Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Debate and difference of opinion, lightly salted with an appropriate amount of passion and tenacity, can help lead to significant breakthroughs. In the world of corporate correctness we are all living in, this should be highly encouraged. I really appreciated Bob Frisch’s response to my recent article on the importance of culture. Though I think he missed the point, the overwhelming number of people who embraced the notion that culture is imperative for sustained success is an indication of the importance of this issue and the opportunity culture offers for positive change.

People matter. More than machinery, products, and real estate. People invent and build. People support and serve customers. Your people either create or undermine value, cultivate or kill relationships, drive or reduce success. A well-conceived strategy living in the hands of unhappy, misdirected, misinformed people is a sure way to a slow and painful death. There is no comparison to being in the hearts and hands of energized, informed, and motivated people.

Companies are not linear, inert systems. They are ever-changing, organic communities that are dependent on the engagement, talent, and energy of their people to operate successfully. Ignore the mental well-being of your people and culture at your own peril. Step inside of any company, no matter the size, stage of development, or level of success, and the culture is either driving the strategy or undermining it. To exist in the first place, a company must have a clear purpose, a deliberate intent, and a directive or set of ideas that it uses to pursue a clear goal, but it’s the people who have to execute it.

There is abundant evidence in every industry that the best-laid plans (or strategies) are derailed, suffocated, or eaten by cultures that either don’t understand or straight-out reject the intent. And this, in turn, slows, sucks the life out of, or sabotages the implementation or execution of the company’s strategy.

For the sake of debate, let’s assume there are two kinds of companies in the world: those driven by strategy, where culture is not a priority, and those guided by a clear strategy, where culture is highly valued and universally understood. To help clarify what’s important, let’s look at the relationship between culture and strategy.

Every company needs a clear strategy…really?

You don’t need to be told that a company must have a clear reason for being and a plan of action. But, you might be surprised by how many companies lack strategic clarity, and whose only purpose is to make a profit. To be clear, making money is absolutely imperative, but it is just one of the outcomes of a successful company.

Competitive differentiation and optimal financial performance do not come from strategy alone. To ignore the potential of a fully engaged and mobilized culture that understands, embraces, encourages, executes, and enhances strategy is negligent and a missed opportunity. It is imperative that today’s leaders not only understand and focus on the interdependence of strategy and culture, but also step back and examine their own role–it is one of the most important areas of their personal responsibility. The mental and physical health of the company in their care must be paramount for sustainable success.

Strategy is rational and culture is emotional. 

Strategy, at its core, is rational, logical, clear and simple. It should be easy to comprehend and to talk about. Without a clear strategy, a company is lost. Culture, on the other hand, means different things to different people. It is emotional, ever-changing, and complex. Culture is human, vulnerable, and as moody as the people who define it. It can be intimidating and frustrating, often leaving leaders dodging it, neglecting it, or discounting it. Because so many large companies are run by people whose expertise is heavily skewed to the rational, financial, and legal side of the equation, culture is often subordinated, misunderstood, or underappreciated.

Every company has a culture, but not every culture is healthy. 

Culture is the environment in which the intent of your company is nurtured, fueled, restricted, or suffocated. Every company has a culture and its health should be monitored and cared for. Cultures reach their full potential when the people in the trenches doing the day-to-day hard work understand the game and are fully informed and engaged. Healthy and vibrant cultures are directed, purposeful, vibrant, optimistic, and highly-successful because they are fueled by the company’s larger purpose and supported by the capability to follow through. A company with a healthy culture is able to operate at its fullest potential while one with an unhealthy culture operates far from its best.

Visionary leaders are required for successful culture. 

Like a great coach, a leader’s job is to clearly set the intent for the journey, model the correct behaviors, lead with an understood set of values, communicate clearly and with sincerity, and set clear expectations and guardrails for the culture to thrive within. It’s the team’s job to bring their best game every day and to execute the game plan to the very best of their ability. Like any great sports team, a culture is built by motivation, communication, training, encouragement, and celebrating both small and significant successes.

Culture is the field on which the strategy plays. A vibrant and functional culture is like a blanket that embraces, protects, and nurtures the strategy. A company without a strategy lacks direction. A strategy without a culture that understands or embraces it is like a sports team without spirit.

Understanding the relationship between culture and strategy. 

1. Strategy drives focus and direction while culture is the emotional, organic habitat in which a company’s strategy lives or dies.

2. Strategy is just the headline on the company’s story–culture needs a clearly understood common language to embrace and tell the story that includes mission, vision, values, and clear expectations.

3. Strategy is about intent and ingenuity and culture determines and measures desire, engagement, and execution.

4. Strategy lays down the rules for playing the game, and culture fuels the spirit for how the game will be played.

5. Strategy is imperative for differentiation but a vibrant culture delivers the strategic advantage.

6. Culture is built or eroded every day. How you climb the hill and whether it’s painful, fun, positive, or negative defines the journey.

