THE ESSENTIALS OF STRATEGIC PRODUCT LEADERSHIP

The idea that companies succeed by selling value is all but novel. What is new however, is how customers define value in many markets. In the past, customers judged the value of a product or service on the basis of some combination of quality and price. Today’s customers, by contrast, have an expanded concept of value that includes convenience of purchase, after-sales services, dependability, and so on. One might assume, then, that to compete today, companies would have to meet all these different customer expectations. This, however, is not the case.

Companies that have taken leadership positions in their industries in the last decade typically have done so by narrowing their business focus, not broadening it. They have focused on delivering superior customer value in line with one of three value disciplines - operational excellence, customer intimacy, or product leadership. They have become champions in one of these disciplines while meeting industry standards in the other two. This Article focuses on product leadership, however, subsequent ones will be centred on the other two disciplines respectively.

Stakeholders in any given business model are always seeking out methods, steps or techniques to place their products and services above other competing or substitute commodities from other organizations. This article seeks to effectively evaluate organizational standards and best practices for product leadership and how any organization can establish its product and/or services as product leaders in their respective markets.

Product leadership basically entails particular products and/or services of an organization dominating whatever market space they exist in. It generally aims to build a culture that continuously brings superior products to the market. Product leaders often achieve premium market prices, thanks to the experience they create for their customers.

Loads of companies have outstanding products in terms of performance, technology and features. And yet, surprisingly, sales do not take off as expected. This article seeks to explicate how leading products and services captivate the marketplace by having more than just the functions and features that customers want. Leading products also inspire and deliver benefits through emotional fulfilment that customers enjoy and seek out.

In one way or another, every book on managerial leadership will say that leaders inspire and energize. Organizational leaders are known to be people-focused, looking to add value to their followers rather than focusing on building their own power base. Successful leaders also do not try to preserve the status quo but are willing to set a direction for change, provided they foresee the change to be for the better. It may be surprising, but a product leader requires the same characteristics. To be clear, “product leadership” means much more than market share leadership. Leading products energize and inspire people. They are people-focused in that they are developed with the people in mind that want and need them. Product leaders set the direction for the industry, changing the status quo and serving as benchmarks for others.

Leading products not only deliver performance as promised, but, more importantly, they deliver desired emotions as well, emotions that result in product leadership. Delivering emotions essentially entails purposefully designing a product in such a way that it evokes specific emotions in those who interact with it. Emotions are therefore a planned product benefit just as the product’s performance benefits. Research after all, shows that the major driving force for decision-making is emotion. Aspiring product leaders must discover ways to appeal to the emotions of prospective customers. In any industry where people interact in some way with a product, emotion matters. This is true not only for consumer companies, but for those in the business-to-business market; it is equally important for large global companies and small niche firms. When a product delivers emotions – emotions such as care, support, joy, respect – that product has the potential to make people’s lives better.

Companies that focus on product leadership push the envelope on product development. They create products that change the way the customer lives and/or plays. They create a culture of innovation, out-of-the-box thinking and rarely punish failure. Companies like Apple and Sony are considered to be companies that focus on product leadership. For any company to institute its goods and/or services as market leaders, there are some basic principles that must be stringently adhered to. To pursue a strategy of product leadership involves delivering value through offering leading edge products and services, creatively adapting services, providing a stream of new and changing marketing conditions while constantly pursuing new solutions on behalf of its clients and customers.

Companies that pursue product leadership strive to produce a continuous stream of state-of-the-art products and services. Reaching that goal requires them to challenge themselves in three ways. First, they must be creative. More than anything else, being creative means recognizing and embracing new and innovative ideas. Second, such innovative companies must commercialize their ideas quickly. To do so, all their business and management processes have to be engineered for speed. Third and most important, product leaders must relentlessly pursue new solutions to the problems that their own latest product or service has just solved. If anyone is going to render their technology obsolete, they prefer to do it themselves. Product leaders do not stop for self-congratulation; they are too busy raising the bar.

Any company that intends to implement product leadership should therefore strive to sufficiently imbibe the following disciplines:

·Creativity (Research portfolio management, teamwork, innovation)

·Speedy commercialization (Product management, marketing, cost effectiveness)

·Continuous improvement and advancement(continual research and procession on existing goods and services)

The chart below further explicates the fact that any organization seeking market leadership for its commodities has to be in line with the three essential traits stated above.

Product leaders recognize that excellence in creativity, problem solving and teamwork is critical to their success. This reliance on expensive talent means that product leaders seek to leverage their expertise across geographical and organizational boundaries by mastering such disciplines as collaboration and knowledge management. Employees should be encouraged to work in teams for more effective and path-breaking results. As the popular saying goes, two good heads are better than one.

Product leaders create and maintain an environment that encourages employees to bring ideas into the company and, just as important, they listen to and consider these ideas, however unconventional and regardless of the source. Incentive systems should be set up for ideas that eventually pull through and make the company money. Basic economics has proven beyond reasonable doubt that man, by nature, seeks out self-interest above all things. Mere knowledge of the fact that there is some form of benefit for bringing forth utile ideas is inspiration enough for employees to brainstorm and strive for acute insightfulness.

