Watch a child at Christmas time. Carefully.

It starts with the imagining of what Christmas might bring, whether it be gifts or family, and it continues through Christmas and beyond. And when you extract the essence of that entire process it really isn’t about gifts. It’s about dreams and dreaming.

We are more than a little bit justifiably chastised for our modern emphasis on giving and getting gifts at Christmas. As adults our ideas for those gifts are often about things, whether they be a new blouse, a watch, a book, or even a computer. For children however, even if the gifts they hope to receive are physical and tangible, they are about far more than the items themselves. They provide a gateway to the imagination and the endless possibilities that lay in that rainbow world.

The toys received are the obvious means of getting this, as a doll or game or electric car offer children the chance to add their own created world around those, an amazing form of augmented reality. Books do that too, which is of course part of why they are also excellent gifts, with their ability to bring those children into a new world they’ve never known before. But even new clothes, artfully chosen with the spirit of the boy or girl who get them, can be a gateway to imagining where they might go or be with those items.

I remember so many of those types of gifts from my own childhood. Whether it be a toy race car I drove over the imaginary streets on chairs and couches, along the driveway and in the bushes, and through the closets and kitchens of my youth. In the pages of the first Sherlock Holmes book I received, with its gateway to a London puzzle world of steamy fog-filled cobblestone alleys and adventures I had never known. And even when I was given a tiny reel-to-reel Aiwa branded tape recorder, which allowed me to create and record my first very own radio plays, complete with sound effects.

Christmas was then a time where the gifts were only the start, catalysts to unchain the mind and heart and allow imagining a world where we all could be and do anything.

In this Christmas, where we as adults have so many heavier thoughts preoccupying us, it seems like a good time to find find a way back into our hearts and so powerful creative powers. To look around all we have in hearth, home, gifts, and family, to take stock and let our souls take flight just like the children.

To dream something big and wonderful again, both for ourselves and those close to us. Because it is at the start of dreams that our future begins.

Merry Christmas everyone.

The economy is finally recovering a bit. Besides reading the articles and seeing the statistics, you can see other signs. Commuting traffic is picking up. The line at Starbucks is longer than it used to be in the morning. Apartment and Office rents are slowly climbing.

Recovering it is, but a recovering economy comes with a guarded nature for those on the inside of it all. Employers are willing to spend on advertising and manufacturing ramp-ups for more secure bets on their product line, but often much later in their product development area on brand extensions, and later still on major new product efforts.

And hiring? The old adage that companies in aggregate make as few hires as possible in a recovering economy is still very true. Except for “critical” new hires (whatever that may mean to you) companies are very reluctant to hire just about anyone until they are convinced things are coming their way. That includes both their own internal positions as well as external consultants who could provide a real kick to their creativity, productivity, and innovation.

The result of these delayed investments, both in people as well as in capacity, is a much slower growing economy than it has to be. But together, by taking a little more risk personally, we can all do something that might just benefit both your own enterprises (by jumping them ahead of their competitors) as well as the country as a whole. So this Christmas, I’m suggesting you consider giving that still recovering economy a few very special gifts that just might help everyone.

Gift #1) Buy something from a friend or family member’s new “startup” enterprise. You can “re-gift” it of course, which is even better because by doing so you pass on the discovery you made to someone else. The act of buying something from that startup is a powerful decision because of all it causes to happen simultaneously. It supports the startup with much needed “proof” that what it is working on is of value, provides cash flow, and helps pay those whose work and creativity helped make those new products happen. It is also far more meaningful as a purchase this season because you are directly giving back to those you know and care for — in a highly meaningful way.

Gift #2) Invest in somebody else’s startup. This doesn’t have to be a big investment. You can go to Kickstarter to find some interesting small ones from people you don’t know. And you can just float a small investment (I’ll let you define “small”) in a company one or more of your friends or family members has started. They gain by getting additional funds at what just might be a critical time for them. You gain by getting stock or similar benefits in something that might turn out to be big.

Gift #3) Donate something useful other than money to a struggling enterprise that needs it. It could be a serviceable laptop you’re retiring. It could be excess office furniture from that last restructuring you did after the economy tanked the last time. It could even be “your time” in helping with a challenging planning problem a friend is having.

Gift #4) Take a risk and hire a new employee you might not have hired under ordinary circumstances. Just hiring anyone can seem risky in an economy still wobbly and not yet on its feet. But hiring someone who seems smart and creative but otherwise “different” might trigger concerns in just about anybody. My advice is to take a risk… On somebody. Especially somebody who you think might just challenge your thinking. It’s good for your company because you will be breaking a well-known pattern that entrepreneurs (once they gain some traction in their business and think they know where they’re heading) tend to hire people like those they already have. It’s good for the economy because you will be adding to the national workforce.

