Growth Strategies for Tech Companies

The story of Pixar is the latest example of how differently leaders of today’s foresighted vs. blind-spotted technology, communications and media goliaths are remaking their converging industries. The contrast between those that can see what almost no one else can and those that have a hard time acting on what nearly everyone can see is playing out in the increasing number of industry acquisitions.

In the case of Pixar, Disney isn’t the one showing great foresight here. Current CEO Bob Iger acted on what predecessor Michael Eisner couldn’t see through the dense fog of his ego; Disney needs to restore its core animation business and purchasing Pixar, while at a very dear $7.4 billion price, is the best way to do it.

Pixar CEO Steve Jobs showed the foresight in this case, when in 1986 he bought Pixar, then a graphics computing division of Lucasfilm, for $10 million from the Star Wars creator George Lucas and shaped it into the technology driven animation company that Disney had to have.

Who is showing foresight these days? Ironically, foresight is only proven out in hindsight, but GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) appear to be putting bets down now on a wide range of emerging businesses that may play critical roles not only in the future of these companies but, more importantly, in the direction of the converging technology, communications and media industries.

The relatively new goliaths like GYM (new compared to the Disneys, IBMs, and incumbent telcos of this world) have been acquiring venture backed companies in increasing numbers since the IPO market went nearly dry a few years ago. Most of these investments in foresight are made for under $100 million, many for less than $10 million.

More important than the revenue (if any) that these acquired companies can generate, the ideas they bring shape or reshape businesses in their parent companies in ways that aren’t always immediately obvious. Yahoo!, for example, likely bought tagging pioneer de.lic.ious for what it could do for Yahoo!’s search service rather than for the potential for building a business around a social tagging site. Unfortunately, the occasional, wildly overpriced, ‘how does this fit’ deal like eBay’s $2.4 billion acquisition of VoIP provider Skype gets most of the press and sets the wrong example.

Google is buying many young emerging technology companies even before they get much if any venture funding, 12 since 2003 and 5 in the last 6 months. As important as the business ideas and concepts that these young companies bring is the skill and foresight of the founding employees.

And what of twin telecom titans – Verizon and SBC (just retro-rebranded as “at&t”)? In their recent M&A activity, these goliaths appear to operate with blind spots more so than with any particular foresight.

Where have they spent their strategic capital in the last few years? Mega acquisitions (Verizon/MCI, SBC/AT&T, Sprint/Nextel) to build up their positions with business customers. Acquisitions of companies having licenses that will fill out wireless coverage. And, major infrastructure investments in both their wireless (e.g. EVDO, HSPDA) and wireline (e.g. FIOS) infrastructure to be able to sell more music and video content in competition with entertainment and cable companies.

Verizon Communications, for example, acquired MCI for $8.6 billion in 2005 and spent $1.2 billion on acquisitions in 2004, nearly 90% of which went to purchasing or making investments in some 13 companies that held wireless licenses that benefit its Verizon Wireless unit. The company did another 16 of these deals in 2005. Starting in 2004 and for a number of years, they will spend billions more to build out their FTTP (fiber to the premises) and EVDO (broadband wireless) infrastructure.

It’s hard to argue with these telco titan strategies. Most of them (MCI, license acquisitions, FTTP) are bold yet competitively defensive. At the same time, it appears the enormous amount of management attention spent on this agenda may be limiting their senior executives’ ability to take control of the convergence future and their company’s role in it.

Infrastructure companies like Verizon and SBC haven’t believed they’ve needed to own the content going over their networks, just to control it. Comcast, when it made a bid for Disney, felt otherwise. TimeWarnerAOL has failed to create increased value out of its combination of infrastructure, content and online assets, assembled in part through acquisition.

So, the jury is still out on the right future strategy for infrastructure dominated companies in a converged world. The right strategy doesn’t appear to be in play right now. Certainly, the apparent unwillingness of most of these titans to show foresight by purchasing young companies (and the titan’s own limited record of innovation) suggests a significant blind spot.

