Strategy

You won't just be happier when you follow your passionate career path; you'll be better at it. IDEO's General Manager Tom Kelley quotes author Jim Collins who identifies a Venn diagram in every career path - the overlapping intersection of what you're good at, what you're born to do, what people will pay you to do, and finding a happy group of co-workers with whom to work. In the pursuit of self-discovery, Kelley suggests keeping a laboratory notebook tracking the happiest moments in life to discover our own true passions.

"It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that ain't so," says Mark Twain. And Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO, cites this famous quote as an example of why it's important for creative minds to continue to cultivate a dedication to continuous learning. He tells the story of retailer Best Buy, and tracks their huge investment and acquisition of a large CD retailer which they thought was a good idea - except for that their target market had stopped buying music and started downloading MP3's instead. The electronic retailer was overly confident in their knowledge of the market, and paid for their lack of learning with a billion dollars in lost revenue.

While some companies or products are built to be acquired quickly, this is not always their best-serving strategy, says co-founder of Cuil Anna Patterson. Short-term thinking, speed, and thrift can sacrifice the quality of the finished product, she reports. Instead, emerging entrepreneurs should simply focus on their goals and product development and allow fate to take its course.

Take a big problem, apply the best minds to its prospects, add the fuel of entrepreneurial energy and a touch of capitalist greed, and one has the perfect recipe for solving any social, environmental, or cultural dilemma, says Khosla Ventures' Vinod Khosla. Mere good intentions are not enough to invoke real change. But the course of industry can only be altered when all angles of the problem-solving pyramid are in place.

Eco-efficiency often means being less toxic overall, but architect and designer William McDonough, McDonough + Partners, believes that true green design and the architecture of business needs to turn over a new leaf. Being effective, and not just efficient, is key to long-term success.

Learning the history of Silicon Valley, says Erik Straser, partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, is the best method to predict its future. He suggests that students of business and entrepreneurship investigate the emerging trends in technology at research universities and elsewhere to unearth the Valley's forward focus. His advice: Find a lengthy, immutable trend that will permeate the next the 30 years, jump on it, and launch your career.

Even after the first round of financing, budding start-up Amyris Biotechnologies didn't quite realize the potential of its assets or its market possibilities, says company CEO John Melo. The company made a choice. And rather than exploring the limits of the technology simply for technology's sake, they thought instead about exploring the needs of the marketplace. They first looked at the attributes of existing energy sources, and then investigated molecular alternatives that can mesh with current capabilities.

When Yahoo! was a small company sorting through websites, says President Sue Decker, it was easy to stay close to the customer through the three legs of their business; advertisers, users, and content publishers. But as they began their upward scale to 500 million users, the systems they had in place could not hold. Their size and focus, Decker reflects, blinded them to the needs of their customer for many years.

Yahoo! President Sue Decker explains the search engine's testing of Google tools to help close the gap between user search and moneymaking ad clicks. She explains that the partnership was part of the due diligence necessary to benchmark Yahoo!'s own capability to turn search engine users into those who buy from well-targeted on-site ads.

If you love something, set it free and it will come back to you, says the old adage. But as Sue Decker, President of Yahoo! explains, this sentiment also applies to advertising-driven online real estate. The front page of the popular search engine has always been a popular destination - and a great source of revenue for the company. But Decker explains why Yahoo! has chosen to eschew solid revenue in exchange for allowing that space to be controlled by the interest of its users - and the message that gesture sends to the Yahoo! community.

Sheer brainpower, strength in numbers, and good old fashioned networking is how the nature of world influence is established. Skewed and disproportionate, modern power structures that regulate global problems happen only when the elite meet, says author David Rothkopf. And decisions made based on these meetings often do not adequately represent the people or the interests that they are meant to serve.

