- Sales will be largely programmatic, and the process will be automated.
- Salespeople will still be needed but mostly for B2B and large accounts where it becomes essential to understand the human customers who are ultimately responsible for purchases.
- Sales will need to study machine behavior, looking for patterns that could inform their sales strategy.
The tao of Alibaba, the rise of non-human customers, and how to solve the toughest problems … 10 new books I am reading this summer … inspiration for business leaders
July 30, 2023
Lie on the beach, hike in the mountains, sail the oceans … time to relax, step back, recharge … to find new ideas and inspiration for the journey ahead.
I love to switch off … but after a few days, my mind is already buzzing with new ideas, initiatives and plans for the future. Clear of the fog of the never-ending to-do list, free of the stress of business travel, I love to catch up on the best new books, insights and ideas … to move me – and all of us – forwards.
So what’s inspired me this year?
“The Tao of Alibaba”
Inside the Chinese digital giant that is changing the world
Asian businesses – like Alibaba, Haier, PingAn and Tencent – are some of the most innovative companies today. Not just in product development, but in how organisations work, the business models they embrace, and the way in which leaders drive them forwards.
Brian Wong was the first American – and 52nd employee – to join the Alibaba Group. As Chairman Jack Ma’s special assistant for international affairs, he contributed to the early globalisation efforts of the company
Wong describes Alibaba’s unique culture and “tai chi” management principles that offer a business and economic development model for the rest of the world. He says “if you took the economic might of Amazon, and added the penetration of Facebook, the ubiquity of Google, and the cultural significance of YouTube, you might have something starting to resemble Alibaba”
Commonly mischaracterised as a kind of Chinese eBay for businesses, Alibaba and its interlinked network of products and services have exploded into global markets, disrupting conventional businesses and creating previously unimaginable opportunities for millions of small businesses worldwide.
Wong reveals Alibaba’s “secret sauce”, a consciously cultivated ethos and spirit that has enabled Alibaba to weather tough times (including its recent setbacks with the Chinese government) and persist toward a common mission. It is a blueprint of the company’s management philosophy, crystalised into the most important elements that have driven its success, and it provides a road map for how to incorporate these principles into any organization’s operations.
The driving idea behind Alibaba was Jack Ma’s commitment to “expanding opportunities for China’s huge number of industrious SMEs” (small and medium-sized enterprises), Ma believed that “in markets dominated by large corporations and state-owned enterprises, technology could be the great equalizer” by connecting small Chinese wholesalers to business buyers.
But even in well-developed economies, reaching and serving SMEs effectively is notoriously difficult and expensive. In China, where few had bank accounts or credit cards, the challenges were even greater. Alibaba overcame these obstacles and built on its B2B platform to also create the leading consumer marketplace, first vanquishing eBay and then Amazon in the Chinese market.
The company leadership model “is built on empowerment, humility, mental dexterity, empathy, and, not least, self-knowledge.” How to implement this is the hard part, balancing the company’s hard-nosed key performance indicators (KPIs) with instinct and broader corporate or social values. Alibaba uses “dual track” performance evaluations, which encompass an assessment of both business results and adherence to company values.
Alibaba had to be more than Jack Ma, and has taken a number of concrete steps to institutionalise Ma’s ethos. Wong was at one point responsible for the Alibaba Global Leadership Academy, established to indoctrinate the next generation of company management in its culture, and the Alibaba Global Initiative, to train entrepreneurs in emerging markets to apply the Alibaba digital mode. What’s more, a majority of Alibaba’s board is nominated by the Alibaba Partnership — a group of 38 company culture carriers whose new members must secure approval of 75% of the existing partners.
Alibaba’s stock has fallen 80% since Ma stepped off the board and largely disappeared from public view in October 2020, after making a speech that angered Chinese authorities. Time will tell whether the systems and structures he put in place will be enough to preserve the unique organization and culture he established.
