Morphology of leadership

One thing is clear: leadership may come in various external shapes and forms, but it must by all means share a number of internal elements. People who have the capacity to influence others use it in many different outward manifestations. Some infra and other supra utilize them – for good or for bad – but there is a certain action for sure exercised.

Probably everyone, including the village fool, has some influential capacity. But often, as I see, the difference between those who lead versus the rest is in their desire to have a direct or indirect impact not just on the outcome, but on the plan itself and how to realize it. The desire to lead, I think, has a lot to do with the belief that we could have a valuable impact on some critical items:

The final result
The project or process to lead to it
The people we will use and involve in getting there
The methodologies and formats we will use to realize the expected timing

In a simple manner this covers a number of issues which I believe drive the leadership mentality to “project the next sequence” of, if ever there are, predictable or plan-susceptible events.

Murdoch the futurist

The INMA magazine Ideas was quoting Rupert Murdoch the other day. It was interesting to listen to his rumination about what could be the future of newspapers in the digital and post-digital era. I think he is not so far from what could be a reality. I also believe these musings are applicable to other content generating industries.

So, Murdoch said:

“What if, at the journal, we spent US$100 million per year hiring all the best journalists in the world…? And spent some money establishing the brand but went global… and then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work, and you’d make some money”.

Nice approach.

Why I love María José

Because she’s totally cool, fun, pragmatic, decisive, reactive, understanding, sensitive, mature, patient, generous and generally cool. That’s why. Plus she put a picture of herself, her new born first child Nicolas and myself in a Chistmas card ;-) That’s pretty cool.

I book, you book we all book for facebook

Facebook is freaky. I mean, a very freaking scary thing. It’s still half the size and has half the turnover of MySpace. Whatever…It’s also a different place that serves different purposes and has security of identity built into the system, which is more than you can say about it’s competitor. However, I find MySpace, with it’s usabilty abhorrent layouts and general chaos, is a much freer space for expression and creativity. That’s probably why they have a huge user overlap but also the reason MySpace has an entertainment industry darling business model and content that Facebook does not reach.

Anyway, my point was not to regurgitate facts about the 2 titans of social networking, you can read about them in Wired, Business 2.0, Fortune and even Harvard Business Review.

I joined Facebook via Eero’s invitation 2 weeks ago. I have 43 friends. I spend on average 5 minutes per day on it, which may extend to 20-25 minutes some Sundays (it probably would be much more where I not policing myself strongly - I find it a superb procrastination tool!). Anyway, all the applications built around it are fine and stuff, I guess you get bored of many of them after some time, whilst other will become true killer apps. (Poking, super wall writing, IQ testing, movie taste sharing, likeness tools, the myriad games tools… someone I know actually spent most of last Friday playing some trading potato game online…). By the way, this open API world has given Facebook a massive leap versus competition and has lot of happy developers making money off it, not bad, not bad, not bad at all!

But my point is that Facebook is, or could be, or is en route to becoming a freaking dominant tool, a kind of integrated environment where we could conduct a lot of our online activities in one platform. And with it’s open API, it is a freaking platform! I was just thinking of things it already has in production, like marketplaces (beware online classifieds moguls).

So, what’s there then?

It’s LinkedIn: just tweak a little bit layout and profile characteristics and you have most of the LinkedIn features already in it;

It’s Google Base: use its marketplace and you’ll see about the best classified environment (in terms of interactivity and relevance) that there exists out there;

It’s Flikr: it’s photo sharing facility is just as neat and does a lot more in terms of sharing and interacting with images than, for example, Picasa;

The event calendar could happily compete with all the Yelp! descendants…

Gosh, it scares me. I mean I see highly niche job markets evolving, huge classifieds markets, vertical and horizontal, never-ending interactivity tools built around them by an army of free-to-work developers… it’s a money maker for them, so they are going at it like mad in a raging frenzy to build the next-big-app for Facebook.

I suspect what we see on today’s Facebook is probably the tip of the iceberg in terms of where this platform could get to… still to be seen in the hands of which if the World Dominance Hunter’s hands it will fall into.

Markets are designed

A relatively emergent field of economics called market design (look how Zopa uses the concept) catches my eye. It supplants the generally accepted demand & supply norms of markets by stating that it’s a bunch of well defined rules which, ultimately, define their failure or success.