In addition, product leaders continually scan the landscape for new product or service possibilities; where others see glitches in their marketing plans or threats to their product lines, companies that focus on product leadership see opportunity and rush to capitalize on it. As an organization reaching for product leadership, it is paramount to always be on the lookout for fresher, more scintillating and more appealing ways of making your products and services unique and bankable. This also applies to the creation of new commodities.

Product leaders avoid bureaucracy at all costs because it slows commercialization of their ideas. Managers make decisions quickly, since in a product leadership company, it is often better to make a wrong decision than to make one late or not at all. That is why these companies are prepared to decide today, then implement tomorrow. Moreover, they continually look for new ways, such as concurrent engineering, to shorten their cycle times. Japanese companies, for example, succeed in automobile innovation because they use concurrent development processes to reduce time to market. They do not have to aim better than competitors to score more hits on the target because they can take more shots from a closer distance. Companies excelling in product leadership do not plan for events that may never happen, nor do they spend so much time on detailed analysis. Their strength lies in reacting to situations as they occur. Fast reaction times are an advantage when dealing with the unknown. Product leaders have a vested interest in protecting the entrepreneurial environment that they have created. To that end, they hire, recruit, and train employees in their own mould.

Furthermore, product leaders seek out cost effective methods of production. They realise early that majority of the customers for any product usually seek out products that are of high quality and comparatively low prices. Their understanding of this concept helps them by efficaciously creating an avenue for competition even in a somewhat saturated market.

Effective marketing is another noteworthy trait. Product leaders seek out maverick and prolific marketing strategies to efficiently create awareness for their goods and services. The fact remains that every product and/or service has its own specific market space and target consumers. Marketing should compulsorily be done within the sphere of the prospective customers or clients. Of what use is it to market a briefcase to secondary school students or a Lamborghini to a middle-class citizen?

Product leaders are their own fiercest competitors. They continually cross a frontier, then break more new ground. They have to be adept at rendering obsolete the products and services that they have created because they realize that if they do not develop a successor, another company will. In other words, they are always working at improving the current products and services before their competitors catch up with them. These companies are never blinded by their own successes. It is only perspicacious to have a research and development team, not only to seek out new products, but also, to propose ways and techniques of improving the existing ones. This, in turn, ensures that said products are never obsolete, but, are ever ready to compete against whatever available or prospective competitor.

Another maxim imbibed by product leaders is that they usually possess the infrastructure and management systems needed to manage risks well. Tremendous risks are usually associated with developing and launching new products or even making advancements on old ones. Becoming an industry leader requires a company to choose a value discipline that takes into account its capabilities and culture as well as competitors’ strengths.

Any organization that can effect the principles stated herein is on the right and fast track to becoming product leaders in the different markets of their respective products and services.

The mathematical mystery of zero (0)

Generally, every and anybody that has even the slightest knowledge of mathematics knows that anything divided by zero is indeterminate, undefined or more technically, tends to infinity. The same way we agree that anything multiplied by zero is zero. There are different proofs, postulations and theories that attempt to buttress this idea, from different mathematical perspectives. The most dominant been that if a number is divided by a given divisor to obtain a certain quotient, then, when that same quotient multiplies the original divisor, we should be able to obtain the original number. In other words, multiplication cancels out division and vice versa. 

There are many such proofs and I have decided not to bother you with the cumbersome details.  Most, if not all available facts and figures are in line with the following

• multiplication by Zero equals Zero 
• division of a non-zero number by Zero is undefined
• division of Zero by Zero is indeterminate 

Note: for better understanding, the terms undefined and indeterminate are explained below:

• If a value is undefined, it means that such value does not exist and as such cannot be obtained
• If a value, say k, is indeterminate, it means that such a value could actually exist, but the value is ambiguous, that is, there could be much more than just one value for k.  

This notwithstanding, one can not help but wonder, "what if?"


After all, Science and Mathematics are technically just a bunch of proven and unproven "what if?s".
Having said this, I thus put forward my theory. I believe that the division of "0" by "0", as a matter of fact, is highly subjective. To be able to effectively obtain a value for dividing zero by another zero, one needs to accurately evaluate the source of the zero itself. This statement might sound somewhat puzzling, but, in reality, it is actually very simple. There are different evaluations and calculations that can yield a zero as an answer. For instance, the following values will all give zeroes as their final answers on calculation.

• Log_x1 = 0, the logarithm of 1 to any base equals zero
• 100 - 100 = 0, simple mathematics

Now, using the above values of zero, we can substitute and prove that division of zero by zero can actually be defined or determined.

