Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1597

Getting Naps Ahead of the Competition

People in every age think they're living in a time of transition (I'm sure Adam turned to Eve and said, "Darling, I think we're living in a time of transition"), but some ages really do usher in broad and deep change. Right now in American workplaces, I believe we're experiencing a transition with regard to well-being. An increasing number of employers and employees alike are acknowledging that the current model of success isn't working, and is in fact leading to burnout, stress, decreased productivity, and — an epidemic with especially personal resonance to me — sleep-deprivation.

Often, when I speak in public, my first mention of sleep elicits a bit of a laugh. But it's a knowing one, because all of us recognize on some level how sleep underpins our ability to function. And how does it in turn affect our organizations? Let me count the ways. Fatigue is the enemy of creativity and memory. It costs American businesses $63 billion a year in lost productivity. One study found that, because of its effects on decision-making and cognitive function, sleep-deprivation opens the door to unethical behavior. Another study found that sleep-deprivation is noticeably reflected in facial cues, enough so that other people are likely to register a sleep-deprived person as lacking energy and unhealthy. (Not the best face to put forward to a customer.) The worst costs arise from the fact that sleep deprivation causes safety lapses and contributes to other health issues. (For instance, the World Health Organization classifies shift work as a Class 2A carcinogen, due to the rates of breast cancer among women shift workers.)

Fortunately, many employers, in every industry imaginable, are learning to appreciate that the health of employees is directly connected to the health of the bottom line, and making concrete changes. At the Harvard Medical School Division of Sleep Medicine's Corporate Leadership Summit last month, Attacking the Sleep Conspiracy, companies like Walmart, Procter & Gamble, and Eli Lilly came together to discuss how businesses can partner with sleep experts and organizations to meet the health challenges associated with sleep problems.

Perhaps they are taking a cue from the world of sports. Olympians now get state-of-the-art nap rooms in addition to their highly monitored diets. In the NBA, stars like Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant have led the way, making pre-game naps part of their warm-up routine. Now, the NBA's deputy commissioner says, "Everyone in the league office knows not to call players at 3 pm. It's the player nap."

More conventional workplaces are catching up. Twenty-five percent of large U.S. businesses offer employees some kind of stress reduction initiative, like meditation or yoga. At The Huffington Post's office in New York, we've installed two nap rooms. At the beginning, our reporters, editors, and engineers were reluctant to use them, afraid that people might think they were shirking their duties. But it's a sign of our time of transition that, these days, our nap rooms are always booked. We have to change workplace culture so that what's stigmatized is not napping but walking around drained and exhausted.

As we approach a critical mass of awareness of the importance of sleep, we're also learning that some of our most admired historical figures have been in on the secret for a long time. So along the way to taking on the biggest challenges and seizing the greatest opportunities, let's hope the next generation of leaders will note the performance advantage enjoyed by some of history's famous nappers — from Leonardo DaVinci to Winston Churchill to John F. Kennedy.

Times of major transition are often precipitated by "perfect storms" combining powerful forces. Behind American's growing concern with well-being are at least three elements: a dysfunctional health care system, an abundance of new technology, and a new ability and desire to monitor and take control of one's own health. As this perfect storm hits the American workplace, and the movement responding to it takes hold, expect great change to happen.

A New Framework for Customer Segmentation

Her confession was blurted out in the midst of our first conversation about the new digital marketing strategy which we would eventually advise them on: "You know, I don't think I believe in segmentation anymore." She said it fast and softly, almost in hope that the sounds around us would make it inaudible. But we did hear it, and responded, "Well, we don't either."

For us, this exchange was the culmination of a reflection that had started in the classroom and in client engagements, where we were finding an increasing disconnect between telling people about segmentation, targeting and positioning on the one hand, and about the increasing shift of control from brands to consumers, on the other. Clients and students questioned it increasingly: here we were, advocating a rigid methodology that carves out the market because "we can't be all things to all people," while preaching the gospel of co-creation at firms, such as Lego and Starbucks, that enter into a dialogue with their customers, giving them more access, sharing risk, and advocating transparency (see Prahalad & Ramaswamy's book The Future of Competition).