Market design suggests that very granular and specific forces are at work for anything from the market logic of a job portal to that of the slot allocations in airport runways. These stem from 2 sources

Game theory, or let’s call it “the study of the rules of the game”, which by the late 1990s was developed enough to provide practical guidance to market design

Experimental economics, which in turn provided an environment to test the reliability of game theory predictions

Both combine to look for answers to market failures. There are 3 must-haves without which a market would breakdown inevitably

They need to provide thickness - that is, to bring together a large enough proportion of potential buyers and sellers to produce satisfactory outcomes for both sides of a transaction

They need to make it safe for those who have been brought together to reveal or act on confidential information they may hold. When a good market outcome depends on such disclosure, as it often does, the market must offer participants incentives to reveal some of what they know

They need to overcome the congestion that thickness can bring, by giving market participants enough time - or the means to conduct transactions fast enough - to make satisfactory choices when faced with a variety of alternatives

Source: www.hbr.org

   The old way: demand exceeding supply in public transportation

More from Professor Alvin E. Roth, the world’s leading voice on the topic

Why I like fat men

I have to make 2 confessions to myself, for clarification. It’s soothing to blog about these things.

I find overweight men more attractive than skinny ones: (I don’t mean sturdy, I mean plain super fat). It must be the Spanish catholic past dictating something here. It does so in confabulation with my still childishly renegade reach on life. As if they could shield me. As if they were making a statement by not taking care of themselves…?

Of course, this statement is to be used ceteris paribus: it’s just a physiognomy factor, to be isolated form intellectual, moral or ethic as well as personality appreciations of men.

Secondly, I start to develop a sense of self-appreciation I had never before experienced. Again, I think a youngest-of-eight and subservient adolescence had imprinted a feeling of lessness on me. It has taken me 35 years to overcome (and I cannot even keep track of how many hours of chaise-longue). But hey! it seems, in the end, it may have all paid off ;-)

Ahhh… there we go! I had to get this out. In case I sometime hit the play-back button and re-read my posts, nobody except myself should care for this entry - but maybe the act of blogging just makes us all a little bit more vane, a little bit (more) exhibitionist and also, on the beholders side, a lot more voyeuristic.

To buy or to ally? A growth dilema

To acquire, to ally…? Questions we ask ourselves in the context of the growth strategy of our business. I read some good news today about our Company’s growth, lead in over 25% year on year organically but assisted in another over 10% by acquisitions. Sounds very nice, especially in a publishing market where decline is pervasive worldwide and Internet revenues are not bridging the gap.

However, research provides disconcerting statistics on the outcome of most strategic alliances (and most acquisitions at that). After a company purchases another it’s share value goes down between 0,34 and 1%, whereas the acquired goes up 30% on average. So it’s their shareholders that hit jackpot, not the purchasers’. Today, to make my evening bleaker, I read that acquiring firms experience a wealth loss of about 10% in the 5 years following most acquisitions, according to research by Journal of Finance.

To make things worse, statistics reveal that 48% of alliances incur financial loss and fail within 24 months.

An interesting Harvard Business Review article (you’ll have to pay) provides a framework on the issue to assist companies avoid the myopic decisions than are often guided by hindsight.

Before doing this, it provides a couple of simple truisms and a couple of typical misconceptions:

Acquisition deals are competitive, based on market prices, and risky

Companies habitually deploy acquisitions to increase scale or cut costs and use partnerships to enter new markets, customer segments, and regions. Sometimes previous experiences become blinders: if success was attained in collaborative experiences, often companies rebuff acquisitions when, infact, they could be needed.

Alliances are cooperative, negotiated, and not so risky

Organizational barriers often stand in the way. In many companies M&A handles acquisitions and does not collaborate with Business Development, which looks after alliances. The two teams do not collaborate and, ultimately, do not let companies adequately compare the pros and cons of either strategy

The dawn of micro venture capital

I knew it. We were just waiting to hear it form an official source. Thanks for the link, Jakub. A guy I hold in high respect was making a point on the Spanish blogosphere that you need to ask for at least 1M from a VC if you want to get a shot. I dissent. Now my intuitive dissents have been verbalised and proved.