7. When culture embraces strategy, execution is scalable, repeatable, and sustainable.

8. Culture is a clear competitive advantage.

9. Culture must be monitored to understand the health and engagement of your organization.

10. Strategy and culture both require the clarity and power of brand to bring them seamlessly together.

Image: Flickr user certifiable.nl

Whenever you start a project, you should have a plan for finishing it.

One outcome is to declare victory, to find that moment when you have satisfied your objectives and reached a goal.

The other outcome, which feels like a downer but is almost as good, is to declare failure, to realize that you’ve run out of useful string and it’s time to move on. I think the intentional act of declaring becomes an essential moment of learning, a spot in time where you consider inputs and outputs and adjust your strategy for next time.

If you are unable to declare, then you’re going to slog, and instead of starting new projects based on what you’ve learned, you’ll merely end up trapped. I’m not suggesting that you flit. A project might last a decade or a generation, but if it is to be a project, it must have an end.

One of the challenges of an open-ended war or the Occupy movement is that they are projects where failure or victory wasn’t understood at the beginning. While you may be tempted to be situational about this, to know it when you see it, to decide as you go, it’s far more powerful and effective to define victory or failure in advance.

Declare one or the other, but declare.

There are two problems with this strategy:

A. By the time the fear subsides, it will be too late. By the time you’re not afraid of what you were planning to start/say/do, someone else will have already done it, it will already be said or it will be irrelevant. The reason you’re afraid is that there’s leverage here, something might happen. Which is exactly the signal you’re looking for.

B. The fear certainly helps you do it better. The fear-less one might sleep better, but sleeping well doesn’t always lead to your best work. The fear can be your compass, it can set you on the right path and actually improve the quality of what you do.

Listen to your fear but don’t obey it.

This year, fewer than 40% of voting age Americans will actually vote.

A serious glitch in self-marketing, I think.

If you don’t vote because you’re trying to teach politicians a lesson, you’re tragically misguided in your strategy. The very politicians you’re trying to send a message to don’t want you to vote. Since 1960, voting turnouts in mid-term elections are down significantly, and there’s one reason: because of TV advertising.

Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent’s supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they’re all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded.

The astonishing thing is that voters haven’t figured this out. As the scumminess and nastiness of campaigning and governing has escalated and the flakiness of candidates appears to have escalated as well, we’ve largely abdicated the high ground and permitted selfish partisans on both sides to hijack the system.

Voting is free. It’s fairly fast. It doesn’t make you responsible for the outcome, but it sure has an impact on what we have to live with going forward. The only thing that would make it better is free snacks.

Even if you’re disgusted, vote. Vote for your least unfavorite choice. But go vote.

According to private-company intelligence firm CB Insights, now is a particularly bad time to try to raise money if you’re a company built on top of Twitter.

The ecosystem of third-party Twitter apps has seen a 50% decline in early-stage investment over the past year. Whether it’s due to Twitter’s evolving business model or due to the number and nature of new apps on the market, investors have decidedly cooled on “pure play” Twitter applications in the past 12 months.

Between June 2008 and May 2009, a total of $21.6 million was pumped into Twitter-based startups. However, between June 2009 and this May, that number had dropped to just $10.4 million. This number would include such deals as TweetPhoto’s $2.6 million Series A, around $2 million for oneforty, and a round of an undisclosed amount for TwitVid from DFJ.

The number of deals have seemed to hold steady, but the amount per round has dropped by about half year-over-year.

So why are investors becoming so squeamish about third-party Twitter apps?

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Third-Party Apps and Twitter’s Strategy

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Just before Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, the company announced it had acquired iPhone app Tweetie. By adopting an official iPhone app, Twitter had taken a step into almost virgin territory: It had moved ever so slightly away from its core product, a microblog service, and had begun thinking about consumer features that could potentially lead to more users and more revenue.

Both developers and VCs saw this move as a loud and clear signal to those who had built their businesses on top of Twitter’s platform. The message was succinct as it was ecosystem-altering: Make way.

In other words, if you had made a business around developing a Twitter-based feature as a third-party app, and the company saw some profit in making that function part of an official, internal feature, you’d better watch your back and beef up your value proposition.

Within months, Twitter rolled out official apps for Android and BlackBerry as well. They also announced their ad platform.

Were developers and entrepreneurs shaken? Absolutely. Was this strategy in Twitter’s best interest? You bet.

While third-party apps have drifted toward the shallow end of the investment pool, Twitter itself has been raising healthy rounds to continue growing its staff and infrastructure. In September 2009, the startup closed a $100 million round, just a few months after closing another round in February. Apparently, buying into small companies with features built on top of another company’s core product has not been as attractive as going to the source itself.

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How Third-Party Apps Can Still Get Funding

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Back in April, we reported that investors were less than bullish on third-party Twitter apps. Venrock’s David Pakman asked the question on everyone’s mind at the time: “Where are there currently opportunities that won’t risk overlapping with Twitter’s current or upcoming features?”