In one presentation, we were exuberant about Big Data and Little Data, and in the next, speaking what seemed to be 1960's voodoo psychographic language. To resolve these contradictions, we had begun pleading with students and clients to look for "jobs to be done." The approach echoes Ted Levitt's famous comment about selling ¼ inch holes rather than ¼ inch electric drills, and advocates a mindset shift away from selling products to "doing jobs" that solve customers' problems. In Clay Christensen's words, customers "hire" products or other solutions because they have a specific job to fulfil, not because they belong to a certain segment.

Once the taboo was lifted in our minds and in our conversation, our client, a senior marketing executive in the telco sector, with decades of operational experience, explained that in some of the countries she managed, her marketing teams were simply shelving the results of the segmentations they felt obligated to perform out of routine, or because they felt it was expected of them as serious marketers. They just ignored them. In others, marketers were still adamant that segmentation was the only way to go, but couldn't explain its benefits. Voodoo indeed.

We agreed to work on a new kind of segmentation based the combinations of jobs that customers need to get done. Here's how the "jobs done" segmentation works:

Step #1: Identify the contexts in which customers are using the company's products. Examples of such jobs in the mobile telco realm might include: "being in touch with family and friends while roaming,""choosing the best entertainment and dining opportunities on the go over the weekend" and "becoming more confident and secure in the use of a smartphone." A mobile service provider using multiple research techniques might find that there are fifty or more jobs to be done across their customer base. One person might typically get several jobs done by a given provider or brand.

Step #2: Combine information about transactions and customer behaviour in the contexts to describe each of the jobs to be done. For our weekend entertainment example, we would look for a combination of weekend searches for entertainment information, searches for local restaurants, movie reviews and social behaviour such as tweets about movies, concerts or restaurants. The "becoming confident and secure" job might use data from call centre interactions and detect unused features on a new smartphone. The actual relevant data for each of the "jobs to be done" is selected during the initial research as a function of the different contexts to be explored and the data available. This is very different from traditional behavioral segmentation which focuses on a wide set of individual variables such as the percentage of voice calls. Here we need a holistic view of the data required to characterize a context.

Step #3: Map individual customers to jobs, using the data. Each customer would be scored according to the relevance for him or herself of each of the jobs done. A specific customer may need 20% of the entertainment job, 2% of the confidence job and 40% of the being-in-touch job. The customer profiles would be spread across all jobs. From there it's a simple step to cluster customers on their mix of jobs to be done rather than on their "raw" behaviour, demographics or attitudes. For each segment, there may be only three or four jobs to be done that are crucial. This then allows the development of specific solutions for each segment.

Setting the job done framework as a basis for customer segmentation allows us to use all the relevant data for customers in a meaningful and structured fashion. Firms can see how customers are hiring solutions for the jobs important to their lives and observe customers in the action of getting the job done (or in some cases, not getting it done). As brands access unprecedented amounts of data about consumers' activities and are able to use them more efficiently and productively, they find broad patterns and trends and can indeed get better at detecting "the person behind the data" and the jobs that person needs done. Another element of relevance for customers is that they now expect that the data which they are implicitly sharing with brands will result in a positive impact on their own personal experience rather than in lumping them into new, irrelevant buckets.

Peter Drucker once said, "The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him." The problem is we don't know what kinds of jobs customers are going to need done unless we follow each customer's journey. Big Data now lets us observe that journey. This type of of segmentation is more important than ever as technologically empowered customers have more choice and the ability to craft their own solutions. It represents the new job to be done for us all of us in marketing.

Your Company Doesn't Need a Women's Network

Another women's conference finds another predominantly female group of HR Directors seeking to improve the gender balance in their firms. In reality, women are working far too hard at an issue actually beyond their power to solve. Corporate leaders must recognize that additional women-dominated efforts are not the way to get companies to take the gender issue seriously. Rather, the solution requires action by those in leadership positions, still frustratingly rare, as hundreds of women at the recent JUMP Conference in Paris acknowledged.

