My leadership style and how do I interact with others

This topic reminds me a lot about what I learned from my former organizational behavior classes.

To be honest, I am a more cooperative person rather than an individualist. I always find myself work well when I was in a team environment. The communications and discussions between teammates and others will always inspire me. I remembered many times that I came up with something good in an interactive environment. I believe that any relationship is built on trust and communication. To get a job done, the first thing to do is to understand the job. And the best way to do that is not reading carefully of the instrument, but to listen to the person who named the task and communicate with him or her directly. One important component of good communication is good listening skills. I seldom interrupt people when they are talking. Part of the reason is that it’s rude to do so in Chinese culture. And the other part of the reason is that I want to hear the person clearly not only the surface meaning but also the deeper meaning.

When I was interacting with a teammate or co-workers or just people I met somewhere, I have a tendency to put my power level one step lower than the person I was talking to. I was not doing that intentionally. It is just something I did subconsciously. I noticed my behavior when I was in my OBC classes and I realized that the behavior helped me a lot on some levels. I found it will be easier to get what I want if I lower my power level. Being modest and patience is a good way to learn and a good way to show my sincerity. And it is easier to build trust on this basis.

Talking about my leadership style, I am still on my way building it. I pivoted my leadership style all the way long. I used to believe that talking louder than others it’s a way to show power when I was in elementary school. I then believed that being friends with every one and being liked by everyone was a good leader when I was in eighth grade. When I was in university, I believe that being a leader meant never make mistakes. All of these past experiences helped form my leadership now. Now I believe that a leader should be professional in his or her field. The leader should establish trust among all the team members and a good leader should set certain power level in the team. My leadership style is kind of like Yanhong Li’s, the founder of Baidu. As I talked in my innovator presentation, Li believed that a good leader should listen to the ideas and opinions of his workers but it is the leader who makes the final decision. I like his saying and for current phase, I’d like to adopt this leadership style.

Engaging Story

Gove Green used to target residential solar market. And that’s why I wrote my Persona Pain-Gain Map on this basis. However, Gove Green has pivoted our target market to the commercial solar market, aiming to attract small to medium businesses in Massachusetts.

 

The Engaging Story

 

Do you know that solar power is becoming a new fashion in Massachusetts? Yes. You didn’t hear it wrong. It is Massachusetts, not California or states from west coast. And it is the NEW fashion. Even though Massachusetts doesn’t enjoy the same amount of sunlight as California, solar power becomes very popular here. The reason is of course the high utility fees in Massachusetts that other states can’t compete with. Massachusetts is known as its long history of liberty and great knowledge. It has many top universities with many talents who want to change the world. Imagine you are a graduate from MIT or Harvard. You have a start-up company which has 15 employees. You rent a two-floor building as your office near Boston area. The business has just begun. Your idea got great attentions and you want to bring it to the whole world in the next two years. However, the high cost of electricity in Massachusetts has nearly caused the company to close the doors, especially during the phase that your company hasn’t made any revenue. You think of the problem every day hoping to find a solution that can cut your electricity bill while keeping the normal usages. This is a pretty common phenomenon in not only IT start-ups but also other businesses such as manufacturers in Massachusetts. One day, you hear a great thing called solar power which can bring your electricity bill down to half of it used to be. What exciting news! What’s more, this company called Gove Green has a special solar panel that can not only cut your electricity bill to half but also provide heating and cooling service at the same time. You now get an extra saving on the top of the 50% cut on the bill by installing Gove Green's solar panel. Now you can sit in your chair and relax and what’s more important, you can now focus on the development of your company, but not your utility bills.

Market Analysis of Gove Green

Gove Green is going to introduce a more cost efficient solar panel to the world. The company will start from Massachusetts and expand to the whole country after. The reason why the company wants to start from Massachusetts is that one Massachusetts has a fast growing solar market, two Massachusetts has several programs that rewards solar energy users and three the company has many good connections and resources here. Massachusetts’ final goal is to have 400MW of solar capacity and 270MW by the year 2017. In the last two year, Massachusetts has built 143.1MW. The available market is still big.