“For the Culture”
The power behind what we buy, what we do, and who we want to be
With 30 years experience in the marketing world, I’ve got to know some of the best marketers, brands and agencies. Wieden+Kennedy, the agency that grew on the coattails of Nike, is one of the most creative.
Marcus Collins is their head of strategy, while also moonlighting as clinical assistant professor of marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. His deep understanding of brand strategy and consumer behavior has helped him bridge the academic-practitioner gap for blue-chip brands and startups alike.
He is the architect of some of the most famous ad campaigns of the last decade argues that culture is the most powerful vehicle for influencing behaviour, and shows readers how to harness culture to inspire other people to share their vision.
We all try to influence others in our daily lives. Whether you are a manager motivating your team, an employee making a big presentation, an activist staging a protest, or an artist promoting your music, you are in the business of getting people to take action. In For the Culture, Marcus Collins argues true cultural engagement is the most powerful vehicle for influencing behavior. If you want to get people to move, you must first understand the underlying cultural forces that make them tick.
Collins uses stories from his own work as an award-winning marketer, from spearheading digital strategy for Beyoncé, to working on Apple and Nike collaborations, to the successful launch of the Brooklyn Nets NBA team, to break down the ways in which culture influences behaviour and how readers can do the same. With a deep perspective, and built on a century’s worth of data, For the Culture gives readers the tools they need to inspire collective change by leveraging the “cheat codes” used by some of the biggest brands in the world.
Jay Norman, Spotify’s Global Head of Music Marketing says of the book “Diving deeply into what moves real people, not personas and archetypes, Collins gives us a look into cultural nuances we can use to make meaningful connections and drive action. This book is insightful, enlightening, and sure to challenge any preconceived notions about communicating with the world. Talk the talk, walk the walk, and always do it for the culture.”
“When Machines Become Customers”
Gartner’s Don Scheibenreif and Mark Raskino explore how non-human customers are shaking up how every company does business.
CEOs believe machine customers will account for up to 20% or more of revenue by 2030 (a trillion-dollar opportunity). This is the first book to help you take full advantage.
For thousands of years, customers have been individual humans, families or organizations. But soon, intelligent software and hardware machines will start to act as customers. CEOs believe that by 2030, up to 20% of their companies’ revenue will come from machine customers. Machine customers will be involved in a wide range of consumer and business purchases.
Marketing and selling to machines will be very different. In a machine-customer world, marketing and selling will be data-science-oriented. You can’t take machines to dinner, and they won’t fall for your advertising, but they might help grow your market share. Here’s how:
Machine customers will operate based on rules and logic. Machines don’t have emotions. They will behave logically and rationally based on their programming. This means:
- Machine customers will be more reliable than their human counterparts.
- Machine customers will be more likely than human customers to make efficient purchases.
- This will take the form of smaller product sizes (minimizing waste), substitutable products that may be geographically closer with lower shipping costs, or recommended value-added products that might be more expensive in the short run, but cheaper in the long run.
Machine customers represent a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. The potential impact is real.
- By 2025, there will be, conservatively, at least 15 billion connected products with the potential to behave as customers.
- Companies such as Amazon, HP, Tesla, Bosch, Siemens, Kenmore and Sub-Zero have already taken action, with more plans to follow.
“I, Human”
AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique
ChatGPT has massively increased people’s awareness, interest in, and concern about the potential of AI. From the navigation advice on Google Maps to the ability to formulate new medicines in record time, AI is all around us, dramatically enabling and accelerating new possibilities.
Psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic tackles one of the biggest questions facing our species: Will we use artificial intelligence to improve the way we work and live, or will we allow it to alienate us?
It’s no secret that AI is changing the way we live, work, love, and entertain ourselves. Dating apps are using AI to pick our potential partners. Retailers are using AI to predict our behavior and desires. Rogue actors are using AI to persuade us with bots and misinformation. Companies are using AI to hire us—or not.