How much longer must we witness the following scenario repeat itself?

A group of men who decide (or are told by government) that they need more women in their teams turn to the few women in senior roles and task them with finding a solution. The women, delighted with this glimmer of interest in their fate, duly throw themselves (in their free time, on top of their day jobs) into launching usually unfunded corporate women's networks and draft a business case on the corporate advantages of gender balance. A senior woman is put in charge and sent to every external conference as a corporate representative. This results in a women's conference with lots of motivational speakers and a few male 'champions' to encourage the girls. Sound familiar?

At first, everyone is happy. The women are delighted to have some time to themselves. As one senior woman in a Magic Circle law firm told me, "It's the only place where we can, just momentarily, be ourselves." The men are delighted that they are 'doing something' for women.

But after a few years, the ladies grow embittered, pointing out how little progress has been made in the actual balance of leadership. The gentlemen reaffirm that, despite 'all that they have done for women', the ladies still aren't able to make it.

This sidesteps the real issue: that the men currently in power may not actually have the skills and knowledge to effectively manage across genders (not to mention across nationalities, the other global elephant in the room). Women's networks and activities end up as politically savvy deflectors for blame. At the JUMP Conference, the lead on Accenture's global women's networks had the courage to agree with me that women's networks were used more to placate women than to promote them.

This was also the consensus view of my three male co-panelists. There was vociferous agreement that until today's male-dominated and masculine-normed leadership teams decide to proactively change the balance by pulling women into power, most corporate women's networks will remain nice places to hang out — and a noose for the gender-balance effort to hang itself on.

Different results require different actions:

1. Use existing women's networks to lobby for real change. Get each woman in the network to sign a petition requesting that the Executive Team accept accountability for gender balance - with targets, KPIs and a budget, like any other business initiative. Evaluate managers on their performance in building more balanced teams. (So, for example, at Facebook, Sandberg wouldn't be tasking women to 'lean in', but rather evaluating the majority of men on their ability to promote balanced teams. The focus should be on the management skills of developing balance, not on the candidates in an unconsciously biased system).

2. Redefine women's networks as 'balance networks' that include both men and women. Their goal becomes skill- and bridge-building around gender understanding rather than segregation. HSBC bank in London was converted at its first meeting. Their 'Balance network' inclusively involves 100% of employees in learning about the differences between male and female employees, customers and careers.

3. Get men to lead the charge, as some are starting to sound ready. Identify male leaders brave enough to confront other men with the need for balance - and perceptive enough to understand the skills necessary to do so. Some of them are even starting to go public, like Warren Buffett, John Chambers at CISCO or Paul Polman at Unilever.

I'm not against women's networks per se. In fact, I founded one of Europe's largest. External women's networks serve many vital purposes including lobbying, information sharing, education, and mentoring. It's just that internally, they inadvertently (or manipulatively, depending on the company) marginalize women into a separate group from the one currently in power. And keep them there.

Good News Boosts the CEO's Pay; Bad News Has No Effect

If shareholders think a CEO has done something good to boost profits, they reward the boss with a pay increase amounting to 48.9% (on average) of the perceived contribution to higher profits. But when the CEO is seen as causing a profit decline, there's a zero effect on his or her pay, Lucian A. Taylor of The Wharton School reports from his study of more than 4,500 chief executives. This "downward rigidity" of CEO pay is pervasive in companies, whether their governance is good or bad. CEOs are in effect insured against bad news about their abilities, Taylor says.

How Advertisers Can Maximize Mobile Conversions

In the beginning, mobile advertising was all about conversions. Remember QR codes? Vouchers? What got people excited about mobile were the opportunities that didn't exist at all on desktop — to use location and behavioral cues to speak to the consumer on the path-to-purchase and become part of the in-store experience. It was about converting a potential customer into a buyer, right then and there.