We have been through many discussions about which market we should go after, residential, commercial or utility. In residential solar panel market, Massachusetts has witnessed an explosive growth in last few years. The support from government is the strongest motivation in the market. There are more than 400 solar panel installation companies in MA. The real fierce competition comes from the third-party owned residential installations. These companies adopt Power Purchase Agreement to lease a solar system with the aim of making solar a more affordable option for consumers. Gove Green didn’t go after the residential market because we see the nearly saturation of the market and unfulfilled needs non-residential market.  

As long as we decided that Gove Green is going after the non-residential market, we started to look at a specific target market to go in. We analyzed some existing companies in the market. One kind of the existing companies is the big energy companies that control large solar project in the country, such as Nexamp, the largest privately owned solar power plant. Gove Green as a start-up energy can’t compete with these large company at the starting phase. We realize the opportunities in Rutland, MA because that Brendan Gove, the founder of the company, has many connections in the field. After analyzing the market there, we summarized a couple of target market. One major market that we are going to pursue is the business plazas in the area with several small businesses in each of them. There is one plaza named Rutland Plaza is going to be our first target. Another target market is going to be industrial parks in the area. Gove Green is going to be competitive in getting these markets because not only the innovative cost-efficient solar panel but also existing networks with some of the targets. We are also going to expand our market to other area in MA based on the same strategy. Along we are opening the market; we are also open to pivot the market strategy. For example, we may find out in the future that certain area has already installed solar panel; we may want to go to the property management companies that own buildings and rent to small business. Another pivot point I foresee may be the expanding to utility market. According to GTM Research and SEIA, the growth of utility market will be the next big thing besides the residential market and commercial market.

Can a company today survive on inbound marketing? Why or why not? What is the role of outbound marketing?

The answer to “Can a company today survives on inbound marketing?” will be “YES”. However, the accuracy of the answer should depend on what kind of product business is promoting and what goal the business wants to achieve by conducting certain marketing strategy. The influences of inbound marketing can’t be ignored. And under some scenarios, inbound marketing is more effective than outbound marketing. Based on the changing behavior of customers, businesses are realizing that rather than “push” their message to customers, “pull” customers to look for the brand will get higher returns.

Inbound marketing so far is like an “invisible hand” behind the scene. When customers are reading high quality blogs with useful knowledge online, customers may not think that the blog may be provided by a commercial good company aiming to convey the promoting information between the lines. We are in the era where people need to pay to get high quality information and knowledge. Once, customers find this kind of information for free, they will dig more into it. The promotion information hiding between the lines will be founded by customers. Customers won’t regard the company name shown in the article as the annoying advertisement which is same with others on newspaper side bars.  Inbound marketing is better than outbound marketing because it won’t let customers feel they are interrupted or manipulated by businesses. Under the influence of this “invisible hand”, the best situation will be customers telling their friends about the company and the using experiences. Recently, I just have an experience with inbound marketing. I was searching in the medical device market. I found this great article talking about the market size, market trend and problems with real data and good information. And in this article, I came across this company name “Stryker”, who is a player in the market. After reading the article, I went directly to check out the company. See the result! I am totally influenced by the inbound marketing.

Besides the advantages of inbound marketing, I want to talk about the practical utility of inbound marketing. I want to say that inbound marketing is a great marketing tool since it won’t require a great of money investment and it will reach the goal of expanding brand awareness. Working on my ETR business plan on Solar Panel, I consider the utility of inbound marketing as a market tool in introducing our whole new brand by posting renewable energy related blogs. Also, by coming up with some useful “keywords” tags, I can increase the visibility of the blog and our company. However, I started to think of the returns that I can get by going after this strategy. I see this strategy will harvest good result in a longer term by constantly investing in high value blogs and information and get customers to go word-of-mouth influence eventually. But whether it will help me achieve the goal of aggressively opening the market?  I believe that the answer will be “no”. This is when I think a combination of inbound and outbound marketing will be a good choice. Gove’s Green wants to build the market from zero up. The best way to open the market will be outbound marketing by pushing advertisements out on outdoor billboard, community newspapers and internet. Also, I will also conduct the inbound marketing going on at the side.

The role of outbound marketing is still important in today’s world. It’s hard to find a company only does inbound marketing and survives. The changing behaviors on customers’ side, preferring to go after products suggested from peer reviews or friends recommendation or discovered by themselves, stimulate the adoption of inbound marketing and lower the position of outbound marketing. However, there are also other changes that can’t be ignored; for example, people now spend more and more time on their smart portable devices. Many start-up companies focus on analyzing data and pushing mobile personalized commercials to customers. This new pivoted outbound marketing can help business effectively higher returns.

