THE ARTANEON BLOG

Social Media Literacy Framework (McKinsey Quarterly, Feb 2013)

2013-02-05T12:31:00.000+00:00

Few domains in business and society have been untouched by the emerging social-media revolution—one that is not even a decade old. Many organisations have been responding to that new reality, realising the power and the potential of this technology for corporate life:

wikis enable more efficient virtual collaboration in cross-functional projects
internal blogs, discussion boards, and YouTube channels encourage global conversations and knowledge sharing
sophisticated viral media campaigns engage customers and create brand loyalty
next-generation products are co-developed in open-innovation processes
corporate leaders work on shaping their enterprise 2.0 strategy

Organisational social-media literacy is fast becoming a source of competitive advantage. Learn how your organisation and your leaders can keep up with this 6 dimensional framework (Source: McKinsey Quarterly (Feb 2013)

It takes guts to innovate radically in leadership and organization, for legacy systems, cultures, and attitudes are powerful forces of inertia. Fortunately, the inherent quality of social media is a powerful transformational force. Social-media engagement will confront leaders with the shortcomings of traditional organizational designs. Leaders who address these shortcomings will learn how to develop the enabling infrastructure that fosters the truly strategic use of social technologies.

Pros & Cons for Monetising a Country’s Debt

2013-01-23T09:31:00.002+00:00

A government can decide to monetise its debt, which removes its liabilities. The central bank of a nation creates money and uses this money to purchase government debt instruments such as bonds. This is one method of financing government expenses when foreign nations and other investors do not buy enough bonds to meet a government's spending obligations. The pro is that monetizing the debt allows the government to temporarily pay its debts, the con is that it is causing inflation and drives investors of to other countries/assets.

Source: Ehow: http://www.ehow.com/list_6863875_pros-cons-monetizing-debt.html#ixzz2ImZ026Ja

My Review of FT Guide on Corporate Valuation

2013-01-15T16:33:00.004+00:00

I have recently read the FT/Prentice Hall Guide on Corporate Valuation by David Frykman and Jakob Tolleryd (second Edition 2010). In this videopost I walk you through the contents and give you a critical view.

Main contents

x) When do you need to value a company

x) Overview of valuation methods

x) Ratio-based valuation

x) Discounted cash flow valuation

x) Underlying analysis and key value drivers

x) Value-based management

The book can be bought on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Times-Corporate-Valuation-Guides/dp/0273729101

Interview with Benjamin Wirtz, founder and CEO of Unifyo

2013-01-08T10:43:00.000+00:00

Unifyo is a customer relationship tool which allows you and your team to have access to rich customer profiles at your finger tips, wherever you go on the web.

What have you done before starting Unifyo?

My speciality, while studying Information Systems has been Social Computing. I did research on how certain functionalities in collaboration tools support social and psychological processes like group building. I later moved on to building a framework for entrepreneurs to align their networking efforts towards increasing the chances of success, developing a very structured methodology. A bit like Lean Startup methodology, but for networking.

While I was looking at data, it turned out that you can see a lot of common patterns in networks of successful people and you can get these patterns from analysing communication data. So, originally, the idea was building an application that automatically measures peoples’ networks and relationships, that keeps track of everything and alerts them when they need to take action on anything, like building a new relationship with certain people or keeping up with a relationship that is starting to drop, although it should be a strong relationship. And that sort of stuff.

Sounds pretty well thought, did you have a product that time?

Our project was called Handy Elephant. What it did is, it grabbed your text messages and put your contacts in order, like when was the last time you have been in touch with someone. It also indicated the channel used. As a results you could visualize, when the best times were to follow up with a contact and what the preferred channel was to reach out to someone. It was also integrated with CRMs, so every time you received a phone call, it prompted you to take a note and sent that note to the CRM in real time.

How did you go about monetizing this?

