Thanks for visiting. This is a welcome post to orient you around the main purpose of this site and its core focus areas. I’ll break it down into three.
Purpose
A blog intended to capture adventures by the author and others, of the mind and at work 👉
Mind
So much of what determines progress happens in the mind and how we manage our attitude.
Work
So much time is spent at work and business is a driving force for so much that happens in the world.
Find out more about the author of this site, his adventures and latest work by sliding open the menu. And one more thing on “why”. Because in the words of a famous adventurer of the spirit who has come to inspire millions:
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
NOTE: this post is made up of 3 pages so click through the pages at the bottom to get it in full.
To own or to use is not a new concept. I started grappling with this at least 12 years ago when I worked for a technology division at Sony and we developed a mobile music streaming service with Vodafone. That was in the day before iPhone was launched, before Spotify, when the iPod was on the rise. I remember the naysayers at the time saying, no one will pay a subscription fee for a mobile service for music they don’t own. CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT??? Check out the video I recorded of the service back in the day in case you don’t believe me.
To Have Or to Be? is one of the seminal books of the second half of the 20th century. Nothing less than a manifesto for a new social and psychological revolution to save our threatened planet, this book is a summary of the penetrating thought of Eric Fromm. His thesis is that two modes of existence struggle for the spirit of humankind: the having mode, which concentrates on material possessions, power, and aggression, and is the basis of the universal evils of greed, envy, and violence; and the being mode, which is based on love, the pleasure of sharing, and in productive activity. To Have Or to Be? is a brilliant program for socioeconomic change.
How does that resonate for you 22 years later, in this day and age?
Not much elaboration needed but a few words just to be clear about what I am saying in this doodle:
These three elements of product, service and strategy are the biggest (but not only) influencers on the success enterprise customers have with the use of their technology. For instance I believe the sales process and what is promised has a huge impact too but not for this list.
I’m indicating with the size of the circles which ones I believe have the most influence.
The pull and push points relate to the nature of the influence on the use and ultimate success of the technology.
I think most of the items listed in each area are clear enough but if you are not on the job to be done point I added a link to a good explanation. And on professional services, by these I generally mean paid for services delivered by the vendor or partners and could include things like change management, training, etc.
I’m trying to distil the essence in this doodle, often for my own sanity, to help me focus on the right activities in the work I do with customers.
Ultimately its for colleagues and customers, to help them understand and rally them behind my efforts 😁
It’s fairly self explanatory I think as I wanted to keep its simple and within a framework of three – three main outcomes, three main causes for each outcome. But here is some brief elaboration.
Activities are sequential. You can only get to value when you have done important pre-work, i.e. introduce a new tool and focus on its use, then how it should be scaled and embedded in real work and then on changing behaviours and driving real business impact.
But planning and focus is nonsequential. You have to start with the end in mind and work backwards – what are you trying to achieve, what is necessary to achieve it, how to measure it, what activities will drive it, etc.
These activities are all that matter in customer success. Everything else is peripheral. If you can get people to focus on these things, their supporting activities and the measurement of them then you will be successful. If you lead a team of customer success managers, remove everything else that does not contribute to these activities or gets in their way.
By supporting activities I mean things like tools to track these activities and the impact they are having, measurement systems, playbooks to drive the correct activities, systems and governance, etc.
One caveat to emphasise: These are activities that apply largely to the enterprise Software as a Service category in which I have the most experience.
I’m by no means perfect in my views. These are based on roughly 8 years in a customer success role. But I spent approximately 2 hours on putting this together. I’m pretty sure I’ve missed something so would love to hear from you if so 🙃
It’s been a while since my last update and there’s been lots going on so sit down, grab a ☕ and enjoy reading about a host of new announcements and articles capturing the trend.
A great treatise here on the evolution of and critical foundations for successful SaaS businesses: What is Product Led Growth? How to Build a Software Company in the End User Era. From the article, these companies in the image below have recognised that we are in the End User Era, and they’re all-in on product led growth:
One of the key factors I will be exploring in my new trend report is how technology ecosystems (including being/running a platform) play a vital part in the success of an As a Service company. That’s captured neatly in this move: Starbucks wants to create the AWS for restaurants.
In a continuation of the theme, you could easily see traditional SaaS businesses that touch parts of their customers core processes with their platform, especially financial or payments, extending their offering. Captured nicely here: Forget About SaaS: Software-as-a-Lender Could Be The Next Big Thing.