Below are some evaluations of divisions of zero by another zero

method 1: using simple arithmetic and the principle of the difference of 2 squares:

Therefore 0/0 = 2

method 2: using the reverse of the principle above:

Therefore, 0/0 = 1/2

method 3:using simple logarithm principles:

The above proves the subjectivity of the division of zero by zero. We can see that for different assumptions of the actual value that yielded zero, we obtained different results (i.e. 2, 1/2 and 1). It is therefore my postulation that by substituting the value of zero as other subjective values, different determinate and defined values can be obtained for it.

Below are evaluations of cases where other numbers are divided by zero:


Generally, the laws of logarithms seem to ascend the laws of the zeros, some of the instances where this can be seen are shown below:


Meanwhile, there have been strange and baffling reports of calculations involving divisions by zero causing mechanical and technical faults to mechanical systems. For instance, On September 21, 1997, a division by zero error on board the USS Yorktown (CG-48) Remote Data Base Manager brought down all the machines on the network, causing the ship's propulsion system to fail. Amazing, right? So, next time you want to try this controversial calculation, make sure you are in a secure location without any heavy machinery.


Please, do  make your contributions, thank you

EFFECTS OF CHANGES IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ON MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

Information technology (IT) is basically the application of computers(softwares and hardwares) and telecommunications equipment to store, retrieve, transmit and manipulate data, often in the context of a business or other enterprise. Different forms of changes in information technology will have corresponding impacts on all organizations. There will be a need for new types of managerial, diplomatic, and social skills and a concomitant need for a new type of decision making process that will not be accommodated by existing organizational structures.

Technological change will force changes in basic managerial functions. There will be increased responsibility on management for organization outcomes leading to added emphasis on planning, decision making, control, and coordination. These will often rely on computer-based management science techniques which demand a higher intellectual capability of managers. This will produce strain on managers and other individuals, potentially affecting morale, productivity, and output. IT significantly affects strategic options and creates opportunities and issues that managers need to address in many aspects of their business.

Key impacts of information technology improvement on organization and Management

1.Business strategy

IT creates new opportunities for innovation in products and services. Services which used to be delivered in person can now be delivered over networks. Among the key levers are:

• resequencing: including parallel processing of data-bases
• simultaneity: making information instantly available in several systems
• time extension: offering 24 hour a day; 365 days a year service
• portability: taking service and products closer to the user
• re-usability: using information captured for one purpose (e.g. transactions), and using for other purposes (e.g. customer targeting)

2.Organization Culture
Newer types of IT such as electronic mail and groupware are creating significant changes in the way that information flows around group ware, and between them and their customers and suppliers.

3.Organization Structures
For many years it has been argued that IT will enable larger spans of control and the flattening of group ware. This has at last happened, but due as much to initiatives like BPR (business process re-engineering) and the drive to cut costs.

4.Management Processes
IT is rapidly entering the era where it supports unstructured management processes as well as highly routinised business processes.

5.Work
IT is dramatically changing the nature of professional work. There are few offices where professional do not make use of personal computers, and in many jobs involving extensive information and knowledge based work, the use of the computer is often a core activity.

6.The Workplace
The way in which IT diminishes the effect of distance means that it creates a variety of options for reorganizing the workplace.

Implications for Management

These IT impacts have implications for managers of all organizational functions. Among the most important are:

• Understanding the Changing Context of IT - they are required to adapt quickly to changes. Business managers need to be able to see developments in the context of the wider environment in which their business operates.
• Keeping abreast of Developments - not necessarily about the details of the technologies, but about the business impacts. For instance; managers can be adequately informed by meeting suppliers and business consultants, attending conferences, or receiving customized presentations from independent analysts.
• Integrating IT and Business Planning - the IT strategy should support the business strategy and vice versa. This may need new planning processes, hybrid teams, and an increased incorporation of the levers into business plans.
• Addressing Culture Issues - the dimensions of existing and desired culture need to be understood and how proposed systems will affect them. In particular attention needs to be paid to the organization's information culture.
• Experimenting with new Structures - using IT to remove some of the limitations of hierarchy and to encourage the development of innovative teams, using experts located in different functions and places. Managing dispersed teams is challenging but rewarding.
• Ensuring that new systems are customized change proof - our studies have shown many new systems to be developed around existing customized structures and responsibilities. Since these change very rapidly, new systems should be built with organised customized flexibility and change in mind.
• Developing New Skills - more of tomorrow's managers will need to become hybrid managers, combining the knowledge and skills of general management, their own discipline and IT.
• Using IT as a management tool - initiating personal use of IT into every day work. This should include use of decision support tools, groupware, knowledge management solutions and exploiting the Internet.
• Exploiting Information as a Strategic Asset - using the techniques of Information Resources Management to develop it as a valuable resource for internal use, for adding value to customer activities or services, or for creating saleable products.
• Introducing Knowledge Management and Innovation - going beyond information to developing networks of knowledge experts who evolve the organization's knowledge assets to create extra capabilities and value.
• Reorganizing the Workplace - by introducing flexible working and telework. The business benefits of this in terms of productivity and cost savings are such that there are many personal benefits to be achieved by a successful implementation.