It quickly turned out that the project did not have a very good route-to-market strategy and also the market was not very good for us. We were hoping to cater to SMEs but we got most interest from corporates. We had a great chat with the Head of CRM of PwC, but ultimately they would not buy from us because we were a very young team.

What happened next?

So we had to pivot and ultimately came up with Unifyo which we launched in July. The concept is more aimed to SMEs that tend to be really bad with data integration. They have customer data flowing around, email and twitter and social media and CRMs and finding information about a certain person is a complete waste of time. So we designed Unifyo as an intelligence layer on top of their existing applications that brings 360 degrees customer data to their sales people.

I was surprised how easy it is to install Unifyo.

That was actually one of the design maxims we had. It had to be really easy to use. Anyone in the business should be able to start and adopt it. Even a low level support guy should be able to work with it.

How many users do you currently have since the public beta?

We now have some 200 businesses trialling it and we have quite few individuals as well. We are now starting to see first users converting into paid. But it is still a very manual process. So what we plan to do during the next 12 months is streamline the self-service experience and enable people to not just technically but also socially spread it in their organization.

Many employees also have private dealings with the customers, how do you convince them to share their interactions with their collaborators?

The basic principle here is that everything in your work email account sort of belongs to your employer anyway and everything should be work related. So the general assumption is, that you can share it. Unifyo is also careful in terms of what data it shares. It will share that there is a particular person you have sent an e-mail to, but it will not reveal the content of that e-mail to your co-workers. Unifyo makes sure that everybody in the organization is aware of who knows who and when was the last contact and it brings this data proactively into the tools as you browse.

How big is your team at the moment?

We are three at the moment but we want to raise it to six or seven people in the future to get more stuff done.

If you would like to give on piece of advice to other entrepreneurs out there, what would you tell them?

I think the most important advice in the UK is to get out of the building. Especially first time entrepreneurs in their very early days, they don’t know, should they tell others about their idea. Yes, you need to, because you need to get that feedback and that reality check. Similar situation with technical people, they think they build something, then they put it on hacker news or some smart developer forum and people will be amazed and they will be world famous and it will go viral and that sort of stuff. Which is just not the case.

Apart from building Unifyo, what makes you really happy in life?

Connecting smart people is something really fulfilling, because you are brokering information and expertise in a way. This is really common in the startup world. You meet people and you get something out of them and they have some needs at the moment and you then again know someone who can help them. Getting the world closer together in this way will add a lot of value. There is no money in it, but it is something that is really fulfilling, knowing you have helped a person.

If you are looking forward, let’s say the next three years, what do you want to have achieved with your startup?

A large number of successful adoptions. If we can spread Unifyo across enterprises, small, medium and big ones and achieve a very high satisfaction rating there, then, we have succeeded.

Interview with Fabrizzio from Buzzoole

2012-12-05T20:18:00.003+00:00

During the Pionneer Festival I had the chance to chat with Fabrizzio, the CEO of Buzzoole. Buzzoole's algorithm allows Social Media users to optimize their online presence and discover the topics they are most influential in. Brands can identify trend setters in their (niche) market, involve them and generate word of mouth making them brand ambassadors.

Interview with Michal Lyczek from Substance

2012-11-02T13:36:00.003+00:00

At the Pioneer Festival 2012 I had the chance to speak to Michal, the CEO and founder of Substance, an app that will transform your paper sketches into interactive models using phone's built-in camera.

Learn more on http://trysubstance.com/

What makes a successful startup pitch

2012-10-29T13:15:00.002+00:00

One of the biggest mistakes an entrepreneur can make, especially when speaking with investors, reporters and potential customers, is to mess up with his or her start-up pitch. Independently of who the audience is, there is key elements that go into a startup pitch. We will briefly discuss those and also focus on the delivery and important skills you need when pitching.

5 Ways to Manage your Start-Up's Growth

2012-10-25T13:01:00.001+01:00

Some Start-ups are concerned about whether they are doing a good job of managing its growth. In this video, we are looking at how to improve a start-up's structure, systems and shared values with conducting a benchmarking exercise and developing a diagnostic tool to accompany growth.