Then rich media arrived on the scene, and over the past couple of years has evolved so quickly that Gartner has even predicted mobile display ad spending will grow and take over from mobile search by 2016. We think it will be much sooner than that, perhaps as early as 2014.

Smartphone adoption aside, a big reason rich media display ads have become so popular with advertisers is that they produce click-through and engagement rates that are significantly higher than PCs. Premium brand advertisers such as Samsung, Nordstrom, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Kia and Home Depot have all had great success with highly creative and interactive mobile campaigns.

Campaigns such as Samsung's use click-through rate and engagement with an ad as their primary metrics. Samsung Mobile launched its new flagship device last year and to allow users to explore its key features, the company built an interactive ad experience. Users were invited to swipe up to reveal the ad and uncover the story of the new hybrid phone/tablet. The viewing speed — and the direction of the story itself — were controlled entirely by the user, who could pause, jump ahead or scroll back through the ad's content with a swipe. At the end, the ad displayed an interactive 360-degree view of the device, with detailed specifications and links to Samsung Mobile's social channels. Samsung is trying to build brand awareness and interest, increase customer satisfaction, and deepen loyalty and retention.

But for certain kinds of advertisers, those objectives don't matter at all, or matter far less than conversions. They include:

Financial services (i.e., credit cards)
Insurance (home, life, auto)
Education (online education)
Automotive (car quotes, loans)
Home services (security systems, maintenance)
Telecommunications (phone, Internet, cable TV)
Restaurants and hospitality (hotels, restaurants, nightlife)

These companies don't benefit if a user merely clicks on and interacts with an ad. They do benefit if that user fills out a form, calls to request an appointment, or gets directions. Qualified leads drive the business, not impressions.

Fortunately for them, as consumers grow accustomed to using their phones for transactions that previously occurred on their desktops, they are more open to intelligent, value-driven offers and opportunities that come to them on their mobile devices.

The stage is set. Here's how performance advertisers in these verticals can maximize their mobile conversions:

Forget about search

While the old-world (read: desktop Internet) model was to generate leads from SEO sites and paid search ads, in a post-PC world, mobile users are not using web browser-based search (mostly via Google) as their primary way to find what they need. Apps are dominating: according to app analytics firm Flurry, mobile users only spend 20% of their time in a browser and the remaining 80% in an app. The crisp and tailored user experience of mobile applications has become the primary channel for content. They're discovering advertising and offers in different, ways, and display ads within apps and on mobile websites is the most efficient way to reach them.

Keep your forms short

Mobile is inherently an on-the-go medium, and users do not have the time or patience to fill in multiple fields on a form. The drop-off rate on a long form would be so low that you'd need to dedicate a large spend just to generate enough volume to know where you're actually converting. So, keep your forms short and sweet. Need more information about a consumer before you can welcome them into your sales funnel? Many mobile marketing services offer to qualify the lead for you, using a call center service to follow up with the customer using the number they provided on the (very short) form.

Use the magical call feature

Surprise... people still use their phones to make actual phone calls. The click-to-call button is still one of the most powerful tools of mobile advertising, as it eliminates all that mucking about with forms and text messages. And since mobile campaigns are so agile, you can have your campaigns timed to match your call center or sales agent resources. Phones not ringing enough? Increase the volume of your campaign. Overwhelmed with too many calls? Tone it down to avoid frustrating potential customers with long wait times.

Increase relevance through targeting

The beauty of mobile is that it opens up a whole new world of targeting that doesn't exist on desktop. With online advertising, you can hone in on a single publisher, like the Wall Street Journal, and know exactly who their users are. Location is the obvious differentiator with mobile, layered with publisher-specific data, including, registration and account profiles. You can also use third-party data providers to target by behavior, intent, and a slew of other criteria. You can do that in mobile now, too. And in mobile, you can also glean insights on the user based on simple information such as what carrier they use and what type of device handset (and OS version) they have. Compare a user on a low-cost Android device from Boost Mobile to an iPhone user on Verizon; they are a very different demographic. For advertisers pursuing a specific demographic for something like an auto loan or online degree, this makes a big difference in performance.