Gift #5). Hire an outside consultant to help you do something different. You may think you know all you need but the pool of outstanding consultants out there is equipped with skills it might take you decades to develop. And don’t just go to the big companies for this. You will get significant and often far more value from someone who is in a small consultancy or is even a sole practitioner. Sure, this is yet another risk. But besides again stimulating the economy by hiring (on a small scale) you will also get great support from someone you might never have involved otherwise. It could be in areas like product innovation, distribution strategy, manufacturing processes, and more. Outside consultants also often have a far broader knowledge of alternate business models, processes, or technologies than your internal people do. And — depending on who you pick — you might just find someone who has built businesses with billions of dollars of revenues to their credit, has a string of over 30 patents, and has supported more types and names of companies than you might ever imagine. (Like me, for instance. Write me at ideas@stranova.com.)

So, entrepreneurs, why not take this Christmas and find a very different way of giving back to the very economy that has allowed you the success you already have? We can almost guarantee it will make a difference both for your business and for the economy as a whole.

And the miracle of such innovations is that often after the collision has happened, the resulting creative idea seems so incredibly obvious.

In biology, Mother Nature has known this for a very long time. Take the estuary, for example, in its strictest definition a place where freshwater from inland rivers mixes together freely with coastal salt water. Both the fresh water and salt water biological zones have their own varieties of teeming life. But when you mix the two both ecosystems become challenged and rupture, especially when that mix first happens, such as when a river becomes so flooded from unusual rains that it charts a new path out to the coast.

The biological result is explosive. The water turns brackish. Fluids and nourishment for one ecosystem are naturally toxic to the other. Plants, fish, and animals forced from the fresh water into the salt water generally either die or run back to the safety of their original homes. This is a bloodbath that goes on every day all over the world, not quietly and with much devastation.

But there are many that find a way to survive. By exploring how to live, with conscious thought from some and by autonomic reactions from others, from the highest forms of life to the microorganisms. Some do not make it. But for those that do and for the resulting region, this land of intermixing ecosystems is known by biologists as a region with some of the most rapidly evolving lifeforms in the world. And where it happens on a grand scale, grand new creations emerge. Such as the glorious Manatee that thrives in the waters of Florida’s everglades, something that would likely never have emerged like this anywhere else.

One of the more interesting aspects of this to me is how, even though many of us are quite aware of rapid biological evolution at the boundaries of the estuary, we do not try this enough in product or service innovations of our own. We instead tend to try to innovate within the existing silos we have already established as our own turf. In the computer world, examples are to refine things like battery life or processor speed. But the result is just a better computer rather than something truly radical.

One wonderful exception to this is the Ford Motor Company’s most recent EV+ line of hybrid cars, which somehow found a way to create brilliant innovation by exploring the collision of two seemingly unrelated technology ideas.

What were the ideas? The first was of course the hybrid car, which in itself represents the integration of electric and gas engine drives in a single vehicle. And the second was the software-based Personal Assistant, which is most commonly seen in smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s new Android feature “Google Now” (currently present in its “Jelly Bean” OS iteration). With the former, SIRI answers questions on demand via local and remote databases, and uses a version of artificial intelligence to come up with what it thinks is the best response. With the latter, when you pull up a Google search screen in the latest Android OS version, the device anticipates where you might need to be going based on appointments coming up, looks up routes and traffic conditions without being asked, and then tells you — without being asked — when you should probably head out so you will arrive on time.

What do these two ideas have in common? Not much, you might think. But what Ford engineers did was take the conventional Hybrid concept and first of all have the car “learn” where home might be based on GPS information in the car (and other data you might manually enter on your own). And its Hybrid, like other Hybrid vehicles, is constantly alternating the use of electric power and gas fuel consumption, all with the idea of balancing to achieve what its onboard computers think is the right mix of both.

But here is where the new idea kicks in. In Ford’s new EV+ vehicles the onboard systems have another calculation they make. That calculation is to figure out how far you are from what the car thinks is “home” for you. Why is that calculation important? Because “home” is where you can recharge your vehicle, a unique location (so far at least) that has a different “meaning” to the car’s systems. And if there is enough electric power to get you home without needing to run the gas engine to recharge it, the car can automatically switch over to electric power full time rather than burn more costly (and carbon dioxide emissions-generating) gas in your car.  (We should point out that that the EV+ also can learn other destinations where charging is possible.  ”Home” is just one example.)

It does this automatically, without you having to think about it, using the concept of “knowing where you are and quite a bit about where you’re going” (something the “Personal Assistant” software does in smartphones too) to provide you with the most cost-effective use of energy for your vehicle. (The new EV+ does more than this too, of course. You can read about it here.)

And maybe it seems a stretch to think of this as like Mother Nature’s Estuaries, where biological innovation is at its most rapid and unconventional because of the collision of ecosystems. But that’s just the point. It is a collision of seemingly unrelated ecosystems that has resulted in an innovation that probably very soon will just seem so obvious to all of us. Like we should have come up with this on our own long ago.

But we would not have without forcing the disruptive thinking that bringing together seemingly unrelated ideas makes possible.

Those working on long-term strategic moves in technology know how important it is to manage their supplier connections. But where in the past it was as simple as making sure you were first to acquire supply and perhaps even locking up commitments to a certain time period of exclusivity, the game is changing. Fast and often in ways that competitors not only cannot easily track but also if they do not move fast enough they may find themselves permanently out of business in critical ways.

