Grow by Jim Stengel, review by Matthew E. May

http://matthewemay.com/2012/01/04/grow/

“Maximum growth and high ideals are not incompatible,” begins Jim Stengel, in his new book Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies. “They’re inseparable.”

Stengel should know. Not only was he Proctor & Gamble’s global marketing officer for the better part of a decade (and got to spend $8 billion a year on advertising), he studied 50,000 brands over the course of the first ten years of this century and identified the “Stengel 50″–the top 50 businesses in the study that, had you invested in the collection, would have delivered a return on investment returned 400 percent better than the S&P 500 over the same timeframe.

Stengel’s key discovery was that phenomenal growth was linked to brand “ideals,” defined in part as a company’s highest reason for being. In other words, it’s noble purpose. “The counterintuitive fact,” writes Stengel, “is that doing the right thing in your business is doing the right thing for your business.”

The major findings from the Stengel study form the basis of Grow, the central lesson of which is that “a business leader’s greatest leverage lies in rallying employees and customers alike to an ideal of improving people’s lives.”

This, of course, is a recurring theme in scores of business books, yet for the most part a subordinate one. The difference here is that Stengel elevates business ideals to the singular key to growth, and argues that he has the data to back up his argument.

According to Stengel, today’s most effective business leaders do five things well:

1. Discover a brand ideal of improving people’s lives in one of five fields of fundamental human values.
2. Build their organizational culture around the brand ideal.
3. Communicate the brand ideal to engage employees and customers.
4. Deliver a near-ideal customer experience.
5. Evaluate their progress and people against the brand ideal.

You might ask what those five fields of fundamental values might be. They are:

• Eliciting Joy: Activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility.
• Enabling Connection: Enhancing the ability of people to connect with one another and the world in meaningful ways.
• Inspiring Exploration: Helping people explore new horizons and new experiences.
• Evoking Pride: Giving people increased confidence, strength, security, and vitality.
• Impacting Society: Affecting society broadly, including by challenging the status quo and redefining categories.

“The bottom line,” writes Stengel, “is that if your business or brand is not serving an ideal in one of these five fields of fundamental human values, you’re likely not positioned for significant growth.”

Stengel maintains that high growth leaders constantly ask a handful of powerful questions:

• How well do we understand the people who are most important to our future?
• What do we and our brand stand for?
• What do we want to stand for?
• How are we bringing the answers to these questions to life?

I happen to believe that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures, so one of the things I liked most about Grow was the visual metaphor Stengel uses: a tree, pictured here. It’s called the Ideal Tree.

Image courtesy of Grow (Crown Business, 2011)

Here’s Stengel on the tree:

“The organic quality of the Ideal Tree goes beyond metaphor. It implicitly identifies all the people who are important to the future of a business and their relationships. Its roots, trunk, branches, and leaves capture the dynamic flow of all the elements that must work in harmony for a business to flourish, both those that are internal to a business (and hence almost always invisible to customers) and those that are or become external, such as communication strategies, products, and services. Finally, the Ideal Tree graphically situates the business in a market ecosystem of customers, employees, and competitors.”

Read Grow. You’ll find yourself asking whether your business is growing in one of the five value areas. The answer could make a world of difference…and a difference to the world.

Gross National Happiness

By Authur C. Brooks

Here is an outline to Brooks prescription for Gross National Happiness:

1. Right or left, political extremism is bad for our nation’s happiness.
2. American’s must defend its tradition of religious faith.
3. Family life must be protected.
4. We should be quick to defend “freedom”, but slow to abridge it.
5. For happiness, our national priority should be “success”, not just economic growth.
6. We must look for ways to promote “opportunity”, not economic equality.
7. We must “celebrate our work”, not impose greater leisure.
8. A happy America must continue to be a “giving” nation.
9. Happiness is “easiest” to find in limited government.

My key takeaway in this data driven book are that equality of opportunity not outcome.   Then also freedom to pursue and succeed in our own endeavors as individuals drive happiness for individuals and nations alike.

This is a great read for the New Year.   Happy New Year everyone!

 

2 Ways to honor Steve Jobs

1. Become an organ donor.

2. Watch this speech:

The internet of things

The future internet

PageRank: What Is It? And How Do You Calculate It?

PageRank: What Is It? And How Do You Calculate It?.

Google’s PageRank technology plays an important role in how online stores show up in search results. Understanding how this ranking system works will help ecommerce merchants improve their search engine optimization (SEO) and potentially increase website traffic.

PageRank is a proprietary mathematical formula (algorithm) that Google uses to calculate the importance of a particular web page/URL based on incoming links. The PageRank algorithm assigns each web page a numeric value. That value is a particular URL’s PageRank.