Use mobile as your first platform in a cross-platform strategy

One of the hottest topics right now is a cross-platform strategy that utilizes the "companion" tablet or smartphone to complement the broadcast experience. But there are many ways in which mobile is a great first platform for lead generation, setting up an advertiser for higher conversion rates on the platforms that follow. For instance, one large company in the financial services space targeted young consumers by simply starting with mobile first. They ran a performance campaign to find customers and capture their mailing address, and then followed up with a direct mailer. As both highly targeted and permission-based, the campaign had far better results and therefore was a solid investment on the part of the company.

Mobile has become an important advertising medium for big brand companies seeking to broaden brand awareness and deepen engagement, especially among the ever-popular demographic of "young, tech-savvy" consumers. But it would be a mistake to limit mobile to brand-only goals, and to ignore its potential as a lead generation tool. Businesses that depend on performance advertising for growth should explore opportunities in mobile.

Innovations in Digital and Mobile Marketing
An HBR Insight Center





Quality vs. Frequency: What's Your Mobile Strategy?
Being Digital Demands You Be More Human
CMO's: Build Digital Relationships or Die
Measurement in a Constantly Connected World

How to Make Sense of Sales Force Turnover

Imagine a sales leader who's looking over data from exit interviews with salespeople who've left his company in the last year. Among the departing reps, 32% left primarily because of their relationship with their first line manager, 27% left primarily because of inadequate pay, and 21% left primarily because of the lack of promotion opportunities

The question: What should the sales leader do to fix this problem?

Is it time to upgrade the first line managers, enhance pay, revisit promotion opportunities--or some combination of the three?

There's more to the story than meets the eye here. Let's dig a bit deeper and try to understand who is leaving for what reason.

Consider the following additional facts:

60% of the people who left for reason #1 (relationship with manager) and 73% of the people who left for reason #2 (pay) were in the bottom half of performance rankings.
70% of people who left for reason #3 (promotion opportunities) were in the top half of performance rankings.

Most of the salespeople who left because of pay and first line managers were bottom-half performers. Companies often hope that low performers will find better opportunities elsewhere, so this turnover isn't necessarily a problem. Indeed, perhaps the current pay plan and managers are having exactly the desired effect.

Promotion opportunities, on the other hand, may need attention if the company hopes to hold on to more top-half performers.

Turnover statistics only become useful when they are linked to salespeople's current performance and future potential. Current performance is visible in most sales forces using metrics such as territory sales growth and quota attainment. Future potential is more opaque, but is usually assessed by managers through the performance management and review process. Salespeople who depart will fall into one of the following three performance segments. You'll want to implement different solutions, depending on which segments account for high levels of turnover.

1. Low performers with low potential: These are bad hires, plain and simple. If many sales force departures come from this group, you'll want to find ways to upgrade the applicant pool, and enhance your candidate selection and attraction process.

2. Low performers with significant future potential: The solution for reducing turnover among this segment lies in helping salespeople become successful through development and coaching and giving salespeople warm leads so that they can taste sales success, which is the ultimate motivator. We find that there is high turnover among new salespeople across many industries, primarily because they just can't get off the ground. Training and support that enable early success can work wonders.

3. Turnover among high performers: Autonomy, appreciation, recognition, pay, long-term incentives, inclusion on a company task force, and sometimes, even employment contracts with a non-compete clause can play a role in controlling turnover for this group.

First line sales managers are key in diagnosing sales force turnover problems and identifying and implementing solutions for reducing turnover among all three performance segments. Managers are the ones who have to figure out if a low performing salesperson has future potential or not. They are the ones who must coach and develop a salesperson to realize his/her potential. And they are the ones who can find the right motivators for holding on to high-performing salespeople.

