Corporate Responsibility Magazine (the new name of CRO Magazine) has announced its 11th annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List.  Hewlett-Packard, once tainted by a 2006 boardroom espionage case that brought down its chairman, topped the list. The Palo Alto, Calif., tech giant beat out the other companies considered–those that make up the Russell 1000 large-cap index–because of its high rankings in categories like corporate governance, philanthropy and environmental impact.

Hewlett-Packard had ranked fifth in 2009 and bumped Bristol-Myers Squibb from the top spot. Gabi Zedlmayer, the vice president of HP’s office of global social innovation, credits the company’s philanthropic efforts for the ranking, particularly its $23 million in “innovation grants” to universities. Good marketing has helped too. “We’ve done a better job of communicating the progress we’re making,” Zedlmayer says.

The 100 Best Corporate Citizens list, now in its 11th year, ranks companies based on publicly available information in seven categories: environmental impact, climate change, human rights, philanthropy, employee relations, financial performance and governance. The list’s creators assign a 19.5% weighting to environmental impact and employee relations, because they think they are what consumers, shareholders and employees care most about. Technology and electric utility businesses dominate the 2010 list, which has 25 of them. “Electric utilities are already highly regulated and transparent, and tech companies are young and mostly venture capital-backed and accustomed to transparency and dealing with investors,” says Jay Whitehead, the publisher of CRO.

Among this year’s high-profile no-shows: Google, which Whitehead describes as “one of the least transparent companies ever.” “Google’s opacity is high for a tech company,” he says. “They made a conscious decision early on not to disclose a lot, because they thought it would make them less competitive. ’Don’t be evil’ is their motto, but ‘Don’t be transparent’ is part of their culture.” Google rival Microsoft ranked No. 14.

The list suggests that companies have ramped up their do-gooding ways, or are at least doing a better job of promoting them. Between 2009 and 2010 the top company’s score improved by 66%, and the average score of all companies improved by 19%. A low score denotes good corporate citizenship, and the aggregate score of the top 100 companies was 30% less than the aggregate score last year.

Forty companies that made the 2009 list disappeared from it this year, including Goldman Sachs, which had the same score as last year. Only three companies, Intel, Starbucks and Cisco, have made the list all 11 years.

The 100 Best Corporate Citizens are selected from among the large-cap Russell 1000 companies, based on data provided by leading ESG investor data firm IW Financial.  More information is at www.thecro.com.

For information on how to enhance your corporate citizenship strategies, contact M Squared Consulting at msquared@msquared.com or 1-888-818-2505.

Business is all about customers and selling. That’s why every manager and executive should be a salesperson once in his career. The skills and lessons are indispensible and difficult to learn any other way. 

Whether you manage engineers, marketing, operations, or customer service; you’re still a salesperson. You sell every day. You don’t just sell products and services; you sell your projects, budget, ideas, and capabilities. And your customers aren’t just the paying kind; they include everybody you interface with.

What Every Manager Should Learn From Sales 

In an article this week, Forbes reported that three decades ago as much as 95% of the average corporation’s value consisted of tangible assets.  Today 75% of that average corporation’s value is intangible.   In other words, a business’s most valuable asset is its good name, its brand and reputation. In a recent survey by World Economic Forum, three-fifths of chief executives said they believed corporate brand and reputation represented more than 40% of their company’s market capitalization.  That value is the organization’s brand reputational value. Strong brand reputational value equals greater profits. 

Many companies that seek to protect and grow their brand contact M Squared Consulting for assistance.  A company’s brand reputational value has four basic elements: expectations, perceptions, business relationships and unique intellectual property assets. Improved quality in each of those areas increases financial value for the organization. For instance, a company with a reputation for quality and safety can charge more for the same product than their competitors because customers put a price premium on quality products and services that give them positive experiences. Companies with strong brands can retain employees better, too. A recent study suggests that 80% of employees between the ages of 18 and 30 will leave a company if they believe it has a weak brand or no association with ethics.

