Big Winner

The American Marketing Association’s Marketing News blog shares some advice from American Express CMO John Hayes on adapting to a rapidly changing economy:

1. Establish new customer listening posts, and engage with customers on as personal of a level as possible.

2. Don’t just cower. Have the courage and perspective to bring about a positive change.

3. The world, and business, will move on without you if you’re not constantly innovating.

Source:
American Express CMO’s Mplanet Presentation, In A Nutshell

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At Identity Resolution Daily, Robert Barker (Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Infoglide) describes the significant components of an identity resolution technology system:

And finally, a comprehensive identity resolution technology, in addition to data matching, should have the ability to:
• Uncover non-obvious relationships between seemingly disparate identities/entities,
• Apply rules and decisioning based on the specific industry, application, and organization,
• And integrate that knowledge back into existing business applications.

Source:
Are You Serious?

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FutureNow’s GrokDotCom points to an article in AdAge on the lengthening tenure of chief marketing officers and quotes Elisabeth Charles, CMO of Petco:

Elisabeth Charles, who starts a new post as CMO of Petco in mid-February, also credits analytics and measurable results for the increased tenure. “You see a lot more folks doing marketing ROI studies, using more direct marketing that can be measured and shows a payback, as well as really scrutinizing the balance of brand investment vs. traffic or sales driving initiatives.”

Ms. Charles goes on to point out an area that has improved but “is still highly underleveraged”, that of utilizing technology & tools to better tap into consumer insights- listening to the voice of the customer. Interesting she brings that up, as it dovetails with a another piece of research on CMOs, seemingly far more negative.

Source:
On CMOs, Customer Service, and Birthing Elephants

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The Customers Rock blog has a great summary of tips from Mary Dillon (Executive Vice President and Global Chief Marketing Officer at McDonald’s) on connecting with employees and customers:

* We have over 1.6 million employees around the world, and we try to inspire the crew to feel great, deliver on the brand promise, as well as reduce turnover.
* Each employee could be the one experience someone has with our brand. This is a great way tap in and get people on the same page, share experiences.

McDonald’s sees social media as a great opportunity to gather consumer information on attitude and perceptions about the brand. Per Mary, “This is a big opportunity for us; we haven’t tapped into it much yet, but we will!” She also stated that they are willing to look beyond merely the cost of doing social media marketing, as they recognize that this is a different kind of conversation.

Source:
McDonald’s Connects with Employees and Customers

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Stephen Hopson’s Adversity University blog has a great interview with Michael Lee Stallard, founder of E Pluribus Partners and former Chief Marketing Officer at Morgan Stanley’s global wealth management group. The interview has some excellent advice, including these responses:

What is the best advice you’ve ever received and given?
A life not lived for others is a life not lived.

What would you say was the most embarrassing moment of your life that, at the time had you mortified, but you now freely share with others? And what was the lesson you learned from the incident?

I had a flawed sense of love when I was young that was manifest in several unhealthy relationships. I was seeking affirmation and twisting who I was in order to get the affirmation I longed for. Experience and self-reflection have given me a much greater understanding about who I am and what I believe.

Source:
Stephen Hopson Interview with Michael Lee Stallard, Part I of II

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The Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology has a page featuring lectures from some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. The lecturers include:

* Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape
* Aneel Bhusri, executive at PeopleSoft
* Pehong Chen, CEO of Broadvision
* Jon Chun, co-founder of SafeWeb
* Stephanie DeMarco, founder and CEO of Advent Software
* Donna Dubinsky, founder of Numenta
* Shomit Ghose, SVP at Tumbleweed Communications
* Greg Gianforte, founder of RightNow Technologies
* Keith Krach, co-founder of Ariba
* Jeff Miller, founder of Documentum
* Stephen Pratt, CEO of Infosys
* In-Sik Rhee, co-founder of Opsware
* Chris Rittler, VP at Tropos Networks
* John Roberts, co-founder of SugarCRM
* Katrina Roche, CEO of Cistera Networks
* Ann Winblad, co-founder of Open Systems

Source:
Lecture Archive

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The Creative Leadership Forum had a roundtable discussion on the role of Chief Strategy Officers in an organization.

Participants included:
* Edward C. Arditte, senior vice president of strategy and investor relations at Tyco International
* Stuart Grief, vice president of strategy and business development at Textron
* Marius A. Haas, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development at HP
* Dan Simpson, vice president, office of the chairman, at Clorox
* Annabel Spring, managing director in charge of strategy and execution at Morgan Stanley
* J. F. Van Kerckhove, vice president of corporate strategy at eBay.

Here are some notable quotes:

Dan Simpson: The role of the CSO is poorly defined, much like the discipline of strategy itself. Most other C-level executives have high levels of control over their disciplines, fairly clear ownership, and a large staff. But that isn’t true for the CSO. Many things affect the role, from the nature of the industry or company to the CSO’s reporting relationship. But the biggest factor is the style of the CEO, the true chief strategy officer.

Stuart Grief: The CEO makes the ultimate decisions, but it’s our job to explore the facts and alternatives around an issue. We make sure CEOs have a clear understanding of the implications of various choices so that they can make informed decisions.

