Disqus - Latest Comments for mikediliberto

Re: Martin Lindstrom: The Secret Cause of Buyer's Remorse | TIME Ideas | TIME.com

mikediliberto — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:48:08 -0000

I remember years and years ago when I was working in the merchandising division of Circuit City, and our research revealed that the single best way to drive television sales was the hand the customer the remote control as soon as possible during a demonstration. The justification at the time is the same quoted in the article above, that the sooner a person can mentally take ownership of something, the lower the barrier is to them handing over money for it.

For all of the growth of online commerce, it still makes up a relatively small percentage of retail sales in the United States. Even so, a lot of that growth may be coming from people that otherwise would not have shopped at all. My family is a great example of this, we live in a small town in China, and we use online shopping to buy items that we have shipped to us; the items we buy are items we otherwise would not have purchased has online shopping not existed. Similarly, it is easy to buy staple products online; I don't seek out toothpaste at the store to decide which one I want, I would just as soon sign up for an auto-refill of my favorite brand that gets shipped to me every six weeks. The experiential environment of retail lends itself to certain products above others.

We might love the convenience of online shopping, but only by shopping in person do we find those new products that we didn't even know we needed or wanted until we saw, heard or touched them.

Re: Six Marketing Mistakes at CES 2012

mikediliberto — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 05:52:01 -0000

Very well said. Working in marketing, I often explain to our clients that our number one responsibility is obscuring their complexity from their customers. Megapixels, watts, volts, resolution are all representations of how things are built, but they say nothing about what they do for me as the customer.

As you said, firms make video streaming equipment, but people buy the ability to enjoy videos on demand in their living rooms.

Re: Building Local Talent in China

mikediliberto — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:52:20 -0000

You've said it yourself in this article and in others, in those board meetings where we present our China performance results, the executives in the room are looking for one thing: Growth. Yet, in order to do the best thing for our Chinese firms, we have to make the decision to forego some growth potential in the interest of developing our people. These forces run in opposition, and our desired outcome drives the choices that we make in staff selection and development decisions.

In my time in China, I have had to make the dramatic, and often very uncomfortable change from a performance driven executive to a people focused mentor. Far too often I found myself falling into behavior borne of my frustration with teaching my local staff; I would grow tired of trying to develop my staff, and simply take over their work. It is a behavior that proves to be counter-productive every time that I have done it. Not only do I rob a person of the opportunity to grow through my experience, but I also end up spreading myself too thin by taking on too many tasks. It is the business equivalent of abandoning the helm of my ship to go help cook dinner. I may be a skilled chef, but I am on board to steer the boat, and I do a disservice to all others aboard when I abandon my post.

You are right to argue for taking the harder road, but doing so requires a change in mindset about how top level executives think about their China operations. We are not here to just operate while physically located in China, we are here to build a Chinese company. You pointed out some great examples of western behaviors that do not translate well into the Chinese workplace. I've come to understand that success here means not just learning Mandarin but rather demands that we take on a Chinese cultural orientation.

I am not, as some of writings might lead one to believe, anti-expat; quite the opposite. I believe that as Western managers we have as much to gain from as we have to impart to our foreign staff members. What we must do is equip our expat managers for success, with pre-assignment training for the staff and appropriate expectations from the home office.

Re: For Great Leadership, Clear Your Head

mikediliberto — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 05:40:11 -0000

The instinct to spend time doing instead of thinking is a hard habit from which many managers struggle to break free. Speaking of my own experience, it was not for quite some time after becoming an executive that I was finally able to prioritize my time in ways that most benefitted the company, to put my pencil down and lean my chair back.

This article has some great pieces of advice, I especially like the focus on communication. I have been paid great dividends through the work that I put into being able not only come up with strategy, but to be able to articulate that strategy to both employees and our board of directors.

Re: HBR Case Study: Culture Clash in the Boardroom - Harvard Business Review

mikediliberto — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 01:47:30 -0000

As a western company that has long operated in China as both a joint venture as well as a wholly-foreign owned enterprise, this case highlights a common issue that we faced during our entry to the Chinese market. It also highlights the role that Liu or a person in his role must take in any joint venture or cross border company dealings.