In today’s business climate there are four main avenues by which you can quickly lose your company’s brand reputational value. They are:

1. The Internet and social media. Any ethical or compliance failure, even an isolated and apparently minor one, can be instantly broadcast all over the world. Only a few years ago experts were saying you needed a top-notch public-relations capability to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle. Today 24 hours is an eternity. You need to be on your toes more than ever.

2. Subcontracting and outsourcing. A customer, partner or contractor may be the guilty party in violating ethical standards, but they don’t always receive the worst of the brand reputational value damage.

3. Regulatory. Litigation over ethics and compliance violations has been on the increase, and it will continue to increase. The Obama administration and other governments around the world are ratcheting up investigations and enforcement actions.

4. Employees. According to The Network, Inc., which runs the ethics hotline tnwinc.com, employees commit fraud more often during tough economic times. The company reports that of all the complaint calls it gets, the portion that were fraud-related whistle-blower calls rose from 14% in the first quarter of 2007 to 21% two years later.

Companies must treat their brand reputational value like any other asset. They should manage it just the way they manage real property and equipment. Here are five steps to take:

1. Invest in the three to five areas that will be most profitable. There are at least nine major areas in which ethics problems can hurt a business: markets and customers; strategy; product and service; design, brand and quality control; intellectual property and knowledge management; leadership; workforce; sub-cost-of-goods-sold expenses; risk management; and procurement. Determine which three to five of those represent the greatest business potential and risk for your organization.

2. Invest for the long term. Improving ethics in business for profitable gain is not a quarterly or one-year undertaking. Management needs to have at least a five-year plan and must try to foresee demographic and economic trends that can affect that plan. Ethical investments, just like investments in manufacturing facilities, can easily take five years to materially pay off.

3. Maintain an open communications structure. To protect a company’s brand and reputation, information has to be able to flow immediately to a sufficiently high level of the organization. One way to guarantee this is by having a consistently open line of contact between an ethics officer and senior management. If you don’t have a communication structure that allows concerns to become known, then build one.

4. Insure against individual idiocy and the ill-educated. It only takes the improper actions of one employee, one remote office or one outside agent representing the company to significantly damage your brand. Smart companies recognize and focus on the individual, always asking who exactly they’re hiring as an employee and whether they’ve done enough checking and testing of the person. Also, they know whether they are making sure their requirements concerning expected behavior reach every individual.

5. Insure against outside institutional incompetence. Apply all the same expectations for your company’s compliance, ethics and control standards to your vendors and partners as well. Not only must you exercise due diligence on entering into a relationship, but you also need to continually verify, at least for the top 10% of your supply chain, that your compliance and ethics controls are implemented and working.

In summary, your brand is a bigger part of your business’s assets than ever before. You can’t afford to let it be endangered.  For more information on how to protect and build your brand, visit www.msquared.com.

Cloud computing is changing the business IT landscape through its ability to provide scalable computing resources without the traditional technology overhead. Now, the same characteristics powering this charge—virtualization, integration, and value-added management—are poised to alter the face of business consulting.  A new cloud consulting white paper highlights the parallels between cloud computing and cloud consulting, as pioneered by M Squared Consulting, and explains how the new model is an effective alternative to the expensive, cumbersome, and outdated traditional consulting model.

In a groundbreaking article released this week, M Squared Consulting launched the innovative concept of cloud consulting™, which could transform how organizations meet their consulting needs.  “Similar to how cloud computing has forever changed the face of IT, cloud consulting will soon become the norm for skills-based delivery,” said Marion McGovern, the white paper’s author and founder & CEO of M Squared Consulting.

So what defines the “cloud” in this new model? The definitions may be as varied as the clouds they describe but the key elements remain very consistent. A cloud is built on virtual resources that are integrated, managed, and available on demand. In general, a cloud provides:

• On-demand access to a full range of resources
• No overhead infrastructure costs
• Use-driven pricing
• Reliability
• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Geographic Independence

In addition to these elements, the cloud has a unique ability to accommodate shifting business demands. By its very nature, the cloud is changeable, adapting to meet the needs of the business. By staying in step with business changes, the cloud provides greater agility and a competitive edge.

