2007 MIT CIO Symposium

For the past few years, MIT's Center for Digital Business, the MIT Sloan Alumni Club of Boston and the Society for Information Management (SIM) have partnered to organize the MIT CIO Symposium. This year's event is being held on May 17th at the Kresge Auditorium; judging by the agenda, it looks like an amazingly interesting event. For those of us trying to move our careers in that direction, and given that the organizers have built-in multiple opportunities to network during the event, this Symposium can't be missed. The $35 entry fee for students doesn't hurt either (instead of the retail price of $150-$300 for others). I've registered and can't wait to attend.

Building Scalable Products

In Friday's Marketing Management class, Professor Marc Meyer of Northeastern University outlined the role marketing generally plays in the organization. He also went on to detail the importance of building robust products and then deciding which markets to target by leveraging existing technology for new applications.

Prof. Meyer's experience in conceiving, building and then successfully delivering products to market is amazing. Ironically enough he's also a software engineer by trade, and true to form, during his presentation dropped many software related terms in reference to building tangible, scalable products with multiple market applications (ie, 'instantiation', 'modularity', 'reuse', etc). In fact a fair amount of his lecture dealt with strategies used in the modularizing and targeting of markets and the subsequent positioning of products into them.

It's Prof. Meyer's opinion that when determining how to segment potential markets, it's best to consider use contexts. Customers buy benefits so the challenge is to determine how they use products to benefit their lives. This is no easy task, in fact, anymore successful companies are realizing they must approach the marketing side of the business with as much intellectual vigor as the technical side. If done right though, Prof. Meyer believes marketing innovation can make more money than technology innovation.

"Global Opportunities for Entrepreneurs" Event

Today I had the privilege of attending the "Global Opportunities for Entrepreneurs" event hosted by the Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs (OPEN). Among the speakers were Ken Morse, Managing Director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center (and one of the founders of 3Com); and Umair Khan, Chairman, Folio3, Venture Partner, The Entrepreneurs Fund and President of OPEN Silicon Valley, and an MIT grad.

The amount of experience these two brought to the event was amazing. Judging by the size of the audience (about 100), they're highly respected, too. Ken began by outlining the effectiveness of his recent work in Pakistan. MIT and the PK government are attempting to instill the entrepreneurial/innovative spirit within PK society. And while some success was evident, when a society has entrenched, well-meaning mentalities that favor protecting the looser rather than fostering winners, any program will be only so successful. This experience was the scope of the event really. But a lot of what both speakers were saying can be generalized and extrapolated to the benefit of your average entrepreneur.

While looking back at his empirical experience learned from leading the Entrepreneurship Center, Ken said that if we were to take away anything from the event, it was that innovation is one thing, but commercialization of innovation is true innovation. He then went on to give examples of how, despite being great entrepreneurs, until recently the British weren't too savvy at bringing their inventions to market.

Another overarching lesson that any entrepreneur should embrace is the realization that in order to be really truly successful, one should be willing to work their arse off. The end-goal should be a world-class quality company. Don't stop short with 100-200 person organization, commit to the long-run. And one of the most important ingredients to any successful start-up is an outstanding sales force. In fact, a key difference of an average start-up and and outstanding one, is its sales force. Ken maintains that sales people aren't lower forms of life, much to the disagreement of your average engineer. In fact, in his view, lone wolf engineer dominated start-ups build perpetually small companies. These are the organizations that lack the appropriate balance of business and engineering talent.

Umair Khan then spoke to the effects of the globalized workforce, how it contributes to the success of an average entrepreneur and how Pakistani start-ups can benefit from it. He then gave examples of tools entrepreneurs can use to efficiently communicate, travel, hire, find hardware, and effectively market a product or service. I was pleasantly surprised by some of his recommendations (hint: check out jajah.com).

One of Umair overarching assertions was that there are various myths that in order to become a successful entrepreneur, you have to find the talent in the United States. He then went on to, I must say, convincingly dispel those myths. Specifically, within the context of targeting markets, the entrepreneur should identify the relevant market in the US or Asia and set out to build a global workforce to build and support the product. Specifically PK start-ups should concentrate on funding and building from within Asia; "The game is Asia" he says.

One good strategy is to find successful business models in the US/ER and develop alternate competitor products with enhanced value back to the developing world (Pakistan, the ME specifically). Examples of which include Google, developed in the US, was successfully transferred to the China market with a product called Baidu.

In order to execute on this strategy Umair recommends that start-ups be "globally sourced" from day one. In fact, because of economies of scale, most VC's anymore will ask a start-up if they've considered going global. He also believes that for any entrepreneur to increase their probabilities of success, he/she must find a good globally integrated team early in the company's history. So strongly did he believe in this strategy that he closed his speech with, "Go Global, Go Early."

This is good stuff. This is what MIT's all about.

Hell Month

Imagine during the first day of class you're thrown together with 61 perfect strangers. You're served breakfast. The staff welcomes you to MIT. They then begin to tell you that collectively, you and your cohort constitute the most impressive skill-set and experience base of any class entering MIT. You're feeling pretty good, but then, 10 minutes after they've begun to build you up...

Many things await you in the next month. You will work very hard for the next four weeks. In fact, you will only average 4 to 6 hours of sleep per night. Many of you haven't attended school for 10 years and need to be reminded what an academic program feels like. Welcome to the top of the academic food-chain. This is MIT; there is NO whining at MIT.

With that we were thrust into the most amazing 30 days of our lives.

Many things were learned during that time, among them, the concept of IAP. The last three weeks in January at MIT is considered Independent Activities Period (IAP). Basically it's a much needed break-for students and faculty alike-from the MIT academic program. For the purposes of the SDM program, IAP = "Hell Month."

In the least Hell Month teaches you how to work in unstructured, non-hierarchical work teams. For each team challenge, the cohort are split into groups of 6-7, given a common objective, a time line, and expected to deliver a particular product; all of this outside the time allotted to all our other responsibilities. There are two of these objectives-Design Challenges-during Hell Month: DC1 and DC2. For DC1 we had to develop a tangible product. In DC2 we researched a weighty issue and collectively wrote a 40-60 page paper. For both, each group was required to give 15-25 minute presentations with slides to the rest of the cohort and SDM staff.

Once you're in your team, decisions about leadership, and task addressing, and egos, and rule interpretation, and conflict resolution are all team efforts. There is no authority within the groups. Problem resolution therefore isn't a product of decree, but one of persuasion. You learn very quickly that you must convince others to proceed in a particular direction with subtle leadership. In fact, if I've personally learned anything in the past month, it was that in order to move tasks to completion, a good leader has to consider the long term leadership objective. He or she must constantly re-evaluate performance/inputs etc, commit to a vision of completion, (and here's the important part I think) determine what inspires your peers or employees, and use those strengths, with positive feedback, to realize the end-goal. After all, everyone wants to feel as if their input contributed to the solution.

Here We Go

Synced with jabz.net; nice! I'll give an overview of the SDM '07 IAP ("Hell Month"), shortly.