Liu's role is not that of sale manager or HR administrator or legal council. His job, above all others, is to be translator between the two firms, to explain the perspective and reasoning of the Germans in terms that his Chinese colleagues can understand, and conversely, explain the minutiae of Chinese business in way that resonates with the German head office. His plan of attack here must be two pronged:

First, it is his duty to represent back to the German company the risks of not paying bribes or kickbacks. In this situation it is pretty clear, they can pay up or lose thirty million yuan worth of business. He must be able to represent these risks an rewards back to his superiors without the prejudice of Wang or Schulman. As a global company, we see how the decisions of one subsidiary can cause huge ripple effects back to the parent company. A decision for or against paying of bribes or kickbacks must go far beyond the Shanghai office and it is Liu's duty to equip managers in Germany with the information required to make an informed decision.

Second, Liu must be able to sell the decisions and policies of the German parent company back to the employees in Shanghai and Chongqing. Simply saying to employees that they are a part of a global company is meaningless when many of them lack the overseas experience to give context to that statement. Liu must instead frame the company's policies in terms that have meaning to the local Chinese employees. To do this requires a deep sense of the differing cultural orientation between Germany and China.

Schulman is asking for permission to give in, to let the sales manager have his way. Liu needs to stand strong here, and realize that to compromise the company's standards for short term monetary gain is a slippery slope from which they will be hard pressed to recover. How soon before the joint venture salespeople start telling their customers that "one percent commission is the standard we pay...."?

Having dealt with this issue, Liu needs to take a leadership role to help mitigate future issues. He should not just tell the Chinese employees that ethics are not negotiable, but instead he needs to build in their minds the value of ethical business practices. Likewise, the Germans need to understand that at times, ethics will ensure long term growth at the cost of short term profitability. Once this understanding is indoctrinated I would hope that no other German executives could be swayed to toss away their ethics under the pressure of one angry sales director.

Re: Five Things They Don't Tell You About Working in China

mikediliberto — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:58:52 -0000

As the general manager of a western company office located in a tier 3 city, my experiences are as common with the author's as they are diverse. Many people ask us why we chose to be located in a city so far removed from the west, both in terms of physical location as well as in mentality. My answer is, as the authors pointed out, that the future of growth lies in cities far removed from the more common (and overdeveloped) urban centers of tier 1 and tier 2. It is startling to find a city of four million people, located a few hours from Shanghai, where as a westerner, my family and I are stared at as if we had just disembarked from our spaceship.

As a society that scores highly on the "power-distance" scale, China demands a set of skills that differ significantly from those that we hone in the west. Communication style in China is much more subtle, and getting to the true meaning of a statement often means reading between the lines, and focusing on non-verbal cues. It is for this reason, more than any other, that I place such a high value on having face time with every member of my team. Ask a question and someone might say yes, and over email, you would often have to take that at face value. In person, however, you notice that they look away when they say yes, or they use a few different words that clue you in to the real answer. The ability to pick up and act on subtle clues is a common trait shared by all of our successful managers here in China.

The view of hierarchy here is one that often challenges my western outlook. I've often found that workers will gravitate towards the highest level person to whom they have access, and hierarchy trumps process almost every time. For example, while I am the most senior person in the China office, I often host our executive board from overseas. While there is a clear process for the purchase of capital equipment, they will often seek out our CFO's direct approval if he is here, rather than follow the process to route these requests through my office. Similarly, I often find myself on the receiving end of direct requests that clearly should have passed through a manager's hands first.

Re: If you vote for our panels, unicorns will appear. Pinky swear.

mikediliberto — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:42:07 -0000

Hey Sydney, looks like some good panels; I love mentorship, and I would be nowhere today without the mentors that have helped along the way. I like to cross-generational distribution of panelists in the content presentation, that promises to offer interesting perspectives.

I'm involved in 2 panels this year:

First, a panel about workplace collaboration, focusing on how we may be over-complicating our quest to give workers cutting edge collaboration tools. Email is successful because it is simple to use. Twitter is successful because through it's simplicity, users were able to define it's implementation. The adoption rates of both email and twitter speak volumes. When it comes to enterprise collaboration, however, we keep seeing very complicated solutions being pushed into the workplace that offer neither the simplicity of email nor the malleability of twitter, and as a result, these solutions rarely improve communication or collaboration. My panel aims to bring together plans for deploying simple solutions in the enterprise, taking lessons from the adoption of similar tools in the consumer space. (http://panelpicker.sxsw.com...