6 Tips To Get Your Startup Off The Ground And Score A Seed Round

2012-10-16T11:00:00.001+01:00

Anthemos Georgiades, the CEO of Zumper, a platform for apartment rentals, that has just scored a seed round tells us on Techcrunch how to take on a fundraising challenge.

Zumper's seed round story is far from perfect. Like most first-time founders, they screwed up at every stage, from having no estimation of what valuation cap they should set, through to stupid meeting scheduling, which led to several important calls in their car.

In the video you'll find some simple and hopefully immediately applicable lessons drawn from the experience of raising the round.

Rats in my Bed or the Art Preparing for a Bad Buzz

2012-10-13T16:02:00.002+01:00

No brand is immune from a bad buzz, and it is often very difficult to get out of it without a long lasting impact on reputation and customer fidelity. In August this year Airbnb, a young start-up from San Francisco, had to pay a hefty price as it tried to catch up with the controversy around a neglected complaint of a customer.

That story made it to the most important web focused media and major newspapers had several articles dedicated to AirBnB’s complaining customer. In retrospect, I very much doubt that AirBnB’s long response time was an error as the negative buzz around the devastated flat prolonged and intensified the media coverage after the firm drew the 9 digit amount.

The more likely case is that AirBnB was waiting for a potential Bad Buzz incident and then took some time to let the news propagate before they took well planned actions.

MegaFon to Float in London

2012-10-11T10:56:00.000+01:00

International investors got another chance to tap into Russian economic growth when mobile operator MegaFon said Tuesday it will float in London. The bad news is the Russian economy is slowing down as well, as a rise in inflation puts the brakes on an earlier surge in consumer spending this year.

A discipline in need of a new direction

2012-10-09T09:42:00.000+01:00

Today, I am picking up some thoughts of a recent Financial Times article which asks for a new direction for the discipline of Strategy, which has long occupied a prominent spot in business schools. In most of the MBA courses, it is strategy that provides the course that brings all the other disciplines together.Strategy is traditionally defined as how companies achieve competitive advantage to maximise profit. However the world is changing in ways that make this definition increasingly marginal.

It is mainly 3 conditions that strategists need to be wary of these days:

1) What performance measures really matter?
We need to relax the assumption of profit maximisation as the driver of business behaviour and the measure of success. We should be open to other interests, such as the intergenerational security of family control or the economic development of nation states.

For instance, state-controlled companies account for 80 per cent of the national stock market index in China, some of the largest Asian companies are family controlled.

2) What drives competitive advantage?
The traditional definition of competitive advantage directs us to forms of competitive behaviour that are often irrelevant. Anti-competitive strategy can matter a lot more. And competitive advantage may be state-based rather than market-based.

The example here is the Russian oil and gas industry where its mostly about superior access to Kremlin support.

3) Where is the competition?
In a world where many markets are dominated by a handful of companies, our theory and teaching should rely less on findings from large sample research studies. We need more in-depth case studies to understand intimately, from the inside, the interactions of giant companies with ambivalent motivations.

Google and Facebook dominate their markets of course, and the same is true for the Big Four accounting firms, the bulge bracket investment banks, the energy and mining companies, or the all-embracing Amazon. Strategy in these markets involves at best strange kinds of competition.

So it’s not about maximising the profit anymore and the number of markets with perfect competition are getting smaller every day. Especially in the industries that are most attractive to MBA graduates - technology and financial services - the traditional strategic frameworks cannot be applied and an effort has to be made to reinvent some of the teachings to reflect reality better.

Stem cell duo win Nobel Prize for medicine

2012-10-08T17:43:00.000+01:00

A pair of landmark discoveries made 40 years apart have earned the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for John B. Gurdon of the University of Cambridge in England and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan.