Comments on “Why Big Companies Can’t Innovate?”

We have seen many giant companies faded away in the market. Kodak, Nokia, Blackberry. It is interesting that those companies who created the market or at first were so big in the market couldn’t survive at last. Why is that?

Maxwell in his blog asked, “Why big companies can’t innovate?” I see this question as an answer to my question. The failure to innovate in big companies may be one of the reasons that these companies went away. However, it is unfair to say that big companies can’t innovate. But it is a common phenomenon that it is much harder for big companies to deliver and deal with high quality innovation, not mention disruptive innovation. Maxwell stated reasons that cause this phenomenon.

Big companies which have a mature business model and company structures put “profit” as the joint basis of innovation with “solving problems”. This adds distractions to innovation and makes this kind of innovation less influential to the market. Operational efficiency is one way to achieve higher profit. Like the blog says, big companies tend to set taking advantage of existing resources as the premise of innovation. Under this premise, big companies have higher possibility in delaying adopting newer technologies and disruptive innovations. Nokia and Blackberry are laggards in entering smart phone market and touch-screen devices market. The same thing happened to Kodak. Kodak invented digital camera, but refused to go after this direction since the new direction will cause great waste of its existing resource.

I never doubt about big companies’ ability in innovating. A big company has better access to resources such as intelligence resource. Smart people go to big companies for better compensations and future. Also, big companies usually have great and right vision of their future and direction. The ideas they build have great quality. However, once the motivation of innovation is not pure anymore, big companies will have limitations in delivering or commercializing an idea, just like what happened to Gerber Singles.

Besides the topic, I found the Gerber Singles a very good example of company going after customer segment first instead of value proposition and key activities as we talked about in the business model canvas discussion. In the case, Gerber found the customer segment, the busy working Americans, very attractive and the needs of this customer group haven’t been fulfilled yet. With the target customers, Gerber started thinking what they could do to win the market.

Reference

Maxwell Wessel, “Why Big Companies Can’t Innovate?” http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/why_big_companies_cant_innovate.html

Persona Pain-Gain Map for Gove-Hybrid

Mike is a 35-year-old career man who has just had this second kid born, living in Massachusetts. Mike’s first kid is going to the first grade next year. He is choosing between several schools in the community. His wife used to work. But she quitted her job to look after the children. Also, he is still paying the debts for the house and his car. Right now, Mike is thinking of cutting down their usages on household to save money and even let his wife go back to work. He talked with his friends with his difficulties. His wife asked suggestions from the neighbors on how to save money. What they got are suggestions like using coupon, selling the car and choosing a cheaper school. Mike struggles between saving money and offering the best to his family.

Mike wants to figure out a best cost-saving plan for his family while keeping his life quality the same level as before. Gove-Hybrid is the best solution for these people who have economic struggles.

For residential home owners who are interested in decreasing and/or eliminating their electric and heating bills. Gove-Hybrid is a Green renewable energy solar panel that captures electricity and heat. Unlike Sun Bug, One Block Off the Grid or Solar City, this product heats and powers your home up to 15% more efficiently.

Pain	Gain
When he arrived home from a hard working day, he received several bills and he’s short on money.	He will get a check from Mass Electric every month for the reward of using solar panel.
He stays up whole night thinking of how to cut down household costs.	Gove-Hybrid solar panel will power the home up to 15% more efficiently.
He has to limit electricity and heat usage of the home all the time to save money.	One time installation and saving money forever.
Short on cash	Available for financing

Persona Pain-Gain Map

Since I just reformed a business plan group with a new product. I still need time to communicate with my new team members and get to know the product. I will post the Persona Pain-Gain Map for that product later. For now, the following map is for my own business new idea.

Ting is a 23-year-old International student who has just been admitted to WPI. She has already spent several days on Craigslist trying to find an apartment and roommates. She has no clue of where to start and what to look at.

