December 25, 2001

Jack Covert Selects - Beyond e

Beyond e: 12 Ways Technology is Transforming Sales and Marketing Strategy by Stephen G. Diorio, McGraw Hill, 320 Pages, $29.95 Hardcover, November 2001, ISBN 0071376496

Beyond e is written for you sales and marketing folks looking for new ways to use technology to grow your business. Sound familiar? Well, it’s true that this type of book (“e-anything”) has flooded the market in recent years, however, Diorio will broaden your horizons by emphasizing fundamental technology changes to help you get more bang for your sales and marketing buck. He believes that after the ‘e-hype’, most people are having a tough time understanding how and where to use technology to improve sales and marketing performance, and that it is now difficult for people to think “beyond e”. Not to say that Diorio ignores the dominant presence of the web, but wants you to remember that there is a whole technological world out there to be used to your company’s advantage.

Diorio backs up his counsel with some scary stats. He reports that most large sales forces invested in one version of sales force automation software in the past 10 years, but, less that one-third feel they have gotten significant results from their investment. When the author’s company studied 50 of the biggest CRM (customer relationship marketing) projects in 2000, less that 10 percent could demonstrate positive results despite the average investment that exceeded $10 million per company. In fact, three quarters of these companies were still thinking about how to measure the return of these investments. Does your experience mirror these results? Then “Beyond e” will help. The author is succinct in writing: “This book shows how the best companies are using technology to build high-performance revenue growth engines.”

The book design/layout is strong. Its preface is extremely thorough, giving you a good idea of what the book’s premise and pay-out will be. The first half of the preface explains the author’s reason for writing the book and why he thinks the book is important, while the second half is devoted to how the chapters are laid out and what he includes in each chapter. Each of the 12 chapters is designed the same way: a page or two describing the main point of the chapter, then a short-term strategy followed by a long-term strategy. The book is laced with real world examples and practical hands on applications, all written in a language understandable to even the most technology-challenged persons. Bottom line? This is a very valuable, very specific book that can help you be a more efficient and effective marketer. And hey, in this new era of possibly dwindling customers, isn’t that really what we all strive for?

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December 22, 2001

Jack Covert Selects - Weird Ideas That Work

Weird Ideas That Work: 11 ½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation by Robert I. Sutton, The Free Press, 220 Pages, $26.00 Hardcover, October 2001. ISBN 0743212126

I am not an instant fan of books with clever titles because many times the title is the high point of the book. Not true with this book. Sutton writes with a real flare for his subject, and shows a real investment in creativity. He fills the books with stories of great feats of innovation. Some of these stories we’ve heard about, but many we haven’t, involving companies we all know. The first chapter makes clear why weird ideas work, and then the second chapter proves that they do. It is called, “What is creativity, anyway?” This is a chapter that can be read many times because the examples of innovative successes Sutton uses are great. Let me start with my favorite:

Sutton tells about Marks and Spencer’s, a leading food store in England, problem buttering bread (really!). They were expanding so rapidly and their prepared sandwiches were selling so well that a huge amount of employee time was taken up buttering the bread. What to do? One of the executives was visiting a bed sheet supplier and saw them using silk-screens to apply the designs on the sheets. He discovered that same technology would be applicable to his bread buttering problem. Now, all of Marks and Spencer sandwiches are buttered by silk-screen. Thinking out of the box. That is Sutton’s message. Another good one? Back in the early nineties, many companies were developing super mini- computers for business folks to use. These inventions generally failed until Palm’s Jeff Hawkins realized that his “competition was paper, not computers.” The rest is history.

The next 12 chapters are on the author’s own 11 ½ weird ideas. As you would expect, these are provocative practices, such as: Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers (Weird Idea #4) and Reward success and failure, punish inaction (Weird Idea #6). These ideas were drawn from Sutton’s research in behavioral psychology to explain how innovation can be fostered. He shows how the best teams and companies use these and other counter-intuitive ideas to crank out new ideas, and he demonstrates that every company can reap sales and profits from this creativity. Then, as I often admire about the most successful books, he includes an application chapter about how to implement these ideas in your organization.


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