The Cloud—Remaking the Face of Consulting

Cloud consulting, as pioneered by M Squared Consulting, applies these core cloud concepts to professional services by integrating and managing virtual human capital to deliver an on-demand, cost-effective, reliable, and scalable resource system. By reflecting how human capital and intelligence resources are really employed, the consulting cloud is able to support business processes and resource demands at a cost that more closely reflects their true utilization.

It is important to note that how resources are linked and delivered defines the cloud more so than the resources themselves. For instance, in cloud computing, the resources are more commodity-like. But in cloud consulting, the resources are more specialized. In each case, it is the virtualization, integration, and management of the resources that makes the cloud a “cloud.”

Clouds on the Horizon

Today’s economic climate has forced companies to find ways to operate more cost-effectively. With fiscal pressures showing no signs of retreat, these cost concerns will continue to grow in all areas of business. And, because of its cost efficiency, so will the cloud concept.

By applying the cloud principles of virtualization, integration, and managed oversight, cloud consulting can help companies make their human capital and consulting budgets work harder and more productively.

To view or download the new Cloud Consulting whitepaper, please visit http://www.msquared.com/home/m2/Whitepapers/cloudconsulting.pdf

With the New Year upon us, many companies are finalizing their 2010 goals and objectives through a process called “Strategic Planning.”  Done well, strategic planning is not an easy process, but those companies that do it well will be rewarded, and those that don’t can face serious challenges.

At M Squared Consulting, we’re committed to helping clients achieve their business objectives, and offer these tips for sound Strategic Planning:

Plan and Process

An organization’s strategic plan should:

• Be ongoing and never-ending
• Represent a shared vision of where the business is headed and what is needed to get there
• Be integrated into a continuous business cycle

The Planning Team

The strategic planning team should represent a broad spectrum of segments within the organization.

• The ideal size is nine to 15 members with an outside facilitator.
• The CEO must serve as the strategic plan’s “spiritual leader.”
• Choose planning team members based on merit, not rank or entitlement.

The Planning Process

The strategic planning process consists of an orderly sequence of activities, each contributing to the success of the whole. The process should take place off-site, away from telephones, faxes, etc., so that team members can “disengage” from day-to-day operations.

Best Practices:

• Practice creative thinking. Generate as many ideas a possible during the early, “out-of-the-box” mode.
• Take a critical, unbiased look at what has worked before and what hasn’t.
• Identify the best of your past business practices and drop others that have led to costly mistakes.
• Create four to six long-term goals linked to the organization’s vision.
• Devise strategies to achieve these goals and objectives.
• For each objective, create specific action steps.

The Mission Statement

A mission statement describes what an organization does, what markets it serves and what it seeks to accomplish in the future.

• The mission statement describes how the business serves customers so they will underwrite its strategy.
• It serves as a guide for day-to-day operations and as the foundation for future decision-making.
• For employees, a strong mission statement builds commitment, loyalty and motivation.

Best Practices:

• Describe the essence of the business in words your employees and customers can understand and remember.
• Focus on specific traits and on target or niche markets.
• When the mission statement is created, post it on conference walls, on promotional materials, even on the packaging of products.

Goals and Objectives

Strategic planning identifies an organization’s goals and objectives. Goals set the agenda and are global in nature. Objectives are more specific and short-term.

• Goals identify areas where a major transition must occur (a transition is described as “from … to”).
• Objectives should be measurable, quantifiable and consistent.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats) analysis is a tool for looking critically at the organization.

Best Practices:

• Draw upon a variety of perspectives – from the CEO to employees, customers and others who rely upon the business.
• Identify only those tangible and intangible assets and obstacles that are tied to your company’s long-term goals.
• Gather “competitive intelligence” by purchasing a competitor’s product, hiring one of its ex-employees or visiting its booth at trade shows and conferences.
• Collect information on the Internet by viewing a competitor’s Web site and/or searching online publications.

Implementing the Plan

The results of the strategic planning process must be integrated with an organization’s daily, weekly and monthly routines.