Pain	Gain
Spend all day online on different websites searching renting information and found no valuable information.	Easy interface of all renting information in one website. Comprehensive information in one profile of a house.
Afraid of landlord hiding information and be cheated by landlord.	Providing past tenants’ reviews on the house
Stay up whole night worrying about how to fit into the new environment.	Create online social circle of people who live around neighborhood
Information online are provided only by landlord.	Multiple information channels of houses and apartments

For people who are looking for apartments or house to rent in Worcester area, who has the need of finding the best suitable house, getting familiar with the neighborhood and making friends.

Worcester House and Apartment Social Network (Whas Network) is a house renting website and social network that gives each house in Worcester area an ID account, creates profiles for houses and apartment including basic information, tenant reviews and neighborhood information, and provides renting services. Houses and apartments that are in the same area can be included in a same circle. Past and current tenants can update news and statuses of what’s going on in the house and invite people in the neighbors to join the activities.

Unlike other house renting companies’ website, the product has the unique differentiation that gives house and apartment identity. Customers can not only acquire house information and make renting decisions on the website; but also fulfill their social networking needs.   

Problem Solving Mechanism—A3

A3 is a simple mechnism that Toyota designes for problem solving and deeper thinking. To better understand the pros and cons of A3, I reasearch other popular and widely used problem solving models to compare. I am going to compare A3 with two other models in this blog, General Problem-Solving Model and Cause & Effect Diagram (Fish Bone).

General Problem-Solving Model

This problem solving model is a quite basic process that people will go through unconsciousely when they meet a problem. After defining the problem, one will consider the possiblilites solutions based on facts, then creating an action plan and implememting to the problem. If the problem is solved, the process will be ended. If not, one needs to go over the process once again starting from gathering facts. It’s obvious that this process lacks efficiency and flexcibility and cause waste. Firstly, it’s aimless in gathering facts phase. People will waste time on gathering useless facts that won’t help with the problem. Secondly, one consider possibilities based only on facts but not on certain analysis. Thirdly, it only allow one action plan at a time. This whole process may be suitble to solve small problems that won’t involve with too many situations and changes.

Cause & Effect Diagram

 

The Cause & Effect Diagram is a problem-solving tool that focus on figouring out the cause and effect relationships. The first step is to identify the problem as other models (Fish head). The second step is to list factors that contribute to or affect the problem as many as possible. These factors (Site, Task, People, Equipment and Control) can be listed along side the main line as “Bones”. The third step is to identy the causes of these “Bones” and subcauses of the causes. The last step is to analyze the whole diagram and reach out conclusions.

The best part I like about this fishbone is that people will be able to figour out the the root causes of the problem. However, it requires further analysis on the situation. For example, which root cause is the most important one and has the biggest correlation? Further rearch is needed. Also, people won’t be able to figout out certain action plans from this diagram and the afterwards problem solving steps. It will require another model to figour the following strategy.

Toyota’s A3

Compared to the above two problem solving models, A3 is better in many aspects. Firstly, the model has many flexibilities. People can innovate on how to design the content by themselves. Secondly, by following the process, people will be able to understand the whole situation with the main goal in mind. Thirdly, as the article said, the model stimulate people to think deeper of the problem. With better understanding of the problem, people will be able to make better decisions on what actions to take to solve the problem.

In my eyes, if one can complete a comprehensive model of A3, it will be a very effective way to solve the problem. The possibility of the successful of solving the problem is also higher than using other models since A3 takes many factors into consideration, the background, the goal, the analysis of the problem, and the comparision of action plans. It should be noticed that one should avoid having a already-known solution in mind to the problem. Knowing where to go at the end will create bias for the analysis.

All in all, I become a fan of A3 model after reading the article and comparing it with other models. I think I will consider using this model in the future.

 

Reference

Toyota’s Secret: The A3 Report

http://www.thequalityportal.com/notes/A3Shook.pdf

Cause and Effect Analysis

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_03.htm

Trouble Shooting Guide

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/bts/4.4/troubleshooting/guide/01tg01.html

 

 

 

Examples of 7 sources of Innovation

The 7 sources of innovation is quite a mind blowing concept. By learning the definition, I listed some examples of each source.

The unexpected: The discovery of Penicillin as antibiotic. Alexander Fleming was studying Staphylococcus at that time. However, he accidently observed a phenomenon that Staphylococcus’s growth had been stopped because of Penicillin. This unexpected discovery changed Fleming’s path of research, and many other scientists’ path. This unexpected event is the source of many innovations, such as the isolation of pure Penicillin and the way to mass produce Penicillin as a medicine.