Interestingly, there are many young content software management companies working closely with the telco and cable titans right now to distribute music and video from the titan’s walled gardens. Unfortunately, the key discussions between these titans and young pups are usually around how big a piece of the pie the titan will allow the upstart to take rather than how to increase the size and number of pies through innovative adoption and scaling of the upstart’s concept and addition of entrepreneurial DNA.

The acquisition pace is expected to pick up this year, in number if not in dollars, as the technology, communications and media businesses continue to converge and search for new business models and ways to create value. The opportunity for the telecom and cable companies to adopt the foresighted approach of some of their technology and media competitors is right there in front of them to act on.

With the post-Katrina economic analyses reaching conclusions such as “little systemic threat to the stock market” and “any dampening of consumer spending offset by the stimulus from Louisiana’s reconstruction” (Barron’s), the back-to-growth readiness urged in my last post still holds water, although one now fouled considerably by a national trauma that personal resilience and slower but continued economic growth must cleanse over time.

So with the broader economy and tech industry expected to get back-to-growth, what do you need to be doing to get your company ready?

I’ll assume that the early 2000’s economic and industry upheaval caused you to remake your operations, cutting costs both internally and perhaps strategically through various forms of operational realignment, outsourcing, and business partnerships.

I’ll also believe that you have gotten to know you customers extremely well as their needs have substantially shifted these last couple of years. Certainly, they would no longer be customers if you hadn’t learned exactly what they need and delivered it to them.

Operational restructuring and customer focus are now table stakes in the tech industry the way great technology and strong management were in the 1990’s. Don’t even think about growing your business with the improving economy unless you’ve got these two vital areas in order.

But, there are four actions that are just as critical to being ready for back-to-growth now. They are:

Articulate Your Foresight – One of the few downsides of focusing on customer needs is the tendency to concentrate on the near term. This is understandable - you are trying to drive sales and service revenues, product improvements and the like for near term results.

But, customers increasingly want to see where your company is headed over the longer term. Many customers have cut the number of suppliers so, if you are still on their short list, you have to demonstrate in many ways that you’ll be around for the long term or risk being dropped. Explicitly or implicitly, customers usually make and renew a commitment to buy a vendor’s offering or solution for a number of quarters or years with each decision to give you an order.

To demonstrate your company has superior foresight, you have to ask questions of customers and analysts about what the issues, needs, industry structure, and basis of competition will look like 5 to 10 years from now. You then need to be able to articulate how your company will lead and thrive along the path from where it is today to your view of the future.

Larger public tech companies have a problem articulating their foresight but shouldn’t – they are so concerned with current year results that nearly all management and staff is focused on the near term despite their capacity to spend resources looking into the future. Venture-backed and smaller public companies shouldn’t have a foresight problem but do – their true ability to create value for investors will only be borne out over a longer term, yet they get focused on the present to meet near term sales and development milestones.

Bolt-down Your Business Model – Fundamentally, your business model should tell you which group of customers you are going to serve (and which you aren’t), what activities your company will perform to serve them (and not), and how you will make money performing those activities in service of those customers (and how you’ll avoid losing it). That’s it. Everything else is the strategy your company will use to execute a business model based on clear answers to those three components.

Some companies have this down cold. Others have only one or two of the components really figured out, which of course isn’t good enough since the model is only as strong as its weakest link.

Too many companies have what I call “business model creep” – their customer set is expanding or their activity base is shifting or the way they feel they can make money is evolving and none of these are changing in concert with the others. This creep can be driven by well intentioned marketing & sales groups or operations teams or finance units working alone. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of top management to work together to determine whether components of the business model should be shifted, and if so, make sure they change in a coordinated way.

Companies are especially prone to business model creep during growth periods. When the economy turns up, many companies want to serve new customers or ones in emerging or related markets. They want to add services or extend products to better meet the needs of these potential new customers. But, an analysis must be done to test out the interdependencies between customer choice, activity performance, and value creation before these kinds of model changes are made. Too often, because potential changes look like great opportunities, they are pursued before being vetted. The result: profitless growth or worse, value destroying growth.