To illustrate this, let us take a look at three critical strategic move-makers and some of the latest press surrounding some of their tricks to keep them ahead of the competition.

First on our list is the recent storm of product announcements and high-level rumors you have all seen in the tablet and laptop area. Samsung, HP, and even Intel recently released information on their latest forays into the ultra-thin and ultra-hot PC laptop market. Apple demonstrated its new dramatically thinner and high-resolution MacBook Pro laptop line, complementing both its iPad3 and updated MacBook Air releases earlier in the year. The very next week, Microsoft demonstrated its Surface line of tablet PCs, to various degrees of praise and derision, both because it was about time they did something like this and because maybe it was too late. The following week Google unveiled the new and well-reviewed Nexus tablet. Details leaked shortly thereafter about Amazon’s near-term and possibly rushed changeover of its Kindle Fire tablet product line. And behind the scenes, rumors were coming out that Apple would release a mini iPad not too long before Christmas.

While many reviewing these products were focusing on the performance, specifications, and shipment schedules for each of them, it was quickly emerging that some of the more important battles might just be happening behind the scenes in the supply chain for each of these. And Apple was winning all of them.

What was happening was that Apple was both locking up the supply of precision overseas aluminum machining capacity [1] as well as even a high percentage of the availability of the very high quality aluminum raw materials needed to produce the cases for all their products, from their Australian raw materials suppliers.[2] Similar reports are coming out about Apple having cornered the market on the highest-quality touchscreen display materials for the iPad, the high resolution displays for the latest MacBook Pros, and presumably the same suppliers to support the rumored new iPad mini whenever it is released.

Meanwhile, China, who of course is one of the main countries where Apple mass-manufactures its products, has been making its own strategic moves in manufacturing as well. Much of the mainstream press has been preoccupied with its rapid emergence as the high volume and low-cost manufacturing source in a wide variety of industries. Behind the great wall there, however, also emerges a very interesting battle regarding the critical rare earth materials used in many of the world’s highest performance and miniature electronics products.

Just as the Middle East was gifted with enormous reserves of crude oil just by location alone, so too has China received the major benefit of controlling virtually 95% of the world’s production capacity for rare earth materials. Just as OPEC can manipulate prices and control key parts of the world’s economy just by adjusting the rate of oil shipping from the region, so too can China direct much of the world’s capability in high-end electronics.

In this latter area the movers and shakers are not just sitting around of course. As a recent article in Forbes Magazine notes [3], more than 35 major rare earth exploration projects are in place and moving rapidly outside of China, precisely to deal with this situation. China knows the critical importance of its lead, however, publicly announcing new export caps for its rare earth materials to preserve that lead in the near term. And while the rest of the world is screaming about those caps and demanding they be lowered, China – along with others of course – is establishing its own beachhead on rare earth mining investments outside its borders. [4], [5]

And as a third example of the Supply Chain wars, consider the moves Amazon.com has already put in place to provide major barriers for others to succeed in its ecommerce supply chain. To a casual observer Amazon is simply a volume distributor of both “real” and digital goods, with the benefits and lower costs not having brick-and-mortar stores and high sales volume can offer. But the true secret of Amazon’s long-term financial success is looking more and more on how it manages service fees associated with its supply chains. And through locking up contracts for such fees with those supply chains, it ensures both highly-competitive bottom-line prices for its end customers while at the same time providing far more lucrative profits than most people probably would imagine.

A great summary of what Amazon has been able to pull off in this area was in the July 9, 2012 article in the Financial Times entitled “How Amazon Changed ecommerce”. [6]

For all three giants of industry, Apple, China, and Amazon, as well as the existing and hopeful future competitors to them, the messages from this are becoming very clear. While the products those companies develop must continue to be the best in class, the supply chain is once again emerging as one of the key risk factors to manage. Both for those who are already in the lead in their industries as well as those who seek to reach the top themselves.

References cited in this post:

1. “Apple said to be Hogging Metal Chassis Supply”, 6/26/12 article in TechReport
2. “With Tablet, Microsoft Takes Aim at Hardware Missteps,” New York Times, 6/24/12
3. “Rare Earth Minerals: An End To China’s Monopoly Is In Sight”, Forbes Online, 6/8/12
4. Great Western Minerals Group and Ganzhou Qiandong Rare Earth Group Sign Rare Earth Separation Agreement, press release dated 6/10/12
5. “Rare Earth Mining in South Africa”, Rare Earth Investing News, 6/18/12
6. “How Amazon changed ecommerce”, Financial Times online, 6/9/12

WHAT is happening is an amazing application of crowdsourcing on a scale never before attempted. It is an interactive game called “Paths Out of Poverty” and created by Jane McGonigal, a subversive designer who specializes in alternate reality games that are played on a mass scale. Her games are focused on real-world problems, with a goal of sourcing real solutions while practicing what she calls “the science of positive psychology”. Oh yes and: she hopes some game designer practicing this might get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Really.