Islamic finance - a bit more than interest free banking

2012-09-18T10:17:00.001+01:00

Just came accross this year 2000 book on Islamic Financing that reveals the complexity of dealing with money in the stress field of financial markets and relegion, that I experienced during lenghty negotiations in Irak and Jordania.

Ibrahim Warde (2000) "Islamic Finance in the Global Economy"

How to set up a panel discussion

2012-09-18T08:33:00.001+01:00

A quick read through with factors to take into consideration when planning a panel discussion in a class room setting.

Groupon pressing ahead with the IPO

2011-10-21T10:01:00.000+01:00

Groupon, the fastest growing online discount business is starting to pitch to potential investors coming Monday with the intention of raising US$500 to 750 million at a valuation of US$10 to 15 billion, significantly below the number they aimed for when they filed their S-1. in June.

Wacky accounting practices and negative impacts on merchants and customers have added to the currently more as uncertain market conditions and make a successful IPO questionable. This video post analyses some of these factors and critically assesses Groupon's business model.

How Raising Money Dilutes you as a Founder

2011-10-18T14:46:00.000+01:00

In this Video Post, inspired by Mark Suster's Article, Johannes talks about for what founders should prepare for when raising several rounds of financing. The case includes equity injections from an Angel and two Venture Capital Rounds.

The results are summarized in the following info graphic that is available for download here.

Lessons learned from Steve

2011-10-12T16:18:00.002+01:00

Seven days after Steve Jobs passed away there is still a Michael Jacksonesque hype in the media, which is a good reason for me to do another (probably final) post on Steve Jobs focusing on the lessons entrepreneurs can learn from him. My favourite take-aways are written in bold :

Experts are clueless (figure stuff out by yourself)
Customers cannot tell you what they need (so you need to propose them something new and useful)
Present big challenges to your employees
Design counts (not only price or functionality)
Big Graphics and Big fonts
Jump Curves (don’t wait for your son to do that)
Either it works (or it doesn’t)
Price isn’t Value (and the left bottom corner sucks)
A-players higher A-players (and B-players higher C-players, and so on...)
Real CEOs can demo (and don’t let the VP do that)
Don’t worry be crappy (or be brave be Beta)
You need to believe in something (before seeing it) RIP Steve Jobs.

Business Planning Workshop

2011-10-07T15:30:00.003+01:00

Facilitating change means educating people and Artaneon has developed workshops and trainings to make sure your people are up to date and involved. All our seminars can be held at your company's premises and are adapted to the specific needs of your organzation.

The first of our SME series is Artaneon's Business Plan Workshop intended for Non-financial people.

After the workshop you should be able to:

Know what a business plan consists of and what the target groups are
Have a methodology to present your idea effectively
Be able to describe your business idea using the key sections of a business plan
Understand how the financials fit in

Check out the video announcement and refer to the artaneon.com for the TOC.

Rest in Peace Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T09:54:00.002+01:00

Apple released a statement paying tribute: "Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives … The world is immeasurably better because of Steve." Steven Spielberg, one of the founders of Pixar rival DreamWorks Animation, released the following statement: “Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.”

Check out the following video with more statmens after Steve jobs death and two major learning points I take away from his life.

Love, Love, Love

2011-10-05T08:38:00.000+01:00

Please check out this short video post on an important matter and a basic question for some essential thinking:

What if we made love measurable?

And don't tell me that money already measures love. It does not, (let's say) by definition. If you need to pay for a service then the person who delivers it to you is not in love, otherwise it would be for free. Makes some sense what I say, but still not very elaborate as a theory, but with time comes enlightment...

Enterprenneurial attitude and more

2011-10-04T12:07:00.001+01:00

In continental Europe we have amazing talent and a lot of diversity but what is lacking here is ambition. I have the impression that ambition is not that well regarded, because it has the notion of failure that swings with it. And it’s not well regarded to raise your head above the crowd. The going down attitude is more of a European thing, it seems. prevailing. In Europe entrepreneurs are misfits, most people don’t want to do our job.