In I, Human we go on an enthralling and eye-opening journey across the AI landscape. Though AI has the potential to change our lives for the better, he argues, AI is also worsening our bad tendencies, making us more distracted, selfish, biased, narcissistic, entitled, predictable, and impatient.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Filled with fascinating insights about human behavior and our complicated relationship with technology, I, Human will help us stand out and thrive when many of our decisions are being made for us. To do so, we’ll need to double down on our curiosity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence while relying on the lost virtues of empathy, humility, and self-control.
This is just the beginning. As AI becomes smarter and more humanlike, our societies, our economies, and our humanity will undergo the most dramatic changes we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution. Some of these changes will enhance our species. Others may dehumanize us and make us more machinelike in our interactions with people. It’s up to us to adapt and determine how we want to live and work.
The choice is ours.
“Think Bigger”
How to Innovate
15 years ago, Sheena Iyengar, a business professor at Columbia University, who is also blind, hit the headlines with her book The Art of Choosing by exploring the psychology of everyday choices which we all make: Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go?
In Think Bigger, she asks “how can I get my best ideas?”
The first part of the book debunks common preconceived notions – including the right-brain/left-brain stereotype, the idea that certain places are more conducive to creativity, that “imagineering” works best in constraint-free environments, and that brainstorming can escape groupthink. According to the author, creativity is primarily about what goes on inside your head, even when working in a group. It starts with the ability to let your mind wander, provided that you understand that mind wandering only works because of work, learning, and memory. The book emphasizes that anyone can learn to be creative and apply creativity to any problem. Is it easy? No. But Iyengar’s methodology does help significantly.
The second part of the book is a Think Bigger roadmap, six steps that help you on the journey towards a big idea:
Step 1: You choose the problem you want to address, why you want to address it, which often allows you narrow it down into something that you can state and articulate in words. Don’t rush to solutions, thus falling victims of the “knowledge illusion effect,” which consists in underestimating the complexity of things. Also it’s during this step that thinking bigger doesn’t mean “think big,” but rather “identifying a problem that’s large enough to matter but small enough to be solved.”
Step 2: You to break down the problem into sub-problems, i.e. the components you believe are key to solving that problem. By doing so, you may discover that your top priority is not the problem you thought you had identified, but one of the sub-problems. Thinking bigger entails the ability to recompose the ideation process and change tack—and eventually go back to step 1. Think of sub-problems as prompts in AI. The choice of prompts has huge impact on outputs.
Step 3: You to identify for whom you want to solve the problem and “compare wants,” i.e. identify the wants of at least three stakeholders, you, your target, and other third parties in order to define your “big picture score.” Thinking bigger is about creating a perspectival system which helps to see “(1) how desirable each solution is overall, and (2) which parties you favor for each solution.”
Step 4: You “search in and out of the box,” i.e. you leverage knowledge not only from your space of expertise, but also from other domains. The author illustrates her point using the Trotter-Matrix that enabled Lloyd Trotter to considerably enhance GE’s Lighting business by identifying and borrowing best practices and knowledge from other unrelated business units. Cross-pollination is a formidable ideation mechanism.
Step 5: Choice mapping is constructive alternative to brainstorming that results from step 1, 2, 3 and 4. It operates as a combinatorial engine that allows you to generate the multiple solutions for you to select by measuring them against your Big Picture Score.
Step 6: The “Third Eye” test leads you through a series of exercises that help you understand how others perceive your idea and “expand the range of viewpoints you bring to your solution.” Thinking bigger is about opening your aperture and eventually rephrasing your value proposition.
Moving from one step to the other is not linear process, but a recursive one, each step you take feeding into both the previous and following steps.
“Both/And Thinking”
Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems
I remember AG Lafley, the former CEO of P&G, saying that a paradox is your biggest opportunity to innovate. When two apparently contradictory outcomes can be achieved together – think of tasty food and healthy diet, or global travel and carbon free – then you have the opportunity to innovate in a more dramatic way.
Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis reflect that life is full of paradoxes. How can we each express our individuality while also being a team player? How do we balance work and life? How can we improve diversity while promoting opportunities for all? How can we manage the core business while innovating for the future?