If you want to know more about Jane, check out the TED Video below. It lasts about 20 minutes but it is well worth your time.

The IDEA is to grab thousands of new ideas for finding “Paths Out of Poverty” for people throughout the world, with the goal of creating a roadmap for change on a scale the world has never seen before. With you and I and everybody else out there collaborating on a grand scale to submit what the designers call “New Evidence”, “New Capacities”, “New Rules” and “New Stories” to help tilt the balance of power to help alleviate Poverty throughout the world. Yes. Really. The short video below illustrates what they’re talking about.

WHEN this change is going to happen starts April 3, 2012, at 9am PDT, 12 PM EDT, 1 PM BRT [that’s Rio de Janeiro time], 7 PM EAT [Nairobi], and 11 PM ICT [Bangkok] time. It will run 48 hours. And YOU need to sign up. Now. Really. We need you.

Click here to do it. Then come back. We’ll be here.

WHO is sponsoring it is an organization called “Catalysts for Change”, an Institute for the Future project supported with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and in collaboration with their Global Searchlight Partners. You can find more about this particular set of change-makers by clicking here.

WHERE this is all going to happen is everywhere. Even where there is no direct connection to the internet, ideas can be gathered and stored for upload later. And for those with internet connections you can upload as it happens.

48 hours. Not a great amount of time out of your life to set aside to make a big difference in our future and those of our grandchildren. So for those of you out there that already think of yourselves as “Game Changers”, it’s time to step up and be part of this. And for those of you who aren’t quite sure you’re up to it, I’d like to just remind you of the famous line by the even more famous basketball legend Michael Jordan. The one where he admitted to never being perfect about making 100% of the baskets he tried for, and the one where he acknowledged missing 100% of the baskets he never attempted.

It is time to stand up and make your own attempts. Because you too are also going to miss 100% of the ones you don’t try for in the first place. The world is going to change. For the better. We just need your help in making a push.

I’ll be there too. Write us at ideas@stranova.com to tell us what you think about this.

This builds on other divestitures LIz Claiborne made this summer, including among other things the sale of fragrance licenses to Elizabeth Arden.

Lest you think this was all about just cutting debt and finding a way to survive in a tough economy, take a look at what Liz Claiborne kept. Those included Juicy Couture, kate spade, and Lucky Brand. All of these, unlike what it dropped, are aimed at higher-income customers. And in this particular recession, like several before it, higher-income customers continue to be some of the best customers. Lucky Brand reported a 24% in sales in September, for example, and kate spade’s designer accessories logged in a sales increase of over 114%.

Recessions, perhaps even more so than the beginnings of economic expansions, represent an excellent time to clean house. So even though it may seem a bit early for “spring cleaning”, Liz Claiborne (or whatever it’s new name will become) has strategically elected that fall 2011 is a great time to get rid of the old stuff and focus on the new.

It’s a good model for all of us as we all plan what innovations and strategies to lead our own organizations forward into 2012.

Need to refocus your own product portfolio, and maybe redirect your own strategies in a new direction? Contact us at ideas@stranova.com.

Recognize this? It’s the signature tune heard every time a Nokia phone boots up. It’s also the default ring tone in many of their devices. And even while Nokia looks to reinvent itself in so many other ways, the still massive Finnish mobile telecom company is looking to this now almost 18 year old part of its past as a trademark for the future. Read on for how this fits into a make-or-break rebranding strategy for this possibly still formidable competitor.

Nokia’s once dominant role in this industry is legendary. By moving quickly to digital technology when the previous market leader Motorola was stuck in an analog world, Nokia took the lead market position seemingly overnight. With strong hardware and software technology coupled with a powerful international market reach, it held the lead position for the better part of two decades.

Not a bad run for any company.* But just as Motorola stumbled in the face of the Finnish giant’s digital juggernaut in the 90s, so also Nokia missed the equally rapid move to smartphone technology here early in the 21st century, first led by RIM, then Apple, and now via partners running Google’s Android OS.

Earlier this year, Nokia’s new CEO Stephen Elop moved to deal with the company’s rapidly declining smartphone market share decline in a big way. By partnering with Microsoft to make the Windows Phone 7 OS the new replacement for its once-heralded Symbian and even its newer MeeGo approaches, it tied its future in a big way to Elop’s former employers in Redmond, Washington.

The challenge in making such a sweeping strategic shift is that it is easy to lose your corporate identity in this industry where the OS characteristics overshadow any other form of brand identity. Handset manufacturer HTC has made its own attempts to differentiate, with its impressive “HTC Sense” UI overlay that runs atop the Android OS and a strong attempt at corporate branding overall. Samsung, with yet another UI overlay and one of the best displays in the business, has also worked to differentiate itself.

In each case, however, Samsung and HTC have phones that look and act quite similarly to each other, all because of the Android OS running their best-selling handsets. Interestingly enough both companies also are and will be offering new Windows Phone 7 OS devices as well, but even then the dominance of the OS makes it hard to tell them apart.