Market your Differentiation – Without a confident, stable business model, it’s hard to differentiate your company. Obviously, you have to be able to show a substantial, compelling, and superior difference between the value you and your competition can bring to your customers to gain an advantage. And in the tech world these days, you not only need to have a compelling, value adding difference to bring to your customers, you must be able to really market it well.

But, you say, your company has a great technology and a great product. So what does it do for your customer? How does it create substantially greater value than Brand X’s great technology and great product? Despite being 10-15 years removed from a time when great technology and products could all but sell themselves, many companies still haven’t figured out that it is great marketing that truly separates those competitors that have a differentiated value proposition.

Taking more than your share of a growing market demands that you expertly market your substantial differentiation.

Create an Execution Advantage – Your company’s ability to execute remains the number one reason you grow or don’t. All the great products, business models, strategies etc., only succeed if you can execute. Execution can be a value creating advantage if done expertly. If done poorly or only as good as your competition, you are no better off, perhaps worse.

Think your company executes with the best of them? Answer 10 questions to see how your execution rates against others.

Fortunately, most CEOs are most concerned with their company’s execution. Unfortunately, it remains a somewhat macho pursuit built around hard work and aggressive management. Those aspects are indeed important but, as I described in a previous issue of The Advisor, execution is more than “just do it” and can be built into a value creating advantage by taking the right steps over time.

Too few companies are accomplishing these four actions with the outcomes they desire. So, to meet your growth objectives and grow profitably and faster than your competition, make sure you are working on each of these as hard and smart as anything else you are now doing.

At the same time the kids are going back-to-school, it appears that the tech world is headed back-to-growth. While it isn’t the first time in the last few years that analytical and anecdotal data suggest we’re seeing a turn in the tech economy, the number and nature of recent reports indicates that we are going through the broadest and most sustained tech recovery this side of the bubble.

Two articles are indicative of tech’s recovering financial performance and ecosystem revival. Business Week’s Michael Wallace (Tracking Tech’s Turned Tide) highlights the turnaround from the depths of 2002 including: 90% appreciation in the Nasdaq index, double digit growth in Q2 2005 PC shipments, double digit Q2 2005 earnings growth across many tech sectors, and a 30% annualized growth rate in real investment in information technology during Q1 2005.

In a cynical yet grudging acknowledgement of fundamental change in the industry, Portals columnist Lee Gomes of The Wall Street Journal (A Competitive Spirit Makes Rare Showing In the Tech Industry) states that “a specter is haunting the computer industry: the specter of competition.”

Gomes says that the Wintel monopoly that threatened to choke off competition across the tech world has withered on the back of its own design entropy and companies like Apple and Google (and, as we know, dozens of other less well publicized but sufficiently well capitalized ones) are shaking up the status quo.

His conclusion after surveying today’s tech environment: “it’s hard to know what the tech world will look like 18 or so months from now. It’s the first time in a long time this has been the case…suddenly, the tech world has gotten interesting again.”

Certainly, it’s hard to predict what the macro-effects of Hurricane Katrina, higher gas prices, and the growing Iraqi war costs and destabilizing situation there will have on the customer’s psyche and pocketbook for tech products and services. Whether these factors are regional and short-lived or effect tech and the broader global economy for several years is hard to know.

But it appears that the tech industry’s trajectory is now back-to-growth. This represents a shift from the fits-and-starts patterns we’ve experienced for the last several years and frankly, have had a hard time managing through. The direction now is clearly positive.

My question to you: Are you and your company ready for back-to-growth?

In my next post, I’ll lay out the areas that must be in shape to accelerate your company forward as the tech economy grows along this new trajectory.

Siebel Systems, the CRM software leader, recently announced weak second quarter earnings. Forbes magazine reported that analysts at SG Cowen significantly lowered their revenue and earnings expectations for Siebel, explaining that they have “questions regarding demand, competition and execution.”

Ouch. What else could be more important to growing your business than how you create demand, differentiate from competition, and drive execution? Not doing anyone of these well would create quite a rough patch in your growth but creating “questions” in the minds of investors about all three at the same time? Not good.

Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies, both private and public, are dealing with some or all three of these growth fundamentals now. If you are worried about these at your company, here are some ideas and approaches to consider and help you answer your own concerns about these areas before others start questioning you.

Demand: Most companies don’t get out of the blocks unless there is a large market for what they plan to offer. Unfortunately, demand can be a fickle thing. It comes and goes and changes. Lately, in a lot of tech sectors, demand has been flat to down and companies are competing like mad for it. Meanwhile, customers are getting more demanding about what they want from you. Not pretty.

As we wrote in our recent posts Where’s the Growth? How do I Get Some? and Creating Strategies that Transform Industries, the best way to create demand in stagnant markets today is to transform them or take advantage of a transformation underway. I don’t have an easy suggestion for Siebel on how to transform the CRM business, but it’s pretty clear that many customers have not been terribly satisfied with how well this application has done for them. That knowledge, of which I’d guess Siebel has more data on than anyone, and a willingness to consider changing what you do and how you go about doing it, which Siebel hasn’t historically shown great interest in, would likely produce some good ideas on how to transform the market and their own company. With new management in place but time running out, Siebel has half a chance of transforming the market it helped create.

Competition: Given the right management team, it’s not too difficult to copy what your competitors are doing in the tech industry these days. In recent years, too much of tech company strategies have been based on the undifferentiated approaches. Oh, everyone thinks they have better technology and more effective channels and lower costs and and and, but ask the customers and they are hard pressed to see significant differences.

In most high-tech and communications industry segments, fundamental change in your business model is what truly differentiates you from competitors.

Compare Siebel to Salesforce.com. The differences between the business models of those two companies - software licensing versus software as a service - are different in the eyes of the customers in terms of price, commitment, implementation and other customer-facing variables. Many internal elements of the business model also significantly differentiate the two companies.

True, the “software as a service” market is very small and Salesforce.com’s revenue is an order of magnitude smaller than Siebel’s. But Siebel’s market cap is not even 2x Salesforce.com’s. That tells you quite a bit right there.

For some approaches to separate yourself from competition by changing your business model, check out Getting to Liquidity and Market of Niches. While both of these were written with venture-backed tech companies in mind, they apply quite nicely to public ones as well.

Execution: This is the growth foundation that every CEO I’ve ever met is focused on first and foremost. Demand may be screaming hot, competition may be pathetically weak, but if your own execution stinks, you are nowhere near ready to create the value you could and are leaving the door open for the weak to get healthy on your nickel.

As I wrote in Execution: More than “Just Do It,” successful execution is strategic at its core, even though it may look tactical to those who don’t know better. Great execution is truly a value creating advantage, but you need strategic levels of the three C’s - commitment, clarity, and capability - to have superior execution.

If you think your company has the execution it takes to complement great demand and competitive differentiation, or you are concerned that it may not, here’s a simple 3-minute self-diagnostic that will foretell how well your new strategy will be executed or help you understand why and where the execution of prior strategies have fallen down.

Siebel’s execution looked pretty good (and ruthless) on their way up. Now that they’ve been stumbling and changed management a couple of times, one can only hope that they will recommit to it.

Demand, competition and execution are as powerful a combination of issues as any to focus and act on to grow your business.

Wireless has been one of the few shining stars in the relative darkness of the tech economy over the last few years. And voice has been the killer application attracting new subscribers and driving growth at US carriers. But the imminent release of the a new Motorola phone with a built-in Apple i-Tunes music player marks an important shift and a major strategy challenge for the largest US wireless carriers.

As subscriber growth has slowed, carriers have tried to set off a new wave of sales and profits by getting users to adopt wireless data applications such as e-mail, ring tones, text and picture messaging, music, game and video downloads, and mobile enterprise sales and service programs.

Unfortunately, revenue from these data applications at Verizon Wireless, Cingular, and Sprint, the dominant US wireless carriers, have been tepid, reaching to 5% of all sales in the best cases. Conversely, large European and especially Asian carriers have succeeded with data applications, which top 20% of those carriers’ sales at the most successful providers.

