Every month, since 2003, when co-founder Jay Kaminsky suggested that the (then) twenty-five of us should get together and talk more, I’ve played opening music at our company meetings. I try to pick songs that capture the company mood. Tomorrow, I’ll be playing Lenka’s “The Show” mixed into the new De La Soul, “Pushin’ Ahead, Pushin’ Along.” Lenka makes me tear up. De La Soul’s new hit track psyches me up.
Today, we sold the company Every month, since 2003, when co-founder Jay Kaminsky suggested that the (then) twenty-five of us should get together and talk more, I’ve played opening music at our company meetings. I try to pick songs that capture the company mood. Tomorrow, I’ll be playing Lenka’s “The Show” mixed into the new De La Soul, “Pushin’ Ahead, Pushin’ Along.” Lenka makes me tear up. De La Soul’s new hit track psyches me up. Selling M5 to ShoreTel is the solution I was looking for all year. The problem? Our market has matured. It is exploding. All the things we do -- VoiP, Unified Communications, Mobile, and Cloud -- are combining to create a perfect storm of customer demand. A classic, Geoffrey Moore style Tornado. Who wins big in a tornado? The #1 company. The leader gives Main Street buyers a safe choice, makes it easy for pragmatic buyers to join in, takes more than its share and outpaces the competition.
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Steve Jobs touched so many aspects of my life. I wanted to write about one sliver of his legacy that directly impacted M5’s business phone system business, and illuminated our vision. Ever notice that while mobile phones are now smart, office phones are still dumb? Wikipedia claims “Smart phones” have been around since 1922. Nonetheless, I credit Jobs. iPhone was a natural extension of his original vision – from everyone having a computer to everyone having a computer everywhere, all the time. That’s the first thing missing from office phones – they are stuck on desks. People move around. The office is the worst place to work. Nothing that doesn’t move with people can extend their intelligence. “Customers want holes, not drills”. Whurley reminded me of this old business saw while presenting to a group of Alan Patricof’s CEOs last summer. He provided a great first-person example of an iPhone app for kids that his chaotic moon studio recently built called “The Quiet Game”. Based on the insight that parents often hand kids their iPhones to keep them quiet, “The Quiet Game” uses the microphone to dock points for noise while playing. Problem solved. A hit. I'm nervous! Tonight I have to sing in front of my closest friends, colleagues, and five rolling cameras. For a sneak preview, watch our Introduction video. Flashbacks to the last time I did this at the 4th grade holiday play. The adrenaline, the racing imagination - that's what learning feels like. It's uncomfortable. It can't happen without putting your body in a new and awkward place. It can't happen without the other people looking at you either. Learning is a team sport, and rarely happens when you are alone with your thoughts. A Peeve: I might burn my local Lowe’s down to the ground. Three months of not knowing when my new washer and dryer would show; calling, calling, transferring in loops, cajoling clerks to punch my name into the computer. Finally, one day a couple of weeks ago, a truck pulls up in front of the house, then refuses to deliver, and finally just leaves these enormous boxes on the sidewalk. Bad service ruins my day! But it reminded me of what I’m trying NOT to do at work. Over the last twenty years, business operations have become more dispersed. Most mid-size businesses have deployed some kind of “front-office” software to help coordinate. This is certainly better than the old manila client records that can’t be shared, let alone easily managed. Anyone that has deployed one of these systems, whether it is ACT, Salesforce.com, Siebel, or a “home-grown” CRM is familiar with their greatest weakness. The systems are passive. If staff doesn't enter notes, the system is useless. Sales teams scramble at the end of the month to enter client records so their managers can update forecasts. And that’s if you have excellent adoption. We wrote a 105-page business plan this year. The exercise was mostly a success in getting my managers to write out and share their thinking. The entire company was invited to read the plan and review it, but very few actually did. Only a portion of the senior executives read each other’s sections. The end result was an excellent roadmap, although I’m a fan of the Helmuth von Moltke the Elder quote “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” We cooked and ate the thing, but I’m not sure we digested it. Almost every business owner I talk to lately has experienced a tough year. Staffs were broiling, whining, anxious, stressed. Cuts hurt trust. And trust is the foundation of effective teams, so that's not good. I thought I’d repost this blog entry to give some props to Larry Smith, who is building a business around a fast and effective exercise we did a few months ago. Teammates need to get to know each other, so they can have candid relationships. So we're back down to the foundation of Pat Lencioni's Pyramid from Five Dysfunctions of Teams. When they do, they care more about each other's approval, ask for help quicker, and hold each other accountable … and so up the pyramid to getting results. I'd send everyone to a rope's course if we had time. (Or if they wanted to, or if there was a decent ropes course within 2 hours of Manhattan, or if it worked over video conferencing for all of our offices.) Telecom analysts have been in my face recently with an old challenge: “you can’t be a great service provider AND a great software company.”This Telecom industry belief will go the way of “Cigarette Smoking is Good for You .” One of the reasons that the hosted IP phone system industry has not grown faster is that most players copy the old Telco mult-tier paradigm.One company builds the application, another delivers it, yet another resells it. Much gets lost in the translation, and it was all about the dial tone, not helping the customer get real impact from the applications. But voice today is really a software application, and an important one.Every major software force – Microsoft, Google, Oracle, even the open source community – are in with both feet.A software business model will win.And the right model is Software-as-a-Service, or Cloud Computing. Some obvious benefits are clear – more sophisticated applications at lower cost, less time to get up and running, and scaling flexibility that matches a company’s growth. Let’s face it, the main reason companies owned their own PBX’s was because there was no other option. What a treat - I got to watch the Green Day concert in “The Pit.” We stood a few rows from Billy Joe Armstrong, on the edge of moshing. Men, and a few women and children were slamming into each other, spinning, flailing, shoving, dancing. When someone went down, a hand and a smile picked them right up. It was intense and fun, an island with its own rules amongst a sea of Madison Square Gardeners. |
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