J. F. Van Kerckhove: The CEO is the ultimate owner of corporate strategy. A good strategy process finds the right balance between top-down and bottom-up engagement in developing strategy, building on the collective wisdom, and exposing its main assumptions. While the formulation of strategy often goes through specific planning milestones, its development is ongoing—at times explicit and at times not. The CSO plays an important role in helping to coordinate and inject knowledge in the more formal strategy process, as well as fostering an environment for more spontaneous strategy creation. The latter often finds its roots in a close collaboration with the business units or field operations at the forefront of experimentation and learning. In a fast-paced industry like ours, the ability to rapidly learn from the field is a true competitive advantage.

Source:
How chief strategy officers think about their role: A roundtable

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Michelle Evans’ blog has excellent notes from the 2009 BCAMA Vision Conference. The notes are a great summary of advice and ideas from the executives who spoke at the conference, including:

* Ken Schmidt: Former Communications Director, Harley Davidson Motor Company
* Brad Gamble: Senior Director of Marketing, McDonald’s Canada
* Richard Bartrem: Vice-President, Culture and Communication, WestJet
* Brian Scudamore: President & CEO, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?
* Kerry Munro, General Manager, Yahoo! Canada
* Clare Meridew, VP Creative Director Interactive, GREY Canada

For example, here are the key takeaways from Brian Scudamore’s speech:

You need to have a vision. You need to make that vision public. You need to paint the picture, tell the story, work towards the vision. Imagine it. Believe. Know where you’re going and make sure everything you’re doing is advancing that goal. Everyone has to share the vision because it is all about the people.

Source:
BCAMA Vision Conference 2009 Notes

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Howard Lindzon is an entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, and angel investor. Wall Street Cheat Sheet interviewed Lindzon and his incredible responses prove why he has thousands of followers on Twitter.

Some great quotes and advice from the interview:

* The hedge fund industry could have been great, and still may be great one day. But the investors were only concerned with chasing returns and not investing with a great manager who really knew what he was doing — someone you could be with for 10-15 years and it didn’t matter what he did today or tomorrow or six months from now because you were going to invest in this guy for 10 years just like you would a business.

* It’s all about shareholder returns. If I see my entrepreneur is focused on making me money, those are the entrepreneurs I want to invest in. You have to make your shareholders money.

* As an entrepreneur, one of the lessons you learn is that nobody investing money knows what they’re doing. That’s why poker is the most successful and fastest growing open-source project of all-time. A person who is 10-years old with math skills can play behind a computer and beat a CEO who has played poker his entire life. The best entrepreneurs would be good poker players because you are looking out for yourself and understand how to operate in an environment where there are no rules regarding what’s good and bad [insofar as strategy].

* I have a theory I call “Oprah versus Montel”: you can do really well being Montel Williams, but you get really wealthy being Oprah. By focusing on the negative you may get more viewers, but they’re not the type of viewers you want. On the other hand, the Oprah viewers can change your life.

* I only buy momentum stocks because then I can be sure someone knows something I don’t. Then I know I’m definitely not the only guy who knows something that nobody else knows. When nobody else knows anything, you have a $2 stock that stays $2.

* The best lesson for an entrepreneur is to completely understand your industry. And that’s very hard. There’s only one Michael Dell and one Bill Gates because not many idiots know their industry and have a viable vision that early. But you can be successful in an industry without being Dell or Gates. The key is to not bite off more than you can chew. You have to accept you’re not going to own the world, but you can own your little niche.

* So, to be successful you have to do something very well and own that niche. Surprise people. And there’s no shortcuts to do that. If your business can be profitable, all the better.

Source:
Exclusive Interview: Entrepreneur Howard Lindzon

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The Ivy Portfolio is a new book written by Mebane Faber and Eric Richardson. Faber is the Portfolio Manager at Cambria Investment Management. Richardson is the founder and CEO of Cambria Investment Management. The Ivy Portfolio really stands out from the endless list of investment books, both in appearance (whoever designed the cover of the book is a genius) and in content. The book explains how individual investors can replicate the exceptional performance exhibited during the best years of the Yale and Harvard endowments as well as the performance of top fund managers. My book review is in the form of ten great ideas from the book, though the book has many more excellent ideas than just these ten.

1. The Yale endowment outperformed stocks by over 4% per year and did so with 33% less volatility.
2. Endowments can invest in illiquid asset classes like timber that can have a time horizon of 20+ years.
3. Compared with smaller endowments, the largest endowments have fewer stocks, fewer bonds, more real assets, and more alternative investments.
4. A quote from Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio (from the book 2020 Vision): “We don’t assume stable correlations, we look at a range of past correlations to stress-test our portfolio based on different correlation assumptions and we structure our portfolios to have no unintended consequences that would favor one type of economic environment over another.
5. Yale prefers real estate that generates a current cash yield to reduce the exposure to holding periods and valuation risk.
6. The Ivy Portfolio consists of domestic stocks, foreign stocks, bonds, real estate, and commodities (the % allocation to each is in the book).
7. According to Eric Crittenden at Blackstar, the 80/20 rule applies to the stock market with roughly 80% of gains coming from 20% of stocks.
8. Average investors can invest in hedge funds through U.S. mutual funds or foreign listed funds.
9. The quantitative timing system in The Ivy Portfolio leads to a greater annualized return and less volatility than the S&P 500.
10. The book gives a step-by-step process on how to track the holdings of top investment managers. Or you can use the author’s service called AlphaClone which makes this process much easier.

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