persona/name emails with different names, vote and review often…5 stars!

Here are some PR links about contest. Pretty exciting!

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6485525.html

http://cf.us.biz.yahoo.com/bw/080115/20080115006448.html?.v=1

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2007/10/01/amazon-novel.html

http://www.globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/BWIRE.20080115.20080115006448/GIStory/

Let’s make “Regeneration” the winner, baby!

Thank for your time, support, review, rating and spreading of the word. Carry on!

Love,
Farzana

Eight business technology trends to watch

Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business.

McKinsey & Co’s James M Manyika, Roger Roberts and Kara Sprague have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years.Managing relation 1.Distributing co-creation: The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries. Today, in the high-technology, consumer product, and automotive sectors, among others, companies routinely involve customers, suppliers, small specialist businesses, and independent contractors in the creation of new products. Outsiders offer insights that help shape product development, but companies typically control the innovation process. Technology now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders. That is why ‘cocreation’ is the essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control. mooter_page_section=”AdUnit2″;       Information goods such as software and editorial content are ripe for this kind of decentralised innovation. Companies can also create physical goods in this way. Loncin, a leading Chinese motorcycle manufacturer, sets broad specifications for products and then lets its suppliers work with one another to design the components. 2. Using consumers as innovators: Consumers also cocreate with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers. The way companies cocreate with customers is really a separate trend. Here the nature and range of the interactions, the economics of making them work, and the management challenges associated with them are different. As the Internet has evolved—an evolution prompted in part by new Web 2.0 technologies—it has become a more widespread platform for interaction, communication, and activism. ‘OhmyNews’ for instance, is a popular South Korean online newspaper written by upwards of 60,000 contributing “citizen reporters.” It has quickly become one of South Korea’s most influential media outlets, with around 700,000 site visits a day. Another company is the online clothing store ‘Threadless’, asks people to submit new designs for T-shirts. Each week, hundreds of participants propose ideas and the top six designs are printed on shirts and sold in the store; winners receive cash prizes. 3.Tapping into a world of talent: As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialised aspects of their work and still maintain organisational coherence. Top talent for a range of activities—from finance to marketing and IT to operations—can be found anywhere. The best person for a task may be a free agent in India or an employee of a small company in Italy rather than someone who works for a global business services provider. Software and Internet technologies are making it easier and less costly for companies to integrate and manage the work of an expanding number of outsiders. This trend should gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate. 4.Extracting more value from interactions: Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing activities and their clerical or rule-based activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labour force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 per cent of total US employment, up from 40. Managing capital 5.Expanding the frontiers of automation: Companies, governments, and other organisations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, HR and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities. During the late 1990s FedEx and UPS linked data flowing through their internal tracking systems to the Internet, to let customers track packages from their Web sites. This dramatically reduced the cost of serving them while increasing cutomer satisfaction. More recently, Carrefour, Metro, Wal-Mart Stores, and other large retailers have adopted digital-tagging technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), and integrated them with other supply chain systems in order to automate the supply chain and inventory management further. 6.Unbundling production from delivery: Technology helps companies to utilise fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments cost effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems. Unbundling works in the physical world too. Today you can buy fractional time on a jet, in a high-end sports car, or even for designer handbags. Unbundling is attractive from the supply side because it lets asset-intensive businesses—factories, warehouses, truck fleets, office buildings, data centres, networks, and so on—raise their utilisation rates and therefore their returns on invested capital. Handling data 7.Putting more science into management: Technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. Leading players are exploiting this information explosion with a diverse set of management techniques. Google fosters innovation through an internal market: employees submit ideas, and other employees decide if an idea is worth pursuing or if they would be willing to work on it full-time. 8.Making businesses from information: Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organisations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities. The Internet has brought greater transparency to many markets, from airline tickets to stocks, but many other sectors need similar illumination. Real estate is one of them. In a sector where agencies have thrived by keeping buyers and sellers partly in the dark, new sites have popped up to shine. Moreover, the aggregation of data through the digitisation of processes and activities may create by-products, that companies can exploit for profit. A retailer with digital cameras to prevent shoplifting, for example, could also analyse the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores and use these insights to improve its layout or the placement of promotional displays. Conclusion Creative leaders can use a broad spectrum of new, technology-enabled options to craft their strategies. These trends are best seen as emerging patterns that can be applied in a wide variety of businesses.