Two main premises support my (and obviously many others) theory

1. Hardware is cheap
2. Software is increasingly easy to produce

So, basically what we see is a market where a start up can get up and go at a fraction of the costs it took before. In this light a lot of investors have decided to approach seed capital in a more agile, small and disperse manner.

Some examples are already visible in guys like Y Combinator, Charles River Ventures which has started to fund 10-20k projects and Jeff Clavier’s 12M fund for tech star-ups.

It’s a new dawn of micro-ventures. Let’s see where it gets to, but it sure sounds nice!

In the picture, a very a propos theme for this post: Caravaggio’s David with the head of Goliath, which is in Madrid’s Prado Museum ;-)

Monkey: Journey to the West

Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! A million times bravo! These guys are setting the classical stages free! 

I saw this animated, acrobatic, 21st Century circus opera last night in the very Parisian Theatre de Chatelet. Insane. I mean, insane. How cool.

I bet you’ve never been in an opera that starts with animation by the guy who came up with Gorillaz; that is based on a Chinese epic written in 1592; and where you are assimilated by an army of 40 Chinese acrobats, singers and dancers that keep you on the edge of the most amazing choreographic, costume and musical thrill you’ve had in ages.

Some master minds behind this are Chen Shi Zheng (conception and mise en scene), Damon Albarn (composition) (the guy from Blur) and Jamie Hewlett (co-creator of Gorillaz). All 3 in the picture below

In case you never heard of the original text, Xi You Ji (Journey to the West), by Wu Cheng, is the tale of a Chinese monk, based in a mythological world, which recites in a fantastical and comic manner his travels through India in the 7th C. He is carrying the sacred Buddhist texts and the trip will take him 17 years.

In the narration the traveller -Tripitaka- is accompanied by Monkey King and another 3 anthropomorphic buddies (a white horse, a pig and a sable).

Behind the paid wall

I see 2 interesting and contradicting news in September. First I find out from John’s blog that Segundamano, Schibsted’s Spanish classified business, starts charging privates to place ads online. They first merged the portal with the Spanish Blocket, Compraventa, to take the absolute leading position in terms of traffic and content on the market (in the process they adopted the Compraventa navigation). They then crashed the private party: 7 Eur to place an ad in cars and real estate and 1,39 for the rest. (The small amounts are easy to pay by SMS or premium fixed line, but of course SMS broker and operator get a nice cut).

Interestingly enough, about 2 weeks later I read an interesting article about how the New York Times is opening all paid sections of it’s content (opening it’s entire site to all readers for free, yes!). This comes just 2 years after launching it’s paid TimesSelect strategy, which charged online subscribers to read columnists and archives (about 49.95$ per year and 7.95$ per month).

The Times said the project drew 227.000 paying subscribers out of 787.000 overall and generated about $10 million a year in revenue. “But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising”, said Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

Interesting, right? We have 2 different media and they present 2 completely divergent strategies. I wonder if Schibsted will have to roll back it’s paid content strategy in Spain, for sure they will cash on it for some time. I am not sure if this will have a strong negative impact on their market-share though. In any case, I enjoy the second approach, but I also understand we are speaking of 2 different businesses, as I mused in an earlier post on news sites versus online classifieds.

Can’t wait to see how it all evolves.

More very interesting posts on the Segundamano issue on Edu’s blog and Juan Carlos’ blog

Happy without sex, but never without Chris

I sent an e-mail asking a guy who I consider a friend a personal question. I did it because I know he’s a smart and fast witted type and he would send me a good reply.

And here is the sequence, question, answer one and the addition. I love this guy ;-)

Me: Chris, is an active sex-life important for happiness?

Chris: I guess not, I am pretty happy

I told you, the guy is good. But wait! it gets better ;) look at the second answer:

Chris: Also, a lot of my married friends seem pretty happy, so clearly not

The Other Russia (and a bonus pic of Minime)

Russia since the 90s has made radical changes, many residing in the mentality of a well trained and entrepreneurial middle class, which equates wealth and economic independence to freedom. This is probably deeply entrenched in the mind of many young, audacious and ambitious Russian professionals.