The next panel deals with intrapreneurship, building innovation within large companies by embracing the behaviors that make entrepreneurs successful. Simple to explain, yet many larger firms struggle to let go of control and embrace "innovation from below". This panel aims to show that rather than ushering in chaos, allowing innovation to flourish benefits the individual as well as the firm. (http://panelpicker.sxsw.com...

Re: Passion is not limited to entrepreneurship.

mikediliberto — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:31:34 -0000

Awesome Post. Seriously Awesome. Your post summarizes a lot of the thinking that I've been doing about this topic. There is definitely a subset of people that look at us like we're selling out to "the man" by working for a large corporation, yet nothing could be further from the truth.

We are not defined by where we work, but by how we treat the work that we do. We (by "we" I mean, you and I and the readers of this blog that are nodding their heads as they read this post) find work that we are passionate about and we give it our all. We take ownership. We seriously kick ass. You don't need to be entrepreneur to be awesome.

Entrepreneurial = taking ownership.
Really, I think that what we define as entrepreneurship means taking ownership of something, being passionate about it and seeing through to the end. There are lots of people in the corporate world that are not entrepreneurial, and that's ok. But there are those of us that "Intrepreneurs" (nice job Tiffany, dig the word) that behave as entrepreneurs no matter if we work at a two person company or a two thousand person company.

Re: Three Steps to Getting a Kickass Mentor: Unfiltered.

mikediliberto — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:59:48 -0000

Great question, and no you're not reading into it too deeply. My mentoring relationships have come and gone over the course of my career, for a variety of reasons. Most often it has simply been that I changed positions or changed jobs; in almost all of these cases I have relocated to a new city, so that made it even harder to maintain connections.

It also has a lot to do with where I was in my career; many of my mentors had a specific role to play in my life, and once I had advanced to a certain level or decided that I needed to change course a bit, I often found that I needed the guidance of someone with different experience. To Adam's point below, I certainly have been conscious of checking in regularly to make sure the relationship is still a good fit.

Regardless, I try to keep in contact with all of my mentors on a regular basis through phone calls or facebook.

You made a point in your post about having mentors both in and out of work, and I've often found that the relationships that I have with mentors outside of the office last longer

Re: Three Steps to Getting a Kickass Mentor: Unfiltered.

mikediliberto — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:43:38 -0000

Dude, Best thing ever.

Seriously though, great post, as always. Mentor-ship, as Alan mentioned in his comment, is not something that is formalized in our industries, but it should be. Where would we be without our mentors?

Finding a mentor is something that has driven several of my job choices, and I have never regretted choosing a job so that I could report to a person that is a mentor to me. My first mentor summed up well the search for the right person: He said, "look for someone that will always tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear".

Over the years I've learned a lot, and hopefully given a lot back as well. In the end, having mentors has also helped me to learn indirectly. I came away from each of these relationships better equipped to be more introspective with myself, to analyze where and how I need to grow to be a better, more well rounded professional.

Looking at where I was when I entered the workforce ten years ago, and where I am now, I can see the impact that these mentors had on my life, both personally and professionally. Being now in a position where I have employees reporting to me, I do my best to mentor my people to help them develop themselves.

Re: SXSW has totally rewired my brain.

mikediliberto — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:08:37 -0000

Awesome post, doubly so because this was your second trip to SXSW. I had so many experiences that were similar to what you described, and I've related it here to people as a distillation of everything that I view as important in my life. Relationships, entrepreneurship, sharing, and much more.

A few SXSW veteran friends of mine related to me that I would never have an experience like this again, even when I attend for my second time in 2011. I'm glad to see that you've defied this prediction by once again having a life changing experience your second time around. It makes me look forward to SXSW 2011 even more.

The question is, can I pull off a "Sydney", and end up on a panel in my second year of attending. We'll see.

Mike

Re: Forget how many angels fit on a pin

mikediliberto — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:43:45 -0000

Very well said, I've noticed the same issues in my lurking of that same group.

Steve, great comment. I've noticed that Artists as a group tend to be ok with failure in a way not typical of the average business school grad.

Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk a few years back seems especially applicable here; spreadsheets kill innovation too.

Re: When Your Funding is Your Worst Enemy

mikediliberto — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:26:09 -0000

Dana,

Great article. The current economic climate seems to have brought to prominence the concept of lean startups, the core premise of which you identified in your article; that is, all the money in the world can't help you if you have not found your product and revenue model.