The Mobile Shopping Life Cycle

Mobile is turning "path to purchase" on its head. One of the most time-honored marketing concepts, that notion that a customer takes a predictable journey toward a sales transaction (in its earliest definition, starting with attention to a product, then moving to interest in it, then desire for it, and finally, action), has long provided the framework for marketers to strategize how to communicate with customers and exert influence. While the steps have been debated and refined over time, and the path is often now depicted as a "sales funnel" (with a large initial audience having awareness, funneling down to successively smaller groups having familiarity, consideration, purchase, and loyalty), the basic idea has remained that a customer's commitment to a purchase intensifies at each step, and so should the marketer's investment in bringing the transaction to a successful close.

Now, because of smartphones and tablets, marketers need to fundamentally rethink things. Shopping is becoming an iterative rather than a serial process. Consumers no longer go shopping, they always are shopping.

To adapt to this transformation, marketers must begin by recognizing that, in this new world of mobile commerce, the traditional sales funnel is dead. It's being replaced by something more like a shopping life cycle, in which marketers have the opportunity to influence mobile consumer behavior and purchase decisions at various key moments.

Marketing efforts guided by the traditional sales funnel don't work in a selling environment populated by mobile devices because, for the always-on, mobile shopper, the entire shopping and buying process is both continuous and intermittent. In the old sales funnel, the shopper moved one step at a time toward the purchase and marketers targeted them as they moved closer to making the buy. With mobile, the process is not in such an organized sequence. The steps of the mobile buying process are all happening all the time. And most importantly, mobile shoppers (m-shoppers) can be influenced when they are using their mobile devices on the go.

I like to think of the mobile shopping life cycle in terms of six key states in which customers exist relative to purchases, each of which offers moments when they can be reached and influenced because they are using various aspects of mobile. (See the exhibit below.)

The Mobile Shopping Life Cycle:

At each of these six distinct moments of the Mobile Shopping Life Cycle, marketers have the potential to steer the mobile consumer toward their product and influence shopping behaviors.

The Set-Up: The Pre-Buy. This is the mobile research phase, as consumers use smartphones and tablets before they even consider going to the store. Mobile is a pull rather than a push medium. Marketers should position information and messages about their products to be pulled by the consumer according to that person's time frame, mind-set, and location.
The Move: In Transit. This phase occurs when the consumer is on the way to a store or running an errand. With new location-based capabilities, marketers can leverage information, such as smartphone location and speed, to send highly targeted and relevant messages to consumers who have opted in to receive valuable offers. Marketers will have to create value for consumers, to provide an incentive for them to leave their location "turned on" in any given app.
The Push: On Location. This occurs at a brick-and-mortar store. In the early days of the internet, brick & mortar was a detriment to business, since online-only retailers could sell directly to consumers with fewer associated costs. With mobile, brick & mortar becomes an asset. But while some retailers are leveraging the ability to interact, most are still missing the opportunity to identify and interact with mobile shoppers while they are in the store.
The Play: Selection Process. This is when customers are near the actual product they may be considering buying. With what is known as proximity marketing, marketers can use various technologies to interact in real time with customers, with the potential even to move to real-time pricing. For example, a number of customers walking by a particular product might receive a real-time offer such as a discount on it. Based on real-time awareness of inventory, the offer could be changed or discontinued before the next group walks by. Consumers already can scan barcodes on products and receive on-the-spot price comparisons with easy-to-use but sophisticated technologies.
The Wrap: Point of Purchase. Here is yet another chance to sway the buyer. As businesses adopt more mobile self-checkout options and mobile capabilities are embedded into point-of-sales systems, offers and counteroffers can be presented to consumers during the buying and checkout process.
The Takeaway: Post-Purchase. This occurs after the purchase, as consumers exchange photos, videos, and information of their recent purchase and share them via their mobile device with friends and colleagues, soliciting and receiving feedback. The challenge for marketers is to become part of the conversation at this stage.