For many of us, these competing and interwoven demands are a source of conflict. Since our brains love to make either-or choices, we choose one option over the other. We deal with the uncertainty by asserting certainty.
There’s a better way.
In Both/And Thinking, they explore how to cope with multiple, knotted tensions at the same time. Drawing from more than twenty years of pioneering research, they provide tools and lessons for transforming these tensions into opportunities for innovation and personal growth.
The great Tom Peters said of the book “I can’t exaggerate the importance and the originality of this book. And that is NOT hyperbole. Both/And provides us with a novel and unspeakably powerful and instantly usable way to reframe almost any problem. The argument is flawless. The case studies are engaging and powerful. And every significant point is backed up by unassailable research.”
“The Four Workarounds”
How the World’s Scrappiest Organizations Tackle Complex Problems
Real-world problems need real solutions. Often “perfect” just isn’t an option, and we need something easy, smart, and quick: we need a “workaround”, a deviation from the norm.
Paulo Savaget has produced a richly illustrated guide to how to work around rules and norms to solve complex problems, with examples from areas as diverse as cryptocurrencies and medicine distribution. Savaget outlines the managerial and domestic benefits to make a wider point about the advantages of adopting a “workaround mindset”.
From remote Zambia to the waves of the North Sea, Brazilian mines to American biohackers, The Four Workarounds shows how seemingly intractable problems have been solved using unconventional tactics. Through these cases – from public urination to the challenges of delivering life-saving medicine to remote communities – we see how some of the world’s most admired companies are already using Savaget’s research to transform the ways they do business.
Savaget draws examples from organizations dedicated to social action that have made an art form out of subverting the status quo, proving themselves adept at achieving massive wins with minimal resources.
They do this by employing four particular workarounds: the piggyback, the loophole, the roundabout, and the next best.
The “piggyback” solution is when you look for something that’s already working and then pair it with your current goal. Your workplace might have a robust mentorship program, but little formal support for new hires — and coupling those resources could help new hires see the same benefits.
The “loophole” solution is where you look for ambiguity in existing rules. It’s similar to where laws might differ by country, and therefore travelling to another place to avoid falling foul legally, Savaget suggests.
“Real-Time Leadership”
Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High
The best leaders, in the biggest moments, know how to read the situation, respond in the most effective way possible, and move forward. You can, too, according to David Noble and Carol Kauffman.
The hardest part of leadership is mastering the inevitable high-risk, high-stakes challenges you will face. Whether you’re making a split-second decision when your business is knocked sideways or you’re finding the best strategy to navigate business-critical long-term circumstances, how can you be in peak form in those most crucial moments?
We all have default reactions to things, and under pressure we become an exaggerated version of ourselves. We are then vulnerable to slide into our automatic ways of reacting. Often these do not serve us, or those we lead and care about. It’s important to learn to make inner space, so as to defy your default mode of acting, allowing you to make the most of every moment.
Finding your winning moves when the stakes are high means being able to have choices at your fingertips when you need them. Victor Frankl wrote that there’s a space between stimulus and response, and in that space is our freedom. But, what can you do with that freedom? What should you focus on, what lifelines do you need to hold onto? Can you slow time down, look around, and gain sense of what you need to focus on? Can you identify what really needs to get done, what inner resources you can access? Are you able to see others clearly, connect with them, and send the right signals? If you could, what would that be like? How much would that serve you?
Here are three examples of stimuli: You are in a major interview and you’re tanking. Will you go into default mode, or can you make a space? You are with a coworker or an extended family member and suddenly they start spouting opinions that are toxic to you. Will you go into default mode, or can you make a space? You want to buy a house or acquire a company and your finances are strained. Will you go into default mode, or can you make a space?
We have a number of ways to help make space, defy your default mode, and find freedom to make the choices you want. We summarize everything we know and clumped it into an acronym so you could remember it in real-time: M.O.V.E.
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