So how in this world of intense competition will Nokia differentiate itself with its Windows OS phone? Based on what has already been leaked, I expect industrial design of the handset itself to be different, though how much it can be remains to be seen. Nokia has given far stronger hints that it will be making some significant alterations to the base Windows OS as well, likely resulting both in key changes to the look and feel of the UI.

And beyond that is something we’ve only just learned about, the recreation of the signature Nokia tune itself.

The company announced this with a worldwide contest launched September 5th, with entries due 4 weeks after that.** The starting point is the original Nokia tune, itself an excerpt from a 1902 solo guitar piece originally written by Francisco Tarrega; you can hear it yourself in measures 13 to 16 of that original piece. It became part of Nokia’s handset branding all the way back in 1993.

That little riff, by the way, is heard a lot more often than any other guitar piece ever composed. According to one calculation it is played over 1.8 billion times every day around the planet, or some 20,000 times per second.

It may not seem like a big deal, but that’s an incredibly powerful brand identity. People still need to see an iPhone or an Android before they know you have one. With Nokia’s products, your ears know the story even if the phone is in someone’s pocket. Nokia may be making a lot of changes to transform its future but it isn’t giving up on what may be its most recognized brand asset around the world.

So what exactly are they doing in reaching out to us with this new contest? It’s about recreating that iconic tune for modern times. Something distinctive and yet easily recognized everywhere.

Early entries vary from the symphonic “Nokiorchestra” to a 60s smoky nightclub version “Nokia Jazz Theme” to a strange but popular one called “The Great Marvelous”. If you want to hear some of these, check out this website excerpt of entries already posted.

Which will end up being the new sound of Nokia? To you and I it probably doesn’t really matter. But to Nokia the hope is not only that the reworked tune is something catchy but also that their new phones will catch on even more.

May the best song win. And perhaps also a previously almost pronounced dead competitor will rise again from the ashes.

* The 20 year run from boom to bust is an all-too-common one in modern companies. Check out our post and podcast on “The 20 Year Syndrome” by clicking here. As you listen, don’t forget this was written over 5 years ago, before one of the companies we talked about there, Google, saw its Android OS take off, before Microsoft restructured itself yet again, and before AOL went through even further implosion. Funny thing, though: time has proven the arguments put forth in that podcast even more accurate now more than half a decade later.

** Full contest information is available here.

To a large extent, the challenge with Strategic Planning is somewhat similar to engaging in a regular exercise program.  If you’re already doing it, although you may have started it thoughtfully in all likelihood you have already fallen into a rut — with the original reasons for getting into it long forgotten and you’re running the process “on automatic”, without truly and deeply addressing your now current needs in this area.  On the other hand, if you aren’t doing it already, you are likely daunted by the looming challenge of taking it on and questioning whether you really have the will to follow through on it.

So how do you avoid the rut of a ritualized process and when is “real” Strategic Planning something your organization should do, however small or successful you already are?

Good question, but at the root of both sides of this question is actually a far more fundamental and important one:  when do you need to consider a different sort of planning than has guided you so far, something bigger than your normal tactical planning and something more challenging than just “turning the crank” on last year’s epic meeting process on this subject?

The answers to this are many, but let me set out just a few of the “whens” that may help you justify a strategic leap into a different planning process.

1. When you have the cash to invest in new initiatives and really would like to do more than just “more of the same thing”.
   
2. When your sales growth is slowing even while your competitors seem to keep growing and your customers are interested in more.
   
3. When for some reason or another you’re considering dropping one of the products or services you already have, and you now have an opening to try something new.
   
4. When the strategic path you are on looks like it may require significant shifts in the skill sets required of your organization.
   
5. When it looks like something your company does could be readily outsourced to another and be able to increase quality without higher cost, all at the same time.  This could be an opportunity to retrain resources or deploy existing ones into new territory.
   
6. When an unexpected potential strategic partner reaches out to you to collaborate on a new opportunity.
   
7. And finally (for this “quick list” at least), when you are considering changing what we refer to as the core “essence” of the business. This could include considering shifting what you consider to be the core purpose of the business, the means by which the business delivers its products or services, and/or the values by which it operates.

A good example of this last “when” might be where you have decided to shift to operate in a more Sustainable Manner, with far more attention to principles such as natural resource conservation, recyclability, or use of renewable materials, for example.  Initiating significant changes in how you practice Corporate Social Responsibility, which might include reaching out in bigger ways to your community, for example, would also be a case where your values are changing.  In both cases, those changing values might suggest jettisoning old products or services, creating entirely new ones, and/or changing fundamental ways in which your business operates.

In all these examples, the larger the opportunity the more important it is to consider some deeper approach to figuring out how your organization should grow.  But how do you do that, especially for those with smaller organizations with minimal resources to make this happen?

Unfortunately for all the value that Strategic Planning (and its highly related sibling, Innovation Development) may offer, the traditional approaches to doing this have grown into such a massive commitment and complex process that for most people the only common word to describe the process is inertia — and on a large scale.

Here at Stranova, we have found the trick to avoiding this for your enterprise lies in two key words:  Focus and Will.

