I'm the new SVP of Creative Solutions. After 19 years at Sun Microsystems, I'm now a few weeks into what I hope to be a long run at my new digs. This is my initial blog entry.
How Do You Eat an Elephant?
I just sat through most of a 3-day internal marketing summit where our global corporate, field and product business unit marketing teams gather for strategy, motivation, skills development and time to interact (I heard there was also some evening parties and a few late night antics, but that can’t be confirmed just yet). As a former chief marketing officer, my experience is that no matter how good the speakers/content/breakouts are, most of the attendees find that just getting time to network with their brethren is the most valuable output. My second experience is that it can be very difficult to do breakouts for employees, who tend to be one or more of the following: pessimistic about anything you say; skeptical that anything will ever change; tired after flying in from Japan, India or the like; more excited about sampling the local drinking establishments than hearing about the best way to implement a direct mail campaign in Portugal. The breakout my VP of marketing and I hosted (“hosted” as in I just showed up), was a quick, hands-on and hopefully engaging exercise on the age-old common sense requirement: customer input. The outcome was in many ways just what was hoped for…people understood the value of why direct customer input is so important to how you create, build, market and sell your products. But the big epiphany for a lot of us what the comments that came when we asked about their thoughts on the exercise. The ah-ha was working on a problem that was narrow in scope, had a clear objective, was short in duration with a specific time limit, didn’t involve all the normal, tedious, pain-in-the-rear processes and approval cycles that usually kill momentum, and, had a result communicated right there in the room (award winners were named at the conclusion of the exercise). How we solve our internal issues is very similar to how any company addresses a huge, complex, seemingly overwhelming problem…carve it up into bite-sized pieces. You’ve heard the old adage, Q: “How do you eat an elephant?” A: One bite at a time.
So why did I come here? The positive experience of our exercise, and the corresponding frustration that occurs when a similar process is carried out inside a company with real business issues is not unique to Adobe, or our industry, or any industry. In engineering if you want something to happen fast, task one individual to go away and come back when he or she has developed a solution. If you want to go even faster, isolate three people in a remote cabin (with power and a high speed internet connection) and turn them loose on the same problem. If you want to slow down the development, add 15 more people and double the budget. No magic in understanding that small, focused, motivated teams do better than huge monoliths. Both the challenge and opportunity with Adobe is 1+1=3. Adobe, by itself, is an interesting company with an incredible brand, really smart people and the ability to address the needs of the most creative people on the planet. But Adobe + Macromedia is even far more compelling, with huge upside potential. If, of course, we are able to attack our new, bigger, more threatening challenges one bite at a time. That’s why I’m here, and welcome to my Blogic.