Understanding this means knowing the difference between being cheap and being lean. I've been at lots of cheap startups, which basically meant we didn't spend money because we didn't have any money. Lean startups, on the other hand, behave like cheap startups until they find, as you said, "the right business development mix, good engineers and a solid infrastructure." Only then is it the right time to spend money in the right places.

At the cheap startups, when we got money, it seemed like a contest to see which founder could spend it the fastest; Lean startups on the other hand behaved similarly whether we had (investor) money or not.

Re: Announcing the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, Research Report and Month of Special Coverage

mikediliberto — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:59:51 -0000

This sounds like a really exciting event, I'm hoping to make it up there!

In the spirit of real time sharing we'd be happy to set up a hosted wiki for you.

Re: Comment Contest: Win a FREE Pass to DEMOfall 09

mikediliberto — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:57:03 -0000

I would like to see more technologies, both hardware and software, related to video content access and playback, specifically in providing video in the consumer space in a way that is seamless, and dare I say, transparent to the user.

Technologies like Apple TV are a step in the right direction, but the consumer space needs not only hardware but content that is easy to obtain and affordable to rent or purchase. The Ruku Netflix streamer and media extenders have made inroads with the "earlyvangelists", but no one has yet crossed the chasm with a product that appeals to the mainstream.

With consumers spending even more time at home in this current economic climate, the timing is perfect to launch the "killer app" for the living room.

Of course, if I receive a free ticket, I will gladly wear the "I <3 Mashable" t-shirt. But no animal costumes. I mean, I would really love to go, and my student loans prevent me from paying my own way. But even I have to draw the line somewhere.

Re: Your Government Needs You: Re-design Congress Online

mikediliberto — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:35:26 -0000

It is exciting to see our government embracing the accessibility of data. While attending transparency camp last month, I experienced firsthand the increasing demand for data accessibility and data interchange during Representative Honda's session as well as many others.

Here at MindTouch we are focused on enabling this new era of data interchange and accessibility in our government through an open platform and open standards.

At the upcoming Government 2.0 conference we will be releasing new tools focused on the rapid development of applications to utilize this public sector data, including extensions to the Sunlight Labs API.

Re: Late Night Reality Check

mikediliberto — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:00:48 -0000

I second Rob; just be yourself, and don't take personally those that have issues with what you say

Re: Behind the Scenes of Jenn2.0, a Web Series in the Making

mikediliberto — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:54:13 -0000

In the real world, we're all kind of weirdos; I can't wait to see the pilot.

Re: What Do Startups Need to Know About Blogging? I Need Your Opinions!

mikediliberto — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:13:03 -0000

The most effective blogs, and this goes for any company, are the ones which establish a human connection between the company and consumer. The benefits you receive from social media are in direct proportion to the number and quality of these connections; the customers you connect with are your best evangelists and when you are looking for talent, this is the pool to pull from.

The least effective use of blogs is to treat them as just another channel for PR to travel from the company to the customer; blogs are not conducive to one way conversation and lack of engagement will frustrate consumers.

You spoke about it in a prior blog post, but it bears repeating, you can't "source out" your blog to your PR firm or your advertising department; truly powerful blogs are the ones which break down the barriers of bureaucracy that normally exists between customers and executives and enable true customer driven innovations.

Re: Can’t I Hire You to Do That?

mikediliberto — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:24:35 -0000

Great points about how at the core it is a personal thing, not (as so many companies treat it) just another version of the PR Newswire. Gary makes some great points in the video, most importantly that you can own the space if your make it real.

What I have found in trying to define social media strategy is that you have visualize twitter and other social media outlets as merely tools which help you unleash the collective power of both your organization and your customer base. It's useless to tell a company to "use twitter" if, at the core, they are not open to sharing and learning from their people.

Re: Ubergizmo fans: a chance to attend DEMOFall 08, for free

mikediliberto — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:04:53 -0000

As a confirmed Geek, of course I want to go to DEMOFall08; however being a recently unemployed startup veteran, the entry fee is beyond my budget at the moment.

I want to attend DEMOFall08 to network, find new startups and most importantly, meet my next employer.

Ubergizmo has the chance not only to make this fan very happy, but also to help end my 100-day-long ramen noodle diet!