Wellness now full-time job at some local employers

Interesting… Check out this article out of Kansas City.

This does indicate approx. $200 in spending per head employee on wellness, however I wonder how they view the relationship between wellness, benefits/ programs and engagement?

Let me know of thoughts.

New 2008 Trends from Richard Watson, Fast Company Blogger

Here is my list of top 10 trends for 2008. The list is neither exhaustive nor 100% serious. It is merely a list of a few emerging trends that could impact on our lives in 2008 and beyond. They are conversation starters - especially if you are involved in innovation and want your idea to make sense in the world in which it is finished rather than the world in which it was started (with thanks to Ray Kurzweil for that last thought).

1. Rhythm & Balance

The speeding up of more or less everything, caused (some say) by everything from technology to globalization, is making some people feel uneasy. One consequence is an aspiration to slow things down a little. Some people are actively trying to regain control by cutting down on work hours or limiting the amount of emails they receive. Others are embracing ‘slow food’, which in turn is creating an interest in living in balance with the rhythms of the natural world. Hence seasonality is becoming important, not only in fashion but in food too. Balance also refers to the need to find equilibrium. For example, with food some people tend to swing between excessive indulgence and complete abstinence. This isn’t healthy. Neither is excessive work if this destroys your health or your family. Another point that is connected is that our digital connectivity is making individuals more aware of the whole. We are thus starting to see the bigger picture of the planet and our place on it and as a result we are seeking to work with nature rather than against it.

2. Karma Capitalism
The old capitalist model was red in tooth and claw. It was shareholder driven and its motivation was money. This model was refined in the caring sharing nineties to include stakeholder concerns and is now being reinterpreted once again to include a much broader awareness of societal impacts at both a local and international level. For example, companies are starting to move away from the idea that they are money machines reacting to the market and are embracing a more proactive model in which shareholders, employees, customers, society and the environment are all deemed equally important. Outsiders are now collaborated with rather than manipulated. An example of this shift from competitive capitalism to collaborative cooperation is the fact that the classic management text of the 1980s, The Art of War, has more or less disappeared from bookshelves and has been replaced by the more introspective Bhagavad Gita, which is perhaps more in line with the post-Enron, post-Bush (almost), post Blair zeitgeist.

3. Making things
Make magazine is a ‘how to’ magazine that was launched in 2005. The publication is devoted to making things with your hands. It is also about how to hack technology and combine low-tech and no-tech with high-tech. Stories have included features on knitting, recycling plastic bags into fabric and DIY coffee roasting. So why is it successful and what on earth is going on? The answer is twofold. First, the Internet has allowed people with weird and wonderful interests to find each other. Hence hobbies that everyone thought had died out are now enjoying a renaissance because individuals and small groups all over the world find it easier to find each other. Second, as life becomes faster and more virtual, people are looking back to the old ways of doing things, especially if the rest of their lives is dominated by the insubstantial, the intangible and the impermanent.

4. Something for nothing
In the future you will still have to sing for your supper but at least some of the lunches will be free. One of the emerging business models in the closing half of 2007 was giving stuff away for free in the vague hope that customers could one day be persuaded to part with money to upgrade their experience (or subscription). This has been labeled ‘Freemium’ and is, perhaps, the way that all digital products and services will be ‘sold’ in the future.

5. Industrial provenance
The more the world becomes globalized and homogenized, the more people will worry about cultural identity (i.e. where they come from). This is partly a reaction to US immigration and the rise of the European super-state but there is also a genuine worry about where products and ingredients come from and in particular the quality of products being produced by nations like China. Food provenance and traceability are well-established trends but with the emergence of ethical and environmental concerns the issue of where things come from is moving centre stage in other areas too. This links with trends like authenticity but also connects with fair trade initiatives and carbon emissions. In the future people may Google airlines to find out where maintenance is carried out and where certain aircraft parts are manufactured. Or how about researching the human rights policies of certain countries before booking a holiday or refusing to drive certain types of car based on where the rubber comes from or where the engine is manufactured?