Many observers have ascribed this adoption gap to cultural differences. The conventional wisdom goes that we’re a computer and car based society, too busy to play or watch games on little screens. The Europeans and Asians, as this view holds, were initially hooked by cheaper cell phones rather than PCs, need something to do while they are crammed on commuter trains to and from work, and are less serious than Americans and therefore more willing to do the ‘silly things’ that one can now do on mobile phones.

More important than these debatable differences in our social cultures are the actual differences in our business cultures. While it may have been the French philosopher Voltaire who said “we must cultivate our own garden,” it is the major US wireless carriers whose strategies have been to build walls around their gardens of applications and allow entry only at, for most, an unattractively high cost. Carriers also lack experience marketing the content that makes up most of these applications. The net result: too few users have been willing to taste the fruit from these gardens and the expensive toll roads carriers built and are improving to get to them are being underutilized

But this is slowly changing – it appears that the walls are coming down.

Cingular, the wireless carrier that will be the first to sell the new Motorola i-Tunes mobile phones, hasn’t yet developed its own wireless music offering. Arguably, wireless over-the-air music download services that Verizon and Sprint are developing and hope to introduce in the next 12 months will have a hard time matching the success of the i-Tunes online download service. Perhaps as a hedge on the wireless much download approach, all three carriers have recently begun selling phones with built in music players that can store a very limited number of songs transferred from a computer.

The opportunity for Cingular, and likely other carriers, to offer its customers the proven brand and product success of Apple’s market making digital music distribution service on the wildly successful Motorola RAZR handset puts Cingular in a far better position to capture new customers, retain existing ones, and capture new data revenue while it develops its own wireless music service, likely in concert with one or both of its new partners.

Already, others with more entertainment industry, brand or entrepreneurial strength like Napster, SonyEricsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, Sirius, XM Satellite Radio and any number of venture-backed start-ups are working on plans to offer music, radio, and video services to compete with the wireless carriers’ offerings. So, the race is on.

Sprint is also figuring out that developing a brand and new business model to sell the kind of content its subscribers want is a risky proposition. While it has been as aggressive as any of the US carriers in promoting data applications, at the same time it has seen the wisdom of helping world-class marketers become so-called Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs). Companies with well established content brands like Disney and ESPN and strong consumer niches like Virgin Atlantic reach their established customers and add their value on top of Sprint’s infrastructure and services to create more revenue and profit for both partners than either would likely generate on its own.

The pressures to further lower the garden walls and embrace new business approaches will continue apace as new technologies are deployed in successful business models by upstart carriers and other members of the strengthening wireless data ecosystem. The near term reality of increased amounts of wireless traffic going over the Internet (through wireless VoIP) and of essentially free access to the all that the Internet offers through WiFi and WiMAX chips built into mobile phones and laptops will set up share-the-spoils versus watch-it-spoil decisions amongst today’s controlling gardeners.

Major overseas wireless carriers like DoCoMo (Japan), SK Telecom (Korea), and serveral European providers have already figured this out and adopted business models that have earned them rapid data applications growth. Already, over 90% of data revenues from these carriers come from applications originally delivered by providers outside of the carriers’ gardens. In the US, that number has increased to nearly 30% from virtually zero in the last year, primarily from simple ring tones and user generated content like e-mail and photos. As the walls come down around their own gardens and the richer content applications are readied for the wireless market, US carriers must determine how they can gain a healthy share of growing data sales with business models that look more like that of a community gardener while enjoying the revenue of increased traffic from those traveling their roads.

In my last post Where’s the Growth? How Do I Get Some, I explained how to use industry transformation to drive tech company growth.

Shortly after putting up that post, I came across a great article in Business 2.0 called The Fifth Wave by Michael Copeland and Om Malik describing a nexus of discontinuities driving transformation in the technology and communications industries today.

Essentially, the article sets out that the arrival of cheap and ubiquitous computing, infinite bandwidth, and open source software creates today’s growth opportunities. I’d separate out “untethered connectivity” as another explicit driver of the Fifth Wave, but we’ll save that point for another post.