Best Practices:

• The CEO should develop a “stump speech” around the plan – promoting its values, mission statement, actions, etc. – and spread the word wherever possible.
• Enlist a support person (or “champion”) for each strategy and action.
• Organize top and middle managers into a “strategy team” that become agents for change. The CEO should receive direct reports from these teams on a regular basis.
• Avoid common implementation mistakes such as: (1) lack of communication throughout the company; (2) treating the plan as something separate and removed from the management process; and (3) choosing to make intuitive decisions that clash with the plan’s accepted objectives.
• Set up a feedback mechanism so that employees can respond to the strategic plan.
• Share the plan with other stakeholders – investors, customers, alliance partners, etc.
• Keep the plan alive by monitoring its ongoing progress. Conduct 60- or 90-daysenior management reviews. Implement objectives by expanding employee skills through training and recruitment.
• Target sales to make the link between business strategy and sales strategy.
• Reward success to increase employee motivation.

These suggestions should put you on a path toward a successful Strategic Planning session.  Should you need help with your program, please contact us at M Squared Consulting.  Best wishes for a prosperous New Year!

What do Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Charles Schwab, Avon’s chief executive, Andrea Jung, and the late publishing giant Katharine Graham have in common?  According to a recent Forbes article, each described themselves as introverts.

A surprise perhaps, but it’s estimated that 40% of executives are introverts, and most admit that at some point in their leadership journey they’ve had to work to overcome being disregarded or misunderstood because of their quiet temperament.

The qualifications for leadership are not easily understood or so readily apparent.  But fortunately M Squared can help.  Since 1988, M Squared Consulting has been providing critical business solutions to our clients by delivering seasoned, targeted consulting expertise tailored to our clients’ unique needs.

According to Forbes, there are five key characteristics that help introverted leaders build on their quiet strength and succeed:

1. They think first, talk later. Introverted leaders think before they speak. Even in casual conversations, they consider others’ comments carefully, and they stop and reflect before responding. One executive tells me that he sits back and listens to his leadership team’s ideas and proposals, often using silence to allow even more thoughts to bubble up. Learning by listening, not talking, is a trait that introverts consistently demonstrate. They also use their calm, quiet demeanors to be heard amid all the organizational noise and chatter. (One thoughtful, reasoned comment in a meeting can move a group forward by leaps and bounds.) In fact, the most powerful person in the room is often the most quiet. Additionally, an introvert’s tendency to be more measured with words is a major asset in the current economy, when no leader can afford to make costly gaffes.

2. They focus on depth. Introverted leaders seek depth over breadth. They like to dig deep, delving into issues and ideas before moving on to new ones. They are drawn to meaningful conversations, not superficial chitchat, and they know how to ask great questions and really listen to the answers. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Deborah Dunsire, M.D., president and chief executive of Millennium, a Cambridge, Mass., biopharmaceutical company, said, “In addition to conducting organizational surveys and holding town hall meetings, I schedule walk around time, just stopping by offices. … I would just say, ‘Hey, what is keeping you up nights? What are you working on? What’s most exciting to you right now? Where do you see we can improve?’” Dr. Dunsire maintains that by pursuing this kind of in-depth questioning–something that introverted leaders do exceptionally well–executives can learn what’s actually happening in the far reaches of their organizations and engage and retain their top talent.

3. They exude calm. Introverted leaders are low-key. In times of crisis, they project a reassuring, calm confidence–think President Obama–and they speak softly and slowly regardless of the heat of the conversation or circumstances. Whenever they get ready for a meeting, a speech or a special event, their secret to success can be summed up in one word: preparation. They often plan and write out their meeting questions well in advance, and for important talks and speeches, they rehearse out loud. They also act “as if”: One executive tells me that he pretends to be James Bond before major industry conferences. It makes him feel more cool and confident. They psych themselves up internally, too, by quieting negative thoughts and framing the upcoming experience more positively. Prior to networking events, Bob Goodyear, an Atlanta-based information technology leader, tells himself, “I can do anything for 30 minutes.”