In Silicon Valley what is different is the culture. How much risk do you take are yopu willing to take? It does not mean that Americans are suicidal, but they are more eager to taking risks and that their venture will probably fail. So that is the attitude you need to undertake something different, something potentially big.

In any case the great thing is that even, if your thing fails you are meeting many people and making many friends while trying to make your venture work.

What Angels like

A wealthy freind of mine recently told me that Angels typically invest

in Products they like to use

in People they like to hang out with

at Valuations they can swallow

So the role is very close to mentoring and Angels tend to be happy to provide start ups with their contacts in the industry.

For Venture Capitalists it is a similar thing but they are more institutionalized, they have people working for them and their job is to make sure that there is an adequate return on their investments and that investment policies are respected.

The Managment Team

Two seems to be the magic number, four is a crowd, three might work too. That’s what Fred Destin, a US based VC says. I think 4 only is a crowd, if you are not on top. If you take the analogy of a sail boat, it is fine to have one skipper and a couple of crew members that may even have complementary skill sets. So I would recommend to reserve some minority stakes for them.

Single founder companies are hard to back, so you need to find a co-founder at least. You need the Co-founder to keep you going and chase things from you, to have somebody to speak to, to use him as a sounding board to complete the skill set of your company, etc.

The role of the Emerging Countries in Europe’s Debt Crisis

2011-09-18T15:22:00.000+01:00

In its upcoming annual meeting, the IMF’s Managing Director Cristine Lagarde will reduce the growth expectations for the world’s largest economies following a dramatic collapse in consumer and business confidence and at the same time warn governments over hampering growth with too rapid spending cuts. The Eurozone’s financial crisis is a mess with banks hording cash and governments pushing for austerity and it does not appear to be remedied any time soon.

As The New York Times reports, no substantial progress towards solving the region’s debt crisis has been made during the two days meeting of European finance ministers, however the credibility of the European central bank remains intact and there is still some space for an accommodative monetary policy.

The forecasts for Emerging Asia are still bright: Changyong Rhee, the Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank estimates a 7.8 percent growth in 2011 for Asia, excluding Japan. In comparison, the U.S. economy is forecast to expand only 1.6 percent this year and that of the Eurozone only 1.7 percent.

Most emerging countries have current account surpluses and especially the economic heavyweights China and Brazil are standing by to boost European investments. Their readiness to help is due to the effects a worsening of the European financial crisis could have on their increasingly resilient economies, with tumbling exports causing slowdowns in industrial production.

But instead of saving Europe, the emerging countries will more likely strengthen European markets by shifting parts of their foreign exchange reserves into European government bonds. It’s the Eurozone countries themselves that have to find a solution to their predominantly home-grown financial crisis that is politically acceptable and with which the markets can live.

Watch the video:

Thoughts on SMO innovation and competitiveness

2011-05-19T14:07:00.003+01:00

Not only Austrian sources recognize Small and Medium Organizations (SMOs) as one of the main drivers of competitiveness as they serve as engines of new idea generation and innovative activity. Both value creation and growth rates of companies with less than 10 employees are far above the average of larger companies. However, times are tough for SMOs especially in times of recession and tougher requirements of providers of capital and other scarce resources.

This raises at least two important questions for directors of small organizations: (a) How can SMOs benefit from their tininess and flexibility and compete against their multi product peers and (b) What should be the form of organizing innovation activities in SMOs?

Apart from their agility and typically lean cost base small companies did not really have a competitive edge over large, established organizations which are in a better position when it comes to mobilizing resources. Apart from financial resources, access to markets and customers to test and commercialize new products has proven to be quite a challenge for SMOs. Also competing on price, which would be ideal for a boots trapped SMO is getting increasingly difficult in the face of multi-product offerings that obfuscate the value of single specialized solutions.