By Focus we mean starting with a clear understanding of that essence of your organization — in all the ways we’ve talked about briefly in this essay as well as through some other lenses, as well as about the dynamics of the business ecosystem you operate with.  Then you zoom in on what are the most promising opportunities your essence and ecosystem may be opening up for you.  Your plans do need to be thorough and systemic, but focus will afford you the chance to avoid time-consuming distractions in the planning process.

After all, if one of the “whens” listed earlier in this post is why you’re considering Strategic Planning at all, you probably already have some degree of Focus as to what you want to investigate already.

And by Will we mean taking the time to harness the full power of each and every individual in your organization to move quickly on the strategic initiatives you agree to pursue.  Collective Will can literally move mountains if you have a clear Focus on what you want to make happen, why it’s important, and the process to get you there.

Yes it is hard work.  But once you’ve put your first “new” Strategic Plan in place, you can be assured the value it will create for your company is already taking shape.

Want to know more about how to make this happen in your enterprise, without breaking the bank or slowing down the good things you’re already doing?  We can help.  Contact us at ideas@stranova.com

A unique three-day virtual conference on the subject of Sustainability as it relates to Information and Communications Technology (“The SmartICT Conference”) just concluded yesterday in cyberspace.  That conference, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry (“The Important Conference You Can’t Go To”), featured presentations from experts in a variety of information technology areas.  For those that are interested, the excellent presentations from that conference have been archived and will still be available to view for the next several months.

Although the final tallies of those that attended have not been made public, I am sure it included many good corporate citizens and also more than a few “Green Tech” visionaries in attendance.  Each of which was looking to apply the learnings there to lower their corporation’s overall energy consumption and systemic carbon footprint, using the latest breakthroughs in “telepresencing”, Smart Grids, and advanced technologies for data centers such as virtualization.

All good, indeed, with bottom line profitable benefits while making for a greener overall world if executed well.

At least on the surface, we have indeed come a long way from legendary economist Milton Friedman’s famous (and some would say even notorious) 1970 statement in an essay in the New York Times that “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits”.  He later of course shortened that to an even more famous quote:  “The Business of Business is Business”.

But how far have we really come?  Unfortunately, maybe not that far at all, at least according to McKinsey Quarterly’s just-published global survey of “How Companies Manage Sustainability”.*  As their top-level survey summary says, while over half of the world’s corporate executives see “Sustainability — the management of environmental, social, or government issues — [as] ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ important”, only 30% of those same executives actively seek ways to either “invest in sustainability” or “embed it in their business practices”.  [All quotes were taken directly from the McKinsey survey article.]  And — sadly — those same executives say the number one reason they are working on Sustainability is for “Maintaining or Improving [their] Corporate Reputation”.  Not because it is good for the planet or those of us whose ancestors might need a place to stay sometime.

Okay.  So maybe Business does not get it completely, and maybe Milton Friedman’s 40 year-old conclusion has passed on to the current generation of Corporate Leaders more than we realize.  What about governments, who have some power to mandate that corporations act differently, or all of us as individuals?

Again, on the surface, governments do seem to be getting the message and are trying to make a difference.  They ask for important bipartisan studies of the world’s various problems and make quite a bit of noise especially on human rights, corporate ethics, and environmental issues on a regular basis.

One of the most impressive of such studies in recent years was a 2006 700-page report developed under the leadership of economist Sir Nicholas Stern for the government of the United Kingdom.  In it he first noted that if we as a human species take no actions on carbon emissions worldwide that there is a 75% chance that worldwide temperatures will rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius over the next 50 years.  That could mean rising sea levels with over 200 million people having to move just because of that alone, extreme weather patterns will become far more common, crop yields will decline, water will become even more of a precious resource around the world, and up to 40% of the world’s species might become extinct.

Stern’s report did not just stop there, however dramatic those environmental conclusions are.  He had the wisdom (and also what some would describe as the audacity) to describe the economic impact of such climate change on the world.  As just a few of his conclusions:

• Just the presence of the increased Extreme Weather could reduce the world’s GDP by up to 1%.
• If the 2 to 3 degrees Celsius temperature rise happens, GDP could drop by as much as 3%.  If the number went to 5 degrees Celsius, the GDP could drop by 10% worldwide.
• In the worst case scenarios described above, global consumption per head would drop by 20%.

If just one company “ruled” the business world, you can be sure they would take some serious action when faced with a 20% drop in revenues over time.  And even if the numbers are not completely right, you would think this would shake up a few corporate board members around the world just from considering the impact to their own personal stock portfolios alone.

And a single worldwide government would realize they had to take action too, both to protect their citizens from harm as well as to keep their own economies thriving.  At least you would think so, provided there was a least a little embedded wisdom to help them on their way.

Sadly again, this is not the case, in part precisely because there is no one super-wise company or government overseeing all of this.

In spite of now many reports concluding things as serious as those in Stern’s report — and worse — governments around the world continue to argue inside their own Parliaments and Houses of Congress and with other governments over precisely what must be done.  Major climate change summits come and go but produce little more than suggestions, proclamations, and recommendations.