4. They let their fingers do the talking. Introverted leaders usually prefer writing to talking. This comfort with the written word often helps them better articulate their positions and document their actions. It also helps them leverage online social networking tools such as Twitter, creating new opportunities to be out there with employees, customers and other stakeholders. For instance, using Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation, an internal social network for employees at the electronics superstore, senior management and sales associates can connect continuously to discussing workers’ feedback and ideas. I know one chief financial officer who writes a daily internal blog and in a recent posting described how he made “a good presentation great” by practicing. In so sharing his experience, he not only showed openness and honesty but also provided coaching to thousands of employees.

5. They embrace solitude. Introverted leaders are energized by spending time alone. They suffer from people exhaustion and need to retreat to recharge their batteries frequently. These regular timeouts actually fuel their thinking, creativity and decision-making and, when the pressure is on, help them be responsive, not reactive. When introverts honor that inner pull, they can do their best work. In managing interruptions, they also manage people’s expectations. When asked to respond to requests or ideas, Martin Schmidler, a vice president at a national food service organization, often tells his team that he needs time to absorb what’s being asked or presented. He’s clear on how and when he’ll get back to people, and he consistently follows through on his commitments. This clarity and consistency helps him build trust with his team.

It’s clear that having the right executive and the right consultants in place is critical.  M Squared consultants come with the qualifications, judgment, and expertise to meet your specific criteria and deliver results. They bring fresh perspectives and best practices to your business need. From the very first day through completion, M Squared makes an impact.

Every business goes through ups and downs, and in this economy the challenges are more daunting than ever.  But this isn’t the first recession and it won’t be the last. Successful companies, even in tough times, keep their eye on the prize and know that down markets are actually a great time to retrench and take risks.  M Squared Consulting can guide you through choppy waters, with experienced consultants that help clients evaluate opportunities and implement new ideas.

So, with a nod toward much future success, we offer some classic CEO quotes that matter now more than ever, along with a takeaway that can help your business today in today’s economy.

“You have to pretend you’re 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can’t hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.”

Andrew Grove, former CEO, Intel

(Takeaway: Come up with an idea, a strategy, a plan, and act!  Now.)

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple

(Takeaway: Failure and loss, especially getting fired, can really invigorate you and your career.)

“When you innovate, you’ve got to be prepared for everyone telling you you’re nuts.”

Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle

(Takeaway: Behind most great and successful products or businesses are entrepreneurs who were turned down a hundred times.)

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Bill Gates, Chairman and former CEO, Microsoft

(Takeaway: Spend time understanding and analyzing your mistakes and failures. Any customer that turned you down - if you can get them to talk - is a tremendous resource for boosting your business.)

“… be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms … these models tend to look impressive. … Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”

Warren Buffett, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

(Takeaway: Buffett was talking about investing, but his advice is insightful. If you’re a reasonably intelligent and experienced business person, trust your gut more than research.)

“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”

Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple

(Takeaway: While cash conservation is critical for many businesses, big companies that think cost-cutting and a nice bottom line will get them out of this cycle in good shape are in for a surprise.)

“Watch, listen, and learn. You can’t know it all yourself. Anyone who thinks they do is destined for mediocrity.”

Donald Trump, CEO, Trump Organization

(Takeaway: Do some networking with smart people you haven’t seen in a while, read some books, take a class, do something to expand your knowledge and your horizons. You’ll be amazed at what ideas pop into your head.)

“The pending merger with XM will offer unprecedented choice for consumers and create tremendous value for stockholders.”

Mel Karmazin, CEO, Sirius XM

(Takeaway: Don’t listen to BS. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.)

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

Andrew Grove, former CEO, Intel

(Takeaway: This is yet another reason why being down is a good place to be - you only have one place to go. Up. Those on top, on the other hand, have the reverse problem.)

So, in short, whatever the business climate, there is always opportunity for innovation and success.  Contact M Squared Consulting today and get on fast track to market leadership.

A recent article in Strategy + Business by David Rock entitled “Managing with the Brain in Mind” was a fascinating look at how neuroscience research is revealing the social nature of the high-performance workplace.  In particular, the essay focused on how brain impulses respond to certain social situations.  As M Squared Consulting is focused on helping clients maximize the benefits of the high-end flexible workforce, it was enlightening to explore how business conditions and management styles can be adjusted to improve employee performance.