6. Robotics
According to Bill Gates, robotics is the next big thing. But why hasn’t robotics taken off before? The answer is that many of the basic tasks required of the ideal all-round robot still can’t be done or cost too much to do. For example, orientation and the visual recognition of objects are still very tricky and getting a robot to tell the difference between an open door and an open window is practically impossible. Thus, until robots can quickly sense and react to their environment they will not become ubiquitous and uses will be limited. However, this is all about to change due to the convergence of a handful of trends. First the cost of computing power (processing and storage) is dropping fast. Second, voice and visual recognition technologies and wireless broadband connectivity are similarly dropping in price and increasing in availability. As a result robots will soon start to multiply. According to the International Federation of Robotics around two million robots were in domestic service in 2004 and this figure is predicted to rise to 9 million by the end of 2008. Meanwhile, the South Korean government is aiming to put a robot in every home by the year 2013. As a result personal robots could soon be cleaning floors, dispensing medicine, folding laundry and keeping an eye open for intruders.

7. Data visualization
When IBM launched its PC back in 1981 it had no graphic capability whatsoever. These days we all seem to relate best to information when it’s delivered in short snack-sized sound-bites or when it’s a picture that replaces a thousand words. One of the key challenges for the twenty-first century will be how to cope with the almost infinite amount of information that will be produced. According to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, one of the most valuable skills in the future will thus be the ability to select and synthesize information. This in turn means the ability to develop criteria for filtering what’s valuable and what’s not will become highly prized. One way of doing this is through the use of information design, information aesthetics or data visualisation.

8. Reality mining
Mining data isn’t new but it’s becoming more universal and interesting because software to filter or analyse large volumes of data is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and powerful. For example, around 2,000 résumés per day are sent to Fortune 500 companies in the US, with around 90% sent in by email or via company websites. As a result, companies are using word-scanning software to decide who’s worth seeing and who isn’t. Equally, Centrelink - Australia’s benefits agency - uses what it calls a Job Seekers’ Classification Instrument to work out the probability that a claimant will become long-term unemployed and adjusts the help that’s made available to the claimant. Both are forms of prediction.
The upside of this predictive analysis is that goods and services can be personalized to the individual. The downside is that data collected by one company or government department could be passed on to others without permission. Indeed, it is unlikely that you will ever be given sight of ‘your’ data, which means that if for some reason there’s a mistake and you have been incorrectly labeled there’s very little you can do about it.

9. Eco-exhaustion
Are you getting hot and bothered about global warming? Does a cup of carbon-neutral cappuccino or a packet of environmentally friendly potato chips make you go enviro-mental? If so you could be suffering from environmental cynicism or eco-exhaustion. In short, people are getting fed up with being told how to behave, especially from hypocritical and holier than thou politicians and celebrities that are driving a Toyota Prius one minute and stepping onto a private jet the next. None of this is to say that acting on behalf of the environment is a bad thing. It’s simply that in a great many instances this newly found environmental consciousness is nothing more than marketing hype and public relations spin – something green that’s cynically added to products and people to make them appear whiter than white. For example, a survey by ICM of 2000 British adults discovered that 23% were “bored with eco news”. The poll also found that 18% of people had exaggerated their commitment to the environment because it was “fashionable”. Meanwhile, there are rumours that Porsche is planning to produce a hybrid version of its 4WD Cayenne, while in Canada a fur company is positioning its fur products as an ethical eco-fabric with the slogan: “Protecting nature, while pampering yourself.” Enough already.

10. Fantasy & escape
People can’t deal with too much reality. As people’s lives speed up (thanks to technology and connectedness) and become more pressured (thanks to increasing expectations and less security in everything from relationships to employment) people become anxious. Add the threat of terrorism or rising interest rates (or a US recession) and people can get very anxious indeed. One solution to this anxiety is learning. Find out what’s really going on and try to do something about it. Another solution is withdrawal. Escape into a virtual world of your choosing or perhaps just go to the movies and switch-off for a couple of hours.