There are any number of user need-, technology-, economic-, and regulatory-originated discontinuities (or its modern synonym, “disruptions”) that enable companies to create strategies that transform industries to their value creating advantage.

Strategies that put these discontinuities at their core can be relatively simple, like shaping a company’s offering to put the needs of a new or rapidly growing market at the forefront. The many companies, both high and low tech, from the first ISPs to Staples, that recognized the bursting growth and emerging power of SMBs (small and medium businesses) grew rapidly and created a significant amount of new market value. Larger, established technology companies from IBM to Dell to Microsoft and on down the line are working hard to generate more growth from the needs of this customer group.

On the other hand, discontinuity based strategies often require a great deal of technology or business innovation to succeed. As I wrote in Create Your Own ‘Big Bang’, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal last year, new markets built around VoIP, RFID, and WiFi that seemed to emerge overnight, actually developed after a fairly long time and large amount of business innovation that accompanied or often followed their pure technological breakthroughs.

David Taber commented on my last post that business model innovation can also be the fundamental element of successful strategies that take advantage of discontinuities. My partner Bill Fleming and I have written on this topic before (see This Time the Rules Are Different , Markets of Niches, Value-ation Proposition ). One only need look at the radical changes in data centers today compared to just 10 years ago to see the effects of new provider (and customer) business models built around outsourcing, on-demand computing, virtualization, and open source computing.

While superior execution of an established strategy in a stable or very slowly changing market can be a continued source of growth (see Intel), the double digit revenue growth and major new value creation opportunities in tech markets will undoubtedly continue to come from innovative strategies that transform industries.

What’s your perspective? Click the comment link below to share an example of an innovative strategy you’ve been a part of that helped transform a tech market.

Most of the tech company strategies I’ve seen since the bubble burst seem to arise out of how executives answer two related questions: Is tech a growth business anymore? and Can you create new value through tech?

Basically, the debate among investors, executives, researchers and others in the tech community is whether the tech world, broadly speaking, is a growth or value play. Should our strategies try to build companies and equity value based on new and growing market demand in key sectors, with innovative technologies and business models? Or, should we capture more of the existing value in what has/will become a commodity business by consolidating companies and industries, running low cost business models, providing enabling rather than breakthrough products, etc.?

Adding to this debate are earnings and projections from F500 companies like those that came out of Q1 ’05. Cisco, Intel, EMC, Dell, and Motorola excited their investors while IBM, Sun, Qualcomm, and Siebel painted a less than rosy picture. At the other end of the spectrum, venture capital investment numbers paint a conflicting picture between the seemingly increasing amounts of institutional money going into companies for the first time and the decreasing number of those companies that are truly innovative start-ups (versus those receiving institutional money that already have released product, customer revenue, and often profits).

I think these arguments miss the point entirely. There are obviously growth stocks and value stocks. Some sectors are growing while some are consolidating. But revenue and equity value growth is going to those who transform or take advantage of transforming sectors, regardless of whether those sectors would be considered “growth” or “value” at the time that their transformation began.

Two examples illustrate the point:

Telecom Access – This his been a steady, very profitable business for years that went through a growth period in the 90s when everyone was adding second lines and data traffic was zooming. More recently, the access market has been consolidating as the RBOCs, aided by regulatory changes have squeezed out some of their weaker brethren and many CLECs. But after relatively predictable ups and downs in this sector, it is being radically transformed by the entrance of cable companies and ISPs/portals, by the alternative of wireless in several forms, by VoIP, and by the demand for value added services that few access providers paid much attention to in the past. Like its long distance cousin, access prices will plummet over the next few years, competitors will multiply and revenue and value growth will come from providing services rather than merely a connection to the network.