The entire article explores numerous aspects of this interesting topic.  The short excerpt below examines the response of the brain in familiar and unfamiliar circumstances, and offers some suggestions on how to break down complex projects so that an individual can feel more comfortable and confident:

“When an individual encounters a familiar situation, his or her brain conserves its own energy by shifting into a kind of automatic pilot: it relies on long-established neural connections in the basal ganglia and motor cortex that have, in effect, hardwired this situation and the individual’s response to it. This makes it easy to do what the person has done in the past, and it frees that person to do two things at once; for example, to talk while driving. But the minute the brain registers ambiguity or confusion — if, for example, the car ahead of the driver slams on its brakes — the brain flashes an error signal. With the threat response aroused and working memory diminished, the driver must stop talking and shift full attention to the road.

Uncertainty registers (in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex) as an error, gap, or tension: something that must be corrected before one can feel comfortable again. That is why people crave certainty. Not knowing what will happen next can be profoundly debilitating because it requires extra neural energy. This diminishes memory, undermines performance, and disengages people from the present.

Of course, uncertainty is not necessarily debilitating. Mild uncertainty attracts interest and attention: New and challenging situations create a mild threat response, increasing levels of adrenalin and dopamine just enough to spark curiosity and energize people to solve problems. Moreover, different people respond to uncertainty in the world around them in different ways, depending in part on their existing patterns of thought. For example, when that car ahead stops suddenly, the driver who thinks, “What should I do?” is likely to be ineffective, whereas the driver who frames the incident as manageable — “I need to swerve left now because there’s a car on the right” — is well equipped to respond. All of life is uncertain; it is the perception of too much uncertainty that undercuts focus and performance. When perceived uncertainty gets out of hand, people panic and make bad decisions.

Leaders and managers must thus work to create a perception of certainty to build confident and dedicated teams. Sharing business plans, rationales for change, and accurate maps of an organization’s structure promotes this perception. Giving specifics about organizational restructuring helps people feel more confident about a plan, and articulating how decisions are made increases trust. Transparent practices are the foundation on which the perception of certainty rests.

Breaking complex projects down into small steps can also help create the feeling of certainty. Although it’s highly unlikely everything will go as planned, people function better because the project now seems less ambiguous. Like the driver on the road who has enough information to calculate his or her response, an employee focused on a single, manageable aspect of a task is unlikely to be overwhelmed by threat responses.”

For the complete article, please visit www.strategy-business.com.

Why is Keeping it Simple So Difficult?

When it comes to company leaders I have found that there are two typically types of executives that exist in every workplace – “Simplifiers” and “Complicaters.”

Simplifiers – seek simple and graceful solutions. They are those rare leaders who take the time to analyze a problem or opportunity, seeking first to understand all the variables, then to understand what the fundamental issue is. Once they’ve boiled the challenge down to its basic elements, then they are in a position to formulate an intelligent solution.

Complicaters – tend to react quickly and often over-engineer a solution. They rely on rigid processes, complex frameworks, and overly inclusive teams to design a solution that is usually viable, but also so bloated and complex that it has a greater chance of failure.

Unfortunately, it has been my experience that Complicaters vastly outnumber the Simplifiers in management ranks.

The uncomfortable truth is that complex design is far easier and takes much less planning than simple design. It encompasses what your user might want to do, rather than understanding exactly what your user needs. Simplicity, it seems, requires more thought, planning, research and vision.

To see the benefits of simplicity let’s take a look at Apple. One of Steve Jobs’ first actions when he returned to the company was to reduce the number of computers they sold, allowing customers to easily identify which machine was appropriate for them. Similarly, with the iPod, simple navigational design on both the player and the iTunes store played a crucial role in its success. Later, Apple used the same philosophy when designing the iPhone.

No company makes more coveted electronic gadgets, or has made it easier to purchase and consume digital content, than Apple. Of course Apple has entire teams it can dedicate to keeping things simple. We could all learn from their example.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you strive toward simplicity with your strategic planning:

Begin with a core set of needs – Above all, it’s critical to know your essential deliverables. What needs must be met and what features are essential to most directly meet those needs? Articulate an initial vision of your product or service with the bare essentials.