Something else that’s a key factor and I am exploring in my new trend report is being data driven and how good views on that data (analytics) is fundamental. A company nailing that aspect here: The Value of Usage Analytics in the Subscription Economy.
And in a good review from the bookSubscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future – and What to Do About It, by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert, these two summary charts:
Just a couple of scribbled views (#daneldoodle’s) on the things that go to achieving success, from customer or vendor point of view. Click an image to enlarge.
I’m often frustrated with how meetings are misused and ineffective at work. I know I’m not alone 😬
I think a whole lot more thought needs to go into things before a meeting is held and included in that is whether virtual collaboration could do the job in place of a meeting.
At some point a meeting may very well be necessary and even a face to face one at that, which is best for driving certain outcomes at times.
By virtual collaboration by the way, I am also thinking of effective working out loud.
I read a really good article on Harvard Business Review: Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting? It had a great decision flowchart which you will see in the article.
I decided to take that a little further and extend that into how Microsoft Teams which I am currently using heavily at work (in my work and in supporting customers to use it successfully) can be used. Here is the result below:
Click to view larger image
Not sure I’ve quite nailed it yet. So in the working out loud spirit, if you have any feedback that you think would make this better, please let me have it 🙏 😆
PS: the definition of Hell in the featured image is mine and I’ve created an entry on Urban Dictionary for a laugh – vote for it if you agree (but mostly for some irreverent fun😜 ). Find the entry from here.
It focuses on many things and chiefly the direction is forward looking, as opposed to his first book, Homo Sapiens, which looked backward from whence we have come.
One aspect I was fascinated by was his account of the recognised decoupling of consciousness and intelligence and how this might play out in the future given the rise of “machines” and their impact on humans.
With machines and technology getting bad press of late, I thought it would be useful to highlight the positives that I see.
It’s very much in line with my take on Dharma Hacking – more below.
I created a #daneldoodle of course, to summarise my thinking. Here it is:
And some added notes to elaborate:
Why the Dharma Hacking in the title? There is more here on what it is but essentially it is based on the the interplay between humans finding our way, developing our mental capacity (especially consciousness) and using technology to help.
We have only just scratched the surface in terms of expanding our known mental states and utilising our super consciousness.
Technology, far from being the bogey man that it currently is, can greatly help us get there.
It plays its role (intelligence), we play ours (consciousness), in a unique cosmic dance of creativity.
In this past post (The post robotic AI age and the role of creativity and innovation) I think I was somewhat deluded in my belief of what will distinguish humans based on their unique skills in the future. Intelligent technology will be able to master these skills and are already (see next point) but it will be advanced levels of consciousness (super consciousness) that will be our unique differentiators.
AI and Super AI is already doing credibly well with being creative and innovative. Check out the comments in this video I uploaded a while ago of famed theoretical physicist and futurist, Michio Kaku (you’ll need to view the video on YouTube for that). He also it appears, was deluded.
How technology will help us develop our consciousness and to what ends is outlined in some of the elements I position in the doodle. Essentially it is between the island on which we currently find ourselves with our known mental states and the antipodes of the mind as I call them. I’m not sure what these supporting roles and end states all are yet but I will be exploring further – watch this space 😊
Ready is an annual employee focused event run by Microsoft and Inspire is partner focused. We generally run them in July and present some really cool demos and content and so here is some public facing material I can share and my favourites from a bunch.
Notice in the case of the Teams in the Classroom demo, how rich the scenario is in terms of the technology being put to use to achieve really useful outcomes for the lecturer and students. And don’t let the Classrooms in the title put you off, this shows how Teams can be used to drive learning in any organisation. Its a great example of the approach described in this previous post: Beyond technology adoption – business scenarios with Microsoft Teams.
As the title of this post suggests, this is a very quick thought on the state of enterprise collaboration, mostly captured in the form of a DanelDoodle – the one above. Some added thoughts/considerations:
In my view, each new phase supplements the last, not replaces and all products and forms of activity still exist and have a place today. But there is a natural, progressive emphasis.
There are many other products, I have just highlighted the major ones, no offence to the ones I left out 😁
The penetration & value axis is wildly subjective and not intended to be accurate. Also because it conflates two characteristics it will be difficult to judge accurately. It’s just a stab at plotting what’s important.
The latest and greatest posts and research on the subject and these are all being tracked with a tag here. I include Customer Success in this being a subset of the As a Service trend but I’ve added it under a separate section.
Delivering on subscription services (includes results from a survey of over 1,000 consumers conducted by Vantiv and Socratic Technologies as well as an infographic)
Stephen Danelutti