Interested parties should read the rest of that post, which contains advice from a panel of VCs. Pakman continued to summarize, “There’s a huge amount of data being thrown out by Twitter. Going through the data and finding value for consumers and businesses seems a lot smarter than making features.”

Over the next few months, expect to see only the most savvy entrepreneurs securing funding for Twitter apps. Those apps will probably integrate with other services, à la TweetDeck and Seesmic, and they will likely offer revenue-creating features that Twitter isn’t currently exploring.

What’s your take on trends for third-party-app startup funding? We’d love to get your insights in the comments.

It’s laughably easy to find someone to critique a sentence, to find a missing apostrophe or worry about your noun-verb agreement.

Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to find someone who can tell you that a paragraph is dull, or out of place.

But finding people to rearrange the chapters, to criticize the very arc of what you’re building, to give you substantive feedback on your strategy–that’s insanely valuable and rare.

Perhaps one criticism in a hundred is actually a useful and generous contribution in your quest to reorganize things for the better.

[And for those in need of subtitles, this isn't a post about your next novel. It's about your business, your career and your life.]

Four people tell you that there was a typo on the third slide in your presentation. A generous and useful editor (hard to call them a consultant), though, points out that you shouldn’t be doing presentations at all, and your time would be better spent meeting in small groups with your best clients.

By Seth Godin: http://sethgodin.typepad.com

There is so much I want to write about the #LikeMinds conference and summit that I could go on for weeks. (And I may yet.) For now, all I can do is give you a glimpse of what is to come, and promise you a deluge of strategic, operational, and tactical insights into how to deploy, integrate and manage social communications.

Feel free to keep calling it Social Media if you must, but I am moving on to “Social Communications” until I find a better term.

Why the change in vernacular? Two reasons: 1. Terminology matters. Using the right words is important. 2. It never was about the media. Not for one second. The reason why so many people are confused about this, from integration and strategy to implementation, management and measurement is because of the focus on the media. Stop. Just stop. Think. Refocus. What are we talking about here? (Trust me, it isn’t the media.)

And if this is the part where you expect me to say “it isn’t about the media, it’s about people,” you’re only half right. Cliches aside, it’s about people, sure. It’s about a lot of things, really. It. But at its most basic level, all we have been talking about is communications. That’s it. Twitter, Facebook, the internet, mobile, all the technology, the media, the platforms, they’re things. They’re boxes. Pipes and wires and glass. There’s a bigger picture here that is tool-agnostic, universal, and easy to understand, define and reframe if we just take a couple of steps back and change our perspective by a fraction of a degree (which is what we did at the Summit.)

This stuff really isn’t brain surgery. How Social Communications can be engineered into your organization, it’s a lot of moving parts, sure, and it’s hard work if you want to do it right, but it doesn’t take quantum physicists to deconstruct the processes, methodologies and best practices. If Likeminds proved anything, it’s that beyond the presentations and show-and-tell sessions common to most “Social Media” conferences, when people who work in the Social Communications enablement space 150 hours a week get together to work out the kinks, the kinks get worked out.

Incidentally, perhaps the reason why so many companies and so many would-be consultants and “gurus” are still confused about how this all works is because we’ve been using the wrong terminology all along. How can you understand something you can’t even properly name?

Social Communications it is, then. For now. It isn’t a big leap really, but try it on for size. Drive it around for a few days, see if it grows on you. If it does, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll keep trying.

I don’t have time to write a real post before catching my flight back to the US. I leave Bovey Castle in Dartmoor before dawn to catch a train from Exeter to London. Then it’s the Heathrow Express, then Delta to ATL and ATL to GSP. So I can’t share videos, pictures and thoughts with you yet. And my presentation from the conference will be available on Slideshare in a few days, so hang tight. I need to add some commentary to it before I upload it.

Until then, you can get caught up on videos, photos and insights from the Like Minds conference here and here. Among the keynote speakers: Ogilvy Worldwide’s John Bell, Chris Brogan, Orange’s Yann Gourvennec, Joanne Jacobs and Jonathan Akwue, who are all brilliant beyond words. No matter what presentation you watch, trust me, you’ll learn something valuable.

One last thought I want to leave you with before I go try and grab a few hours of sleep before my early ride out of here: We’re going to crack this nut wide open for you. Social Communications, the whole bit, we’re going to lay it out for you, piece by piece, brick by brick. The white paper that will come out of this summit will outline a lot of it for you. Much more than we expected. The level of clarity we reached through the exercise surprised me, frankly. That’s what happens when the right people sit together and focus on the right things long enough to get something done. Why we don’t do it more, I don’t know.

So hang tight, get caught up on all of the #LikeMinds content, and I will be back with more updates throughout the week.

Oh, and please help me spread the word about Red Chair Portland on March 11 and 12. I am updating my deck to include some of the key findings and insights our group worked out during the summit, so… it might even be worth flying into PDX for this one.

Cheers,

Olivier