Emergent Business Networks

Getting “the vision thing” right in Enterprise Software December 12, 2013

Lou Gerstner wrote one of the best business books of all time,  an educational thriller about how he took an IBM that was on the ropes in 1992 (having failed to adapt to a PC centric world) and made it great again, which he called “Who says Elephants Can’t Dance?”

IBM was in total crisis in 1992. He was asked by a journalist what his vision was for IBM. His reply became famous and much misunderstood. He said something along the lines of “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision”.  A couple of years later he did unveil a classic bland corporate vision statement and then said what he really thought which was:

“So the most important strategic priority for IBM becomes, when you peel it to the core, to execute what it knows – and has known for years.  Execution will lead IBM back to success.”

Gerstner did have a vision – to make IBM a customer-centric business – but he recognized that realizing this vision was all about execution. Later in the book he revealed his growing understanding that execution was all about changing the culture.

At IBM’s scale he was right. It was 99% execution and 1% vision. For tiny startups struggling to get noticed in a crowded market, that balance is different. Execution is critical – it always is – but startups need crystal clarity on vision, mission, positioning and so on. Mind-share precedes market-share.

In many enterprise software startups, this is harder than it should be, because executives are like blind folks around an elephant. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement.

The different parts of the enterprise software elephant are:

A. Technological Advantage aka “secret sauce”. Externally this is irrelevant. Your customers only care what you can do for them, not how you do it. You actually want to hide this externally and protect it with patents. However, internally you must know where your source of competitive advantage comes from.

B. Customer pain. You must know “what keeps them awake at night” and how you can use your technical secret sauce to solve these problems. The difficulty that horizontal platforms have is that the language used to describe this pain varies dramatically by market. The way that a CXO level person talks about the pain is totally different in a Bank, in a Pharma company, in Government, in FMCG etc.

C. Market Space Labels. This happens when some bright analyst does some pattern matching across vertical markets. They spot that the customer pain being described in such different ways in a Bank, in a Pharma company, in Government, in FMCG etc all have a common theme. They give it a name, a label for the market “space”. All the participants in the market realign to position into this new space and to get into the magic quadrant or other short list paradigm.

The problem for startups is very simple:

By the time the customer pain across verticals has been aggregated into a “space”, it is too late for a startup to become the dominant player in that space. The incumbents can offer “just good enough” features to be signed off by buyers who have already put them on the approved vendor list.

Startups have two ways to meet this challenge:

1. Name the space while you are creating it. It’s incredibly hard to do. In this post I describe how Tibco did this.

2. Just deliver and don’t label yourself. That is what Splunk does. You deliver value and let the market figure out what label to put on you.