Conventional politics means protecting your own turf and on a short-term basis as well, it seems.  If there is any question of that, witness the massive pollution China is producing at the same time as it grows faster than anyone else.  So much so that nearby production plants had to be shut down to allow the air to clear enough for athletes to compete in the last summer Olympics;  volunteers were also recruited in large numbers to manually clear the algae and other growths that come with polluted waters along the China coast at the same time.

So if government and business cannot get themselves organized on this, what about organizing the individual citizenry itself, maybe in new ways?  Perhaps NGOs, non-governmental organizations such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and others acting on behalf of individual citizens might be able to make a difference, but in the end they are limited by their funding, the breadth of their impact, and the unfortunate “Tower of Babel” challenge of having way too many small groups working all on slightly different objectives.

And as for human individuals themselves, they represent an even more scattered group than the NGOs, with even less depth of understanding of the issues. Some of course make the point even more strongly in the way they describe the limitations of the individual, such as how the U.K.’s  respected newspaper “The Guardian” referred to the situation in their recently-published article, “Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change”.  It featured an interview with James Lovelock, the creator of the world Gaia hypothesis.

Among the many memorable quotes from that interview was the following: “I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change.”  He went on to blame “human inertia” and democracy as two of the major reasons why nothing meaningful was getting done to deal with this situation.  Lovelock also said he felt only a major catastrophic event, such as the calving of a major glacier in Antarctica, might enough to divert us from our current lemming-like path to destruction.  As result of all that, Lovelock indicated he felt that adaptation measures, such as building seawalls to protect against rising waters, might be the only courses of action we as a species would end up considering seriously and on a large scale.

I myself am not so pessimistic to believe that individuals, NGOs, and governments cannot engage more fully to deal with the massive issue of Climate Change.  I may be naive, but I personally believe that the more those three collective powers engage with the problem of Sustainability and Climate Change, the close we will get to a “tipping point” where human inertia will slowly but inevitably begin to change its direction.

Where I do agree with the pundits, however, is that such a change might take longer than we have available to us.  So where does that leave us — or me — in what we need to do?

What I think is in fact the most powerful course of action is to come back full circle to where I started this essay with business itself as perhaps handling the rudder that just might be able to turn this ship around.  Business in fact represents what has been described as the most widespread social organizing force in the world, even before religion (though I am sure I will get a few letters from that comparison).  As Sir Nicholas Stern also noted, business on a grand scale has a lot to do.  And the largest businesses, such as Wal-Mart and Google, have tremendous power both directly (in Wal-Mart’s case) and indirectly through the power of information (in Google’s case) to cause even the biggest of governments to take heed.  If they so wish, they also have the collective organized leadership capacity to cause even bigger change.

If they want to, of course.

And is this last pronouncement possible?  Some would say yes, especially under the leadership of forums such as the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), which has produced significant measurable commitments to specific Environmental, Corporate Governance, and Socially-Responsible change, often on a grand scale that individual stakeholders, governments, and even corporate boards could not make on their own.  Coming up on its sixth year, the CGI forum, with its unique blend of corporate, NGO, and individual leadership to deal with such causes, seems to making a major difference in everyone’s lives.  Where else could the leaders of Wal-Mart and Virgin Airlines come together to launch major systemic Sustainable Change initiatives?

That said, once again we cannot just leave it up to one forum or one group of companies.  In spite of Friedman and absolutely in spite of thousands of corporate boards and management teams across the world, I believe every business has the responsibility to step up to the challenge of Sustainability in a big way.  And, further, business may in fact be the first category of social organization to actually realize the critical importance of taking on such a responsibility.

As in any such serious change, they will likely take this on first for their own long-term survival.  It is possible also that they may invest in such businesses because, as the McKinsey survey indicates, it will enhance their corporate reputations.  In the long run, though, I believe they will take it on for the same reason as they have any other major strategic initiative. It will be because it is the right thing to do for their company.

And yes they will also do it because by taking this on their company will be able to do something uniquely and strategically significant for the sustainability of the world.

Will charging for online access to newspapers really save them?  Maybe those news companies should be focusing not just on the money but instead on an even bigger opportunity to rise from the ashes.

News International (NI), which owns The London Times, announced this past week that it would begin charging for online access to its newspaper services in June.  It will not be inexpensive either.  According to an article in the March 27th edition of the Times Online website, it will cost you 1£ to read Times Online for a single day, or 2£ for a week of access — but apparently only the U.K.   The article goes on to say that International pricing for the same access will run $2/1.5£ per day or $4/3£ per week.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp owns NI, also apparently plans to implement similar charges for his other UK papers The Sun and The News of the World.

On the other side of the Atlantic, The New York Times made a similar decision to begin charging for online content. Starting in 2011, it will begin charging for access to content after readers have clicked to read more than a set number of online articles in a single month. (See the article here for more details on this.) The Financial Times online service has been following a similar model for some time, blocking access to the site after only a few articles have been accessed per month.

