Even if you’re not like Google–with pockets deep enough that you’re able to scout out and buy just about anybody out there whose stuff you take a shine to–you can still take a page out of their playbook.
Google is out to terrorize Microsoft. First, they bought a program called Writely that “competes” with MS Word–and Microsoft would be right to be worried. without having to constantly email different versions back and forth. And, folks, it’s free. I had already tried several options for similar functionality, paid for them, and found them lacking. So far, I’m satisfied just fine with Google’s stuff.
Anyway, now Google’s negotiating with a Korean maker to possibly buy its MS Office-like suite. If they do (though the article indicates the Korean maker isn’t anxious to give up total control but is looking rather for an alliance), Microsoft’s halls are gonna be dancing up and down for quite a while.
The point for your corporate blog is that if you have any feature, service, or extra of any kind that rivals what a big-name competitor does, write about it and use the big-namer’s name. A colleague of mine has been creating brilliant ideas non-stop for several years, but recently he found one that he’s marketing as a competitor to Google’s Adwords–just using the giant’s name in his campaign automatically gives his service more credibility. You can do the same. Think creatively about how your product/service is different from/alike to the big guys–and take a little free ride of their mountains of advertising output.
The rage to measure things has been good in some ways, but like the quantum physicists who finally pointed out through their experiments with light as waves and light as particles, you find exactly what you’re looking for. So if you’re measuring process X because you think it relates to outcome Y, you may get some correlation, but not necessarily the one that’s most likely to give you the truth about results.
For example, let’s say you measure how many minutes it takes team B to produce a widget. And when you measure team A, it turns out they can make the widget in 2 minutes less. You may think, okay, now let’s measure each and every step that team A does and find out where we have to improve team B’s performance. Yeah, you’re going to find some items that you can a) throw training at, b) give incentives or c) threaten with penalties to get team members to do better on individual performance measures.
But you might be missing a much more important factor. For example, how do you quantify intangibles like, say, team A’s leader listens to fellow team members’ ideas (even if they’re not implemented very often), and team B’s leader is a taskmaster? How do you gauge the effect when one or two A team members went bike riding this morning, and one or two B team members went out on a binge last night?
For best results, don’t just start measuring. When you think of performance, think about the individual–who’s doing the job. Think about what motivates people. Once you get those kinds of measures and incentives in place, write about them in your corporate blog. You’ll start attracting more of the highest quality job candidates than you can possibly use. And you’ll keep the good ones you’ve got.