Mobile activity in each of these six phases will continue to expand as smartphone and tablet penetration increases and more consumers join the ranks of mobile shoppers. By recognizing the mobile shopping life cycle as it emerges, brands and marketers will be in position to adapt along with its evolution, and to master the new art of mobile influence.

Innovations in Digital and Mobile Marketing
An HBR Insight Center





Quality vs. Frequency: What's Your Mobile Strategy?
Being Digital Demands You Be More Human
CMO's: Build Digital Relationships or Die
Measurement in a Constantly Connected World

Boosting Creativity Through Constraints

Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to boost a team's creativity is to unshackle them from constraints. The less they have to worry about, the more open they'll be with their ideas, the theory goes. Budget? Unlimited! Ideas from outside? Bring 'em on! Different business model? Consider it entertained! Unfortunately this approach can actually be counter-productive.

Some constraints are realities that must to be dealt with — laws of physics, or perhaps a budget. Other constraints may seem immovable but upon inspection are actually assumptions based on the past — your business model, or which customers and needs you serve, for example.

Constraints have a Goldilocks quality: too many and you will indeed suffocate in stale thinking, too few and you risk a rambling vision quest. The key to spurring creativity isn't the removal of all constraints. Ideally you should impose only those constraints (beyond the truly non-negotiable ones) that move you toward clarity of purpose.

If a constraint enhances your understanding of the problem scope and why you're doing what you're doing, leave it in. Insights into user needs, for example, are great because they provide focus and rationale. If the constraint confuses or overly narrows scope without good reason, remove or replace it. Don't be afraid to experiment with different combinations of constraints; it's not always easy to tell ahead of time what the right mix will be for a particular project or circumstance.

Beautiful, brutal clarity is your goal.

There are no hard and fast rules about finding that "just right" mix to achieve this, but here are some examples of how clarity and creativity can be enhanced.

Focus on the Vitals

In Silicon Valley start-ups a common philosophy these days is "mobile first": create the mobile app or mobile version of the web site before you do the "full" version. Partly this is driven by the fact that many of these start-ups' customers will be accessing the new service primarily through a mobile device, and may never look at the web site on a desktop browser. But a side benefit is that a phone's small screen forces discipline about what's really critical to communicate to the customer, and which functionality customers will really need.

You can apply this simplicity-oriented mindset even if you're not making a mobile app. What is the one thing you want your customers to know or do at any given point of interacting with your business? If you could only communicate with them via a 3.5" screen, or a business card, or a 6 second Vine movie — what would you say, what would you ask of them, and what would you want them to feel afterward? Once you've found that, you may be surprised that all the other stuff that once seemed important now seems superfluous.

Change Your Habits

We tend to get set in our ways, both as individuals and organizations. These habits are often shaped by the constraints we impose on ourselves or are imposed on us. Changing the constraints can shake you out of your habits so that you see the world and opportunities with fresh eyes.

I'm an avid photographer, and I recently purchased a camera that has a fixed lens (I can't swap a different lens onto it) which doesn't even zoom. Why would I pay over $1000 for a camera with this inconvenience when much cheaper SLRs with their panoply of lenses can do so much more?

There are many benefits to the fixed-lens camera. Taking pictures is faster because there are fewer things to adjust than on a complex SLR, and the constrained view of the lens means my mind's-eye becomes trained at anticipating what the lens will see. I can react more fluidly to rapidly changing scenes, like when shooting on a busy street. I'm also forced to physically engage with my surroundings — I can't stand in one spot and lazily twist the zoom in and out. I've got to move myself around, and this opens up points of view I would have missed if I'd stuck to my initial position.

Get Uncomfortable

Breaking habits is hard, and sometimes it takes a new stimulus to provoke change. In the workshops I occasionally run with companies, many activities focus on getting teams to challenge their habitual assumptions and apply a different set of constraints to how they think about the problems they face. In this way they often come up with solutions that surprise them. A service company may think about what would happen if they created a physical product to meet customer needs, for instance, or started offering the service the way a well-known brand in a very different industry would.