Just to support this comment (which by the way is not mine but made by many local commentators), have a look at some hard facts from Russiablog:

The Good

After seven years of steady decline in the 1990s, Russia has seen eight straight years of economic growth, with expansion for 2006 estimated at 7 per cent, more than three times the rate in the European Union.

As the world’s largest exporter of gas and second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, soaring energy prices have hugely benefited the Russian economy. Salaries have been growing at a rate of more than 10 per cent a year and consumption is estimated to have risen by 12.5 per cent last year.

Car sales have risen sixfold since 2001, with Russians spending the equivalent of $38 billion on cars last year.

Only 3 million Russians owned mobile phones in 2000, but today more than 80 million do.

The number of households that own a personal computer has jumped to about 20 per cent from under 5 per cent in 2001.

And the Ugly

Salaries still lag far behind those in Western countries, with the average income in Moscow only about $800 a month. Millions of Russians continue to live in abject poverty, especially pensioners and rural residents.

Most Russians credit President Vladimir Putin with fostering the economic boom by ensuring stability after the political chaos of former president Boris Yeltsin’s rule in the 1990s. Putin’s approval rating often surpasses 80 per cent in public opinion polls. His image in the West, however, has steadily deteriorated since he began his second term in 2004

Another aggregator from Croatia with love…?

Just saw that the Croatian team of aggregator Gohome launched a Spanish version. I wonder if the Barcelona based team of Properazzi (or the gazillion other in this hyper-saturated market) are concerned right now…? I have followed the progress of Gohome from the start and I am both concerned and interested by their evolution.

The business model of GoHome is pay per click and was originally developed by search engines. Every time a visitor clicks on a given search result, the original provider of the content such as a real estate portal or real estate agency pay GoHome for the click of the visitor. This model gave them about 30,000 EUR of revenues in less than a quarter in 2007. Not bad considering the size of the Croatian market, it’s reported Internet penetration and online advertising spending there.

Total forecasted net profit by the end of year 2010 is 4 million EUR, and they estimate 90% of the revenues will come from pay per click.

The Unique Selling Proposition of GoHome, they claim, “is its search and aggregation technology which enabled them to quickly take over the online real estate market in Croatia”. They probably believe they can launch this in another 5-8 countries in Europe in the next few months and I imagine they are starting in Spain and have a number of large markets in the pipeline…

Now let’s see who provides the funding for the venture. I should not blog about these guys as I perceive them as competition, but I would also like to hear people’s opinion on the business model and current aggregation technologies.

And in this international venture, I find it amazing that they do not have the .com domain of Gohome!

The foolhardy business traveller

Man-o-man! Who’s going to work out the marketing and segment placement of hotel chains soon? This is just insane. I am in Warsaw camping my tired bones in a terrible Polish hotel (phone over 3m away from bed, 24×33 cm towels, no shampoo, no soap, no hair-drier, no minibar, no wi-fi…). After this (cancelled return trips and re-bookings at hand) I suffer the budget French chain hotel punishment: tiny room, tiny bathroom, tininess and cheap-o-ness all around me, plus adolescents at breakfast (it’s like a dorm scenario). Depressing to say the least. Needless to say all this is forced by a booming economy, Warsaw hotel occupancy at it’s peak and little silly me travelling to Poland on a per need basis (meaning I cannot arrange a decent booking for decent pricing) and a corporate budget limit I am stupid enough to respect.

My point was, anyway, that this hotel pricing thing just does not make sense…

Why? Because, I paid 60 EUR to survive it in this French blue collar worker chain but tonight, tired of it all (thanks Erol) I managed to get my tired bones to a Hilton and am not paying 5x the price, but I am getting 10x the service, the rest, the space, the comfort and the respite. Ah, God bless the economies of scale of the big guys, and their expertise in their trade.

 

This issue of amateur versus expert we will discuss soon, I cannot wait.

But the issue at hand was: It’s all around us an has nothing to do with being a foolhardy traveler: those of us on the road have to learn to travel well and get rest. As for me, I am learning, from humbleness, to make sure that I get what I deserve for an business developer who spends her time on the road. This, just as much as everything else, is a key to good work and productivity.

By the way, the definition of foolhardy: marked by defiant disregard for danger or consequences