And The Wall Street Journal, another News Corp publication, already has an online pricing model for its newspapers.

The reason for doing all this is of course because the daily newspaper, at least in its printed incarnation, seems to be in a business death spiral. Whether it is because of the busy world we live in where the time to read has drastically diminished, the trade-off of paying for what seems like a high-cost newspaper subscription when something more pressing may seem more important, or because free online news services abound, there is no question that those subscriptions are down dramatically worldwide. When the subscriptions drop, ad revenues drop as well, forcing papers to cut back on the very content that attracted readers in the first place, which in turn convinces still more subscribers to cut off their service. Newspapers are in serious trouble.

How much trouble? According to “The Dire State of the Newspaper Industry”, an excellent summary article by Ben Parr recently published in the online site Mashable, in 2009 newspapers worldwide earned $27.564 billion in advertising revenue (the main source of income), with $24.821 billion of that from print and $2.743 billion from online sources. Sounds good, except when you consider that in 2006 newspapers made $49.275 billion in total revenue. That’s a revenue drop of over 44% in about 4 years.

No wonder your local newspaper is looking a little thin these days.

So the question becomes: will this idea of charging for online access to newspapers turn the tide for what used to be — and still are, for the most part — some of the most important publications in the world?

There is some evidence that this may work to some extent. As one example, according to Michael Massing’s article “A New Horizon for the News”, published in the September 29, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books, one newspaper, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette started charging for content in 2002, and as a result has managed to keep its circulation roughly stable at a level of 180,000 while many other newspapers have lost large percentages of subscribers. Other smaller circulation newspaper circulation successes that followed from that experiment appear to show the same result.

And charging for online access can be big business in itself. According to the same article from Massing, The Wall Street Journal has ~100 million subscribers paying between $100 and $140 a year for access to its online content, while the newsprint version is still doing well. The Financial Times, with its model of requiring you subscribe to read more than a few items per month, now has some 117,000 subscribers paying up to $299 per year for that privilege.

For all the success that these models would seem to indicate, there are some notable skeptics. As Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor of The Huffington Post, a highly successful online publication, has repeatedly said, she believes charging for online access is a losing proposition. The argument is that there is too much free material out there to justify long-term online paid subscriptions for these services.

Of course, if “everybody” starts charging than maybe the economics might shift in favor of the big services, or so it seems.

The catch with either side of this argument is, to me at least, that addressing the question of whether or not charging for online access is unfortunately badly oversimplifying the real problem — and the opportunity that it provides.

What is happening, regardless of why, is the continued evolution of a long-term sea change to how we as news consumers access news content. Baby boomers grew up in a generation that read the morning newspaper and eagerly awaited watching either CBS, NBC, or ABC in the U.S., the BBC evening news in the U.K., and equally narrowly-defined choices in other markets worldwide. Now those same news consumers subscribe to far fewer daily papers and can choose from many other broadcast and cable news sources to listen to and/or watch at a time of their choosing. And they do read news online, a great deal.

Just like you who are reading this now.

The TV networks cried about their losses some time ago and one could argue they are still holding on way too tightly to the old model of the “Evening News Anchor” and the half-hour Nightly News. Newspaper publications might actually be considered a bit more agile as they continue to develop their online content, even in the presence of online-only upstarts such as The Huffington Post and other publications.

What is happening to news readership, though, is something that requires more than just re-designing content that can be read on the web, regardless of whether or not you or I pay for it. It is not just that you can get this information online, but also how you engage with the information. The Huffington Post and even some of the higher readership blog sites get and keep their readers because they have a combination of fresher content, typically material with more of an edge to it than perhaps the newspapers are used to, and various means of truly engaging the reader in the online conversation.

People who read on the web are of many kinds, from skimmers who just want the highlights of the news to those who are looking for something to pull them in and get them involved. And it is those who become involved in this new medium who will become the most dedicated long-term news consumers, a phrase which to me applies better than just calling them “readers”.

Why? Because the new brand of news consumers is far from passive, with participation ranging from writing comments online to actually authoring acting as free online editors for those publications. And in case you think this is only in the “new” online services, consider how CNN has moved in a big way to involve citizen journalists with its “iReport” multimedia publications service: edited by CNN, but authored by its customers. Even The Wall Street Journal makes it possible for subscribers to chair their own online discussion forums from within the WSJ community pages on the web.

And yet, for however successful these new online models may be, either for the print newspapers who are testing the “pay to read” waters or the new services who seem to be thriving at this moment, what is clear without question is that how consumers engage with the news is changing. There is an incredible opportunity for strategic innovation in this arena that goes not just beyond publishing the print articles online, but also way beyond even the current approaches of CNN’s iReport, the Huffington Post, and others allowing for online comments to articles, or even inviting readers to host their own services.

The next few years are going to be a wild ride for the news industry. Newspapers may end up closing down and the job of the paper carrier will be in jeopardy. There will, however, always be a strong individual and group interest in the “news”, and true innovators will find a way to meet that need in ways we can only now just begin to imagine.