Always look to eliminate features - Spend as much time analyzing what you can eliminate from your product or service as you do analyzing what should be included. It takes very little thought to add features or service complexity, but the end result is usually a complicated mess. By constantly adding elements, you risk making the user experience more complex and less enjoyable.

Customers don’t always know best – This sounds crazy, but there is some truth to it. Customer interaction is essential to most successful products and services, but the questions you ask are crucial. Asking your customers what they need and what problems they are trying to solve is the key. Do not spend a lot of time asking for feature requests. When you validate your design, focus on whether it meets their need and not what they want to see. Unrestrained feature requests result in bloat – and will cripple your delivery team.

Have vision – It’s essential to be able to look at your offering as a whole and understand how it will ultimately be used. Vision based off of a deep understanding of market needs – not feature requests – revolutionizes industries. Feature driven development, for instance, would have resulted in an iPhone with a keyboard.

Know when to say no - Careful market analysis will teach you when not to pursue an idea. Look at your company as if you were a skeptical outsider as you decide upon new initiatives. Time and company resources are precious for every company.

Simplicity is a key ingredient to innovation. It comes from thought, experience, and expertise. Those three attributes (thought, experience, expertise) are great descriptors for the consultants M Squared Consulting deploys on client engagements. By having senior-level talent working on client challenges we are able to deliver graceful and impactful solutions.

I enjoyed a post earlier this month to Modern B2B Marketing (excerpt below) that suggests that thought leadership is one of the most valuable assets that your company brand – or your personal brand — can develop.

In Corporate America, thought leadership initiatives are in place at many companies, some of them extensive (and expensive), and others more ad hoc. And with the advent of social media, which can instantly deliver wisdom (and everything else) far and wide, personal brand building via thought leadership has taken off like wildfire. Yet there are pitfalls if the plan is half-baked or the product sub-par. But well-conceived thought leadership programs can pay dividends, both to your brand and the bottom line.

FYI, M Squared Consulting has a robust thought leadership program, one pillar of which is our annual Independent Consultant Survey, which takes a snapshot of economic trends as seen by members of our 14,000-person strong consulting network. For a copy of that survey, drop me a note at jtarabini@msquared.com.

The excerpt below makes for fascinating reading:

As a B2B marketer, thought leadership is one of the most valuable assets your brand — or you — can attain. In down economies, prospects conduct even more research leading up to the purchase. This means B2B marketing professionals must help educate prospects in the early stages of the buying cycle; doing this well can help frame their buying process and establish your brand as a trusted advisor that understands their problems and knows how to solve them. Therefore it’s more vital than ever for your organization to be viewed as an industry leader and trusted resource for all key stakeholders: customers, media, analysts, investors and everyone in between.

Unfortunately thought leadership is not as easily quantifiable as other demand generation metrics like revenue, sales or leads. And investing in reputation building may not produce the same short-term, immediate effects of efforts such email marketing campaigns. But cultivating thought leadership can have a significant long-term payoff, as in time it elevates your brand at scale.

What are the qualities that define thought leaders? Thought leaders:

• Develop relationships with customers, prospects and others by engaging them in non-sales, industry-relevant conversations.
• Become the go-to source for research, insight and interpretation of the latest news and trends.
• Gain trust among prospective customers so that when the time finally comes to purchase, customers turn to the thought leader organization.

Try incorporating some of these ideas in your B2B marketing efforts to build your organization’s reputation:

1. Provide original research
2. Use your company blog to provide insight
3. Be a solution for specific problems
4. Join the speaking circuit

If you still aren’t sold on the value of cultivating thought leadership, consider the indirect result of these measures. Done well, reputation-building efforts can:

• Provide you with additional quality inbound links to your website
• Increase higher-quality referral traffic
• Elevate your brand to become referential

Plus, the more optimized content you produce in the form of whitepapers, blog posts and webinars, the higher your search rankings. What’s not to like about that?

Read the complete article at http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2009/10/why-thought-leadership-is-your-most-valuable-asset.html