The above named modest advantages of SMOs have been reinforced with the emergence of ICT platforms that allow the firms to reach a far larger and more dispersed audience (of up to 2 billion Internet users) which erodes the economies of scale associated to mass production and a country spanning service offering. The access to the audience of internet users is available at an ultra low monthly cost, but allows SMOs to gain global marketing capabilities in the corporate and political world.

The explosion of media choices and platforms - from blogging to Twitter to Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube - is something SMOs did not have in any real sense a couple of years ago. Storytelling has been thrust front and centre because customers not only expect firms to exceed their expectations, but also to have the ability to tell stories, be they good or bad. This human character trait makes it easier for SMOs to conquer the minds of powerful decision makers.

Furthermore SMOs should leverage their ability to focus on certain niches and make sure they offer a sufficiently sophisticated product. Let’s take the case of a small provider of EMR (Electronic Medical Records) in Brazil wanting to sell its well designed software to small practices and private clinics. Provided that the customers are overly spoiled and used to sales persons from pharmaceutical firms knocking on their doors, it would be possible for the small software house to sell their EMR online and the potential Brazilian market would be huge and emerging. However, the firm would face fierce competition especially from ERP providers that include their (probably less sophisticated) EMR as a bonus, if the practices go for their suite of programmes.

For the second question on how to organize the innovation process in a small company there is no answer that works for all sectors and activities. One natural advantage of SMOs is that they do not have the bureaucratic processes in place that hinders innovation that you can find in larger organizations that aim for efficiency in the first place.

However small the company is, it is recommendable to raise awareness among the employees that innovation is core to the sustained success of their company. Furthermore one person should be dedicated to the role of innovation manager and spend a decent amount of her time on identifying new opportunities and managing current ones.

While most companies have plenty of creativity, they lack the skills to convert ideas into reality. Vijay Govindarajan of the Tuck School of Business points out the three basic steps for planning an innovative initiative and evaluating its progress:

Formalize the experiment: Stick to the basic principles of learning from an experiment.
Break down the hypothesis: Most innovation exercises are really compound experiments. There are two or more uncertain variables. SMOs should learn to test those assumptions at the lowest possible cost.
Seek the truth: Political pressures in organizations push people towards interpretations of results that are comfortable and convenient rather then analytical and dispassionate. These organizational pressures tend to be lower and more transparent in SMOs.

In most of the practical cases, I have come across in small companies, there is too much emphasis on ideas and not nearly enough on execution of the profitable ones and separation from the initiatives with too many sticking points. So a proper follow through of the person in charge of innovative processes is required for the ideas to bear fruit.

Revolution 2.0 - Thoughts on the MENA events

2011-03-08T13:06:00.002+00:00

I love picking up buzzwords that translate computer concepts into real world stuff - the pressure the US, Europe but also less "civilized" countries like Turkey and Israel exercised on Hosni Mubarak enabled his gradual departure and opened the way for hopefully free and peacefull elections. However, the revolutions themselves were caused by cultural convergence which was facilitated by social networks that disseminated ideas of freedom and values of liberal democracies like the US.

Magnus Thor Thorfason, Entreprenneuship Professor at HBS points out that both, Social Media and the increased availability of Mobile Devices have played a key role in solving the coordination problem faced by potential protestors (hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6660.html) and help organizers of protests gain momentum by convincing followers that events would be large which makes it more difficult for regimes to retaliate.

A second aspect even, if more profane is the help of coordinating a large crowd and help them to express themselves on a dedicated online forum.

It currently it does not seem to be a matter if, but how far the upheavals in the Arab world will spread. Apart from comprehensible conflicts in China there is also some concern that the movement is swapping over to Albania and even Italy, which puts Europeans and the NATO on alert.

Even, if short term these developments can be alarming, in the long term, Revolution 2.0 will offer the possibility of enhanced representation and bring along more stability and a more competitive business environment. It is certainly not true of all revolutions but in the cases of North Africa it is worth the risk.