The underlying assumption is that links are analogous to “votes” for a page’s importance. The more votes a page has, the more important it is. What’s more, votes from important pages/URLs have more weight than votes from unimportant ones.

In this Ecommerce Know-How, I will (1) discuss why PageRank is important and (2) provide an explanation of how to use a simplified PageRank calculation to make sound SEO decisions about internal linking. In all, this article should give you a foundational understanding of this ranking system. And in future installments of Ecommerce Know-How, we will build on this fundamental PageRank information and apply it to SEO techniques like bot herding or siloing.

The Importance of PageRank

“Using PageRank, we are able to order search results so that more important and central Web pages are given preference. In experiments, this turns out to provide higher quality search results to users,” wrote Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (along with Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd) in their January 29, 1998 paper, The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.

In spite of this paper and the complex calculations it included, Google’s exact recipe for ranking web pages is not public information. But there is enough data available to make some educated guesses and assumptions about the PageRank algorithm and a search engine’s basic procedures.

Our search assumption goes like this: Jack starts a search for the phrase “golf clubs.” Google first seeks relevant pages that include content matching Jack’s query. Once Google has located the relevant pages, it ranks those pages based on importance—that is PageRank. The first page/URL listed on the Google results page had the most PageRank out of all the pages that were relevant to Jack’s search query. The last page/URL listed had the least.

Good content that matches a search query determines whether a given web page/URL will be included in Google’s results. But PageRank determines the order relevant pages are shown in.

PageRank is important then because it will determine if your site shows up first or last when a potential customers looks for your keywords.

Google’s Search Procedures

1. A Google user submits a search query.
2. Google searches all of the pages/URLs it has indexed for relevant content.
3. Google sorts the relevant pages/URLs based on PageRank scores.
4. Google displays a results page, placing those pages/URLs with the most PageRank (assumed importance) first.

Simplified PageRank and Ranking Power Estimates

Google does not disclose its exact PageRank formula. But it is a pretty safe bet that calculating PageRank is not easy math (note the “simple” PageRank formula at left).

The folks at SEOmoz have come up with an excellent guess about the PageRank algorithm in their paper, The Professional’s Guide To PageRank Optimization. And I recommend that paper for site owners that want to know how to estimate a page’s actual Google PageRank and don’t mind spending $39.99.

But when it comes to making certain good choices about SEO (particularly internal linking choices), you don’t really need to know a URL’s actual Google PageRank. Rather, a simple model that estimates the effect of one SEO strategy or another is just as good. For example, you’ll be able to compare two different internal linking strategies, estimating how each one will affect a page’s rank, without having to employ higher mathematics.

Our simplified PageRank modeler looks like this:

PageRank for a given page = Initial PageRank + (total ranking power ÷ number of outbound links) + …

Google assigns every new web page an initial PageRank score. For the sake of our example, that initial PageRank will be 1. If I create two new product pages, page A and page B, those pages would each have an initial PageRank of 1.

A link from page B to page A would effectively be a vote for page A’s importance, and that vote would increase page A’s PageRank to 2—page A’s initial PageRank plus the value of page B’s vote. Page B’s vote is worth its PageRank and is called ranking power.

If we add a new page C, and page B also linked to it, page A’s PageRank would fall from 2 to 1.5 while page C’s PageRank would rise from 1 to 1.5.

Adding more links from page B to either page A or page C will not change things, since only one link from page B to page A distributes ranking power. A second link would not add additional ranking power.

With just this simple model, we can now start to test some SEO tactics for internal linking. Simply plot out two or more scenarios, adding up each page’s PageRank to determine which tactic will work best for a given goal. For example, let’s imagine that your ecommerce site has five pages, including a home page, a category page, and three product pages, what is the best navigation strategy if your goal is to boost your category page’s rank? Interconnecting every page would give the category page a total PageRank of 2 as in Figure A.

Linking product pages to the category page only as shown in Figure B, would result in a PageRank of 5 for the category page, making it the better choice.

A visual guide to SEO

“Obama Care Explained” by Trump

“Obama Care Explained”

Let me get this straight . . . …
We’re going to be “gifted” with a health care
plan we are forced to purchase and
fined if we don’t,
Which purportedly covers at least
ten million more people,
without adding a single new doctor,
but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents,
written by a committee whose chairman
says he doesn’t understand it,
passed by a Congress that didn’t read it but
exempted themselves from it,
and signed by a President who smokes,
with funding administered by a treasury chief who
didn’t pay his taxes,
for which we’ll be taxed for four years before any
benefits take effect,
by a government which has
already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare,
all to be overseen by a surgeon general
who is obese,
and financed by a country that’s broke!!!!!
‘What the hell could
possibly go wrong?’

Android vs. iPhone: Battle of the OPS

 

I’m excited about attending Hyper Island Master Class