In the documentary It Might Get Loud, guitarist Jack White argues that technology makes us lazy (like the zoom lens on my SLR), and laziness is the enemy of creativity. He purposefully uses low-quality instruments that he has to fight with to get the sound and attitude he wants. "If it takes me three steps to get to the organ, then I'll put it four steps away. I'll have to run faster, I'll have to push myself harder to get to it." You may think you're making your team's life easier by removing constraints, but forcing a little hustle is good for creativity.

Creativity needs some grit, in both senses of the word: an irritant to get the ball rolling (like a grain of sand births an oyster pearl), and persistence to push through to completion.

So don't be afraid of constraints. They can be your friend, your muse even. Thinking outside the box is all well and good, but if the box is the right size and shape it might help, not hinder, your creativity.

Why Successful Companies Stop Growing

We've all seen examples of unstoppable companies that suddenly hit the wall. Growth slows down, stock prices start to decline, shareholders get nervous, and the press starts to speculate that something is wrong. In some cases, like P&G and Starbucks, the board brings back a former CEO who can presumably return the firm to its previous glory. In other cases, like with Apple, GE, or Cisco, the board holds its breath and hopes that things will change.

But the reality behind many of these cases is that periodic slowdowns are inevitable, even if the company is fundamentally solid. That doesn't mean that CEOs (old or new), and other managers, can't do anything to slow the decline or reverse it more quickly. Taking action, however, requires an understanding of the three forces that always drag high-flying companies back to earth.

The first is the law of large numbers. As a company gets bigger, each percentage of incremental revenue suddenly represents a fundamentally larger number. As the base grows, the amount of new business needed to make a material difference in earnings also rises, increasing the pressure on sales to find new markets, new categories, and new geographies. In other words, the larger a company becomes, the more the entire engine has to work harder.

A company's growth is also inhibited by market maturity. Over time, markets follow more predictable patterns as buyers become familiar with and loyal to particular brands. Eventually, as the market becomes more crowded, prices tend to stabilize, reducing the ability to grow through price increases. Finally, some markets reach a saturation point either because of limited demographic growth or commoditization of products. Taken together, these product and market life cycle forces all put pressure on the typical sources of growth for marketing and sales.

The third reason that growth slows down is psychological self-protection. As a company gets larger, there is more pressure to preserve the base business and less willingness to cannibalize it through innovative new offerings. As a result, at the very moment when the company needs new sources of growth, there is a tendency to play it safe and focus more on adapting existing products and services, rather than breakthrough opportunities. This not only opens the door to potentially disruptive competitors, but constrains moves into whatever is perceived as "risky" territory.

Taken together, these natural forces almost always damp down growth, which is why we shouldn't be surprised when successful companies hit periodic speed bumps. The challenge of course is what to do about it. Here are two suggestions that managers at all levels can consider:

Regularly re-examine your business model. In the face of the forces described above, most business models eventually get stale and need to be either abandoned or refreshed. So periodically take a look at what you do, and how you do it — and ask yourself if it still makes sense. Could someone else provide this product or service differently? Do our customers have other choices or have their needs changed? In other words don't limit your innovation and research to the development of new products and services, but also focus on the possibility of new business models.

Think about getting smaller in order to get bigger. A second way to cope is to periodically do some pruning. Like trees that get too spindly, organizations also grow unnecessary branches that reduce the health of the overall enterprise. These need to be cut back in order to allow new shoots to have the resources to flourish. To do so, ask yourself whether some of your products or services may not be producing sufficient returns; or whether you would be better off without some of your customers. These are tough questions that often provoke strong emotional responses. But taking action on them can liberate you and your resources to focus on new opportunities and will lead to more growth in the long term.

There is no such thing as a company that grows forever without eventually hitting the wall, or at least slowing down to go over a speed bump. Through judicious pruning and the exploration of new business models however, managers can minimize the slow downs and give their organizations a better chance at long-term growth.

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