We can't legislate against historical trends in the global age, but we can look more closely at the well-networked superclass - those who have broad influence across international borders on a regular basis. The Superclass has money, power, and influence - but it's woefully short on ethics in the global interest. Author David Rothkopf (Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making) describes this influential core of the global power structure and stresses that economic prosperity can't be the only metric of a civilization's success.

If the people who set the prices are the same people who set the production levels, then it's not really a market, and true supply and demand are a farce. David Rothkopf, author of <i>Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making</i>, says that Europe is leading the planet in green energy technology thanks to government subsidies, including biofuels and wind energy. Rothkopf is optimistic that the US will eventually adopt these policies toward energy, though our current system is corrupted by nearsighted, pure financial interest.

Figure out what you're good at and where you can make money, and focus. This is a critical strategy in a competitive marketplace, says Shutterfly CEO Jeff Housenbold, who claims that business always makes the mistake of trying to be too many things to too many people. Winning means differentiating yourself on the cluttered product shelf, and providing real innovation where products are most similar. And in this clip, Housenbold outlines the numerous facets of his services and products and the decisions that put them into place.

If we don't recognize that the unequal distribution of wealth is unsustainable, then, perhaps, says author David Rothkopf, more sinister political tensions and divisions will ensue. He advocates that the planet needs to reflect upon why we have one set of rules for our geographic community, and a different set of rules for institutions, among them the for-profit sector. Only when we hold the powerful players in economics responsible for contributing to the welfare of our community as we would a neighbor, says Rothkopf, will the interests of the globe at large become balanced.

Just twenty percent of the members in any group or social system own eighty percent of the assets, indicative that scale indicates a growing concentration of power. The top 2,000 companies employ and influences a million people in the modern world, says author David Rothkopf. With cross-ownership and networking in all circles - business, military, religion, and the Internet among them - a few succeed, but the majority of participants within any given system are marginal.

Do research, but don't let your customers tell you what do build. Too often, says Jeff Housenbold, Shutterfly's CEO, the customer doesn't know what they want, and rarely in market study will they admit that they're willing to pay more for a premium product. For example, 96 percent of Shutterfly customers polled said they wanted a brick and mortar outlet, but only seven percent of customers use it.

Under Ken Wilcox's tutelage as CEO, Silicon Valley Bank has cashed in on a winning hand. He added a broker dealer of money market accounts to their existing commercial banking services with huge success. The bank now focuses exclusively on technology clients (save for a few holdovers from the premium wine vertical), and they've expanded their product suite to cater to this unique market appropriately. The institution altered its efforts to retain larger customers longer, and worldwide.

Tech companies deposit about seven times the amount that they borrow. And at Silicon Valley Bank, recalls CEO Ken Wilcox, the methodology his venture has used to invest these excess deposits is a micro-history of commercial banking itself. Learn the lessons of the bank's lending in the 1980's to 1990's, and its investment in real estate developers and under-served niche markets. Learn also how these plans failed to provide financial stability long-term.

Rather than poising his entrepreneurial efforts as a single company offering a suite of products, InCube Labs CEO Mir Imran believes in segmenting each product into its own stand-alone venture. His reasoning? Cleaner R&D, a more potent investor magnet, and greater product development and marketing focus.

Why does Google hand out Google Analytics for free? Because there's more money to be made in ad spending, and because it's an altruistic solution for the digital ecosystem, says Brett Crosby, Group Product Marketing Manager. After careful consideration at the time of Urchin's acquisition by Google, all parties agreed that keeping the web-based tools accessible to all would be the right strategy.

Set your business model sites to large. Think globally, use multiple languages, and build your software products to be scalable. Not only will this improve your own company's growth, says Google Analytics' Group Product Marketing Manager Brett Crosby, but it makes you a more appealing fit for acquisition by a larger player.

Analytics company Urchin was acquired by Google because of the professional look of their trade show booth - and because their product was quality, says Google Analytics' Group Product Marketing Manager Brett Crosby. Here, he recalls the nine-month process of the deal, and how a leak to the press nearly lost it all.