The incongruity: I really find the source incongruity gives me a hard time to come up with an example. It seems that many innovations are related to both incongruity and new knowledge. It is true that with the born of some new technologies, people started to look at things differently. However, I want to argue that some innovations are truly generated on incongruities and then people would look at the problems and find solutions. The innovation of credit card and checks is my example. The reality at that time was that people had to carry certain large amount of cash if they wanted to buy something expensive. The reality that was ought to be was that people should be able to carry a small volume of something that could be traded. The incongruity led to the born of checks and then cards.

Process need: this source of innovation is very common. In manufacturing industry, this kind of innovation can be spotted everywhere. The developments of almost everything acquire process need. The web interface became more and more user friendly because people have the needs of better using experience. The updates of many smartphone applications because of customers have continuous needs on better functions and son on.

Change in industry structure and market structure: There were times when a company would produce everything it needed by itself. Later, companies began to outsource part of their business or partnered with other companies. The increasing competitors and changing market were the source of this structure innovation.

Demographic: I come from a country with 1.4 billion populations. The innovations of how to better serve this huge number of people is quite common. How to better use the space is a big issue. Innovation on construction technologies to build higher building and innovation of parking building are all innovation derived from demographic source.

Change in perception, mood and meaning: The example I have for this source is that people’s perception on environment. In past, people didn’t care about environment and limited resources. But later, when people realized how precious our planet is, people started to innovate, such as clean energy.

New Knowledge: new knowledge is definitely a main source of innovation. New materials such as plastic are created. With time went by, different plastic were invented based on different need. Innovation based on plastics can’t be numbered.

SWOT Analysis on Google

Strength

Google has always enjoyed the reputation of innovation and creativity. The biggest resource of Google is its people. Tons of top engineers and talents are attracted to this giant. Google employees work under a very flexible and comfortable environment and company structure to make sure their creativities. Its technology team makes sure Google is always in advance of everything. With the best people in the company, Google knows what it is doing. Its strong brand identity also can’t be ignored. Google made “google” a verb that equals “search”. The equation that “Google=Search” brings Google tons of benefits. It takes controls of 6.5% internet traffics, which makes it reach out huge population. Also, Google create its own eco-system in which Google won’t rely on any other channels or companies.

Weakness

As we all know that now Google is everywhere. It’s now in search engine, social network, mobile devise, tablets, software, TV, and even car business. There is an old saying in Chinese, “Things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme.” In my eyes, Google now is in too many areas but its major profit only comes from advertisement on its search engine. Google’s focus has been distracted to many places. No one can make sure that all the investment will get returns. Costs in R&D and human resources are very high. Wastes are created to drag Google’s speed back.

In addition, Google Android can also be regarded as a weakness of Google. Android is an open system that others can get the code and modify for free. Compared to its biggest competitor iOS, which is a closed system, Android lost tons of profit. Even though Android has bigger market share, it lost profit.

Opportunity

If Google can turn its weakness around, opportunities occur. As I talked in Google’s weakness, Android system right now can’t help Google make money. How to improve the system or the formation and how to use Android to make sustainable profit are key issues. Right now Android is used as a platform to provide Google’s services such as Google Map and Gmail. The essence of these services is still advertisement based business model. The real benefit of Android operating system is hidden. It’s an opportunity for Google. Google now has both software (Android) and hardware (Motorola). With these resources, Google has the opportunity to compete with and win Apple. In addition, Google TV, Cars, Glasses and Cables are all undergoing. Once these products find a profitable and practical business model, it will be very promising with all the innovation and first mover advantages.   

Threats

When it comes to threats, the first thing comes to most people’s mind will be competitions. Google faces even more fierce competition than any other companies since Google has too many fragments. In each field, Google faces different competitors, some of which are very strong such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and AT&T. Google is the best in search engine, but not in portable devices and cables networks. The threats from these strong competitors of market share and profit won’t make Google as easy as its in search engine fields.

Patent problems also threat Google. Apple just won Samsung a big one. What’s next?

With the whole SWOT analysis above, my suggestion on Google’s strategy is to invest more on its R&D department to look for an exit for its Android operating system and focus on it. Keep make smart decisions on acquiring companies. Use its huge influence on Internet to attract more attention on what it is doing.