Data Storage – Going back perhaps 20 years and continuing periodically up to the present, every time you thought this industry had matured and the big boys had cornered the market with stable technology, it all changes. In just the last 3 years, EMC has dramatically changed itself from a product to a software and services company, from a build your own technology company to a voracious acquirer, and in many other ways. It has transformed its industry in part by transforming itself. Bob’s back-up to the future blog lists 10 trends from the recent Storage World conference many, like the mainstream future of CDP (continuous data protection), are truly transformational. And the VCs continue to invest in a range of storage technologies and companies doing different things at different stages in a way that suggests they believe there are many more transformations to come.

So what should you do to transform a tech sector? It’s not a one size fits all answer, but my experience suggests the best executives transform their industries and create value for their companies by using the following approaches. (Since it’s summer, but I’m in the office rather than out driving a sweet sloop, let me use a sailing metaphor to help make my points.)

Plot your next course well ahead: While the mission and objectives of the best companies remain steady, their strategies shift regularly and show great foresight far into the future. These companies understand that discontinuities – shifts in user needs, technologies, global economics or regulations – properly captured, can change an entire industry in your favor. IBM has moved its services strategy well beyond outsourced IT services to encompass all enterprise business processes both in outsourced and on-demand delivery models. Dell, so successful in providing low cost computers in developed markets, is emphasizing software and services to grow in developing markets where its cost strategy would be much harder to replicate.

Tack and tack quickly: EMC has made its stunningly fast and powerful return to prominence after getting knocked down and nearly capsizing from the 2000 tech collapse. Recognizing its inability to match the pace of start-up firm development to serve storage management requirements brought on by technology various cross currents, it made and integrated a half dozen strategic investments of relatively small firms in a couple years. This dramatically shifted its offering and enabled it to regain its peak revenue levels and competitive position in a market that looks very different than the one it dominated only 5 years ago.

Bring new mates into the pilot house: Companies like Motorola, HP, Kodak, and Siebel have recently changed their captains, bringing in outsiders to help change their course or better execute it. This is not a new trend. But at the ranks of senior business or functional heads, many more companies have abandoned promote-your-own philosophies. Outsiders with different experiences and first hand knowledge of the business effects of major industry discontinuities can both lead and catalyze the kind of changes needed across companies trying to transform industries.

Today’s business waters are choppier than ever, and likely only to get more so. And that’s a good thing for those of you that learn how to transform you industry and company to grow revenue and equity value.

Steve

Blogging has become quite popular, almost faddish. Before starting this Growth Strategies for Tech Companies blog and asking you to read it (and committing myself to write it), I wanted to better understand what’s behind this trend and convince myself that this blog could really be of value to you.

Basically, blogging has taken off because blogs can provide information in a form that works for more people these days. Like it or not, we have less time for long articles, e-mails, memos, phone calls, meetings, or other extended forms of communication. And we need to get and act on more information than ever before.

Increasingly, we want to know just the bottom line, the essential insight, and the action that needs to be taken for each piece of information. And if it comes from someone we trust, we don’t need all the explanation that goes with it and that can slow our processing of it.

People increasingly want this bottom line information more frequently, more relevantly, more thematically, and more approachably. A good blog does all of this – bottom line, actionable insights and recommendations from someone you trust, relevant to your interests, on a related set of topics, regularly offered, in bite sized chunks, easily accessed and digested.

So if a blog is a good way to get the kind of information you want from sources you trust , what should go into this blog and why should you read it?

Over the last few years, I’ve used many of the traditional means to share my perspective and recommendations with you on various strategies that technology companies can take to grow their revenue and market value - The Advisor newsletter; guest columns for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Business Journal, and Mass High Tech; the Emerging Business radio interviews; CEO and industry panels; print and TV interviews; quarterly market analysis….

So it seems that I’ve got something to say about how to grow the revenue and value of technology and communications companies and more than a few people are interested in hearing it. And a blog seems a whole lot easier and more effective in getting to those who really want to follow my thoughts on this topic. Better yet, it’s an easy way to get a conversation going between you and me or a group of you who have your own experiences to add, all leading to a richer set of perspectives and a better set of recommended actions.

I’m excited to get started and have a few observations and recommendations that I’ve been mulling for the first few posts. So bookmark this site or capture it in your RSS reader and give me your feedback as we blog along.

To your growth,
Steve