What to Expect in 2007

FountainBlue's Thursday, January 25, 2007 Transitions event featuree Mitchell Levy, Author of 5 books on business topics, chair for CEO networking, head of the Silicon Valley Executive Business Program, frequent speaker on leadership, networking challenges and online publishing strategies for senior executives, and founder and CEO for the book publishing company, Happy About http://www.happyabout.info.

Since 1998, Mitchell has surveyed thousands of senior executives annually on the question of what to expect for the coming year.
Here are the top 10 trends for What to Expect in 2007
#01 - Global Warming/Environmental Concerns Effect Business
#02 - Energy Continues to Take Center Stage
#03 - The Internet Continues to Grab Mindshare by Getting Incorporated into Daily Processes
#04 - The World Continues Going Mobile
#05 - Marketing Starts Moving from an "Art" to a "Science"
#06 - The US Dollar Becomes Less Important
#07 - Capitalism Continues to Spread Throughout the World
#08 - Rapid Adoption of Mass Customization
#09 - Software Continues to Morph
#10 - Online Networking Becomes a Key Business Asset Industries

To follow up with this conversation:

• Visit http://www.marketerschoice.com/app/netcart.asp?MerchantID=75129&ProductID=2638341 to purchase your copy of Mitchell Levy's What to Expect in 2007.
• For more information on other books published by Happy About, visit http://www.happyabout.info/books.php.
• For more information about Mitchell's CEO Networking group, visit http://ceonetworking.com/.
• For more information the Silicon Valley Executive Business Program, visit http://www.siliconvalleypace.com/
• Contact Mitchell if you are interested in writing a book to be published through Mitchell's company. He will e-mail you six questions about your book topic.

Business and Technology Trends in 2007

FountainBlue's January 19, 2007 panel on Business and Technology Trends in 2007 featured John Verrochi, marketing executive and strategist and founder for the HP and Sun Alumni Associations; Steve Bengston from PriceWaterhouseCoopers; Rick Ellinger, Founder and Board Member, Wireless Communication Alliance; Tom Foremski from SiliconValleyWatcher.com; Fred Greguras, Of Counsel, Fenwick and West.

The beginning of the year is a time of optimism and promise, a time for planning ahead, reflecting on the past, leveraging the learnings into the future. As you consider plans for the new year, we invite you to attend this month's Connections event, where we've assembled a prestigious panel to share their predictions, their advice and their strategies for the year.

Below are some big-picture take-aways from the meeting:

General Business and Financing Trends

• Private equity funds have gotten so big that few companies are now beyond their reach. This is good for Silicon Valley and businesses in general if it helps fix and repackage ailing firms, but not-so-good if it's for the purpose of financial re-engineering alone.
• IPOs continue to be weak and M&A market will continue to dominate - Trend for early-stage companies is to invest 5, 10, 15 million an make an average of 60 million in M&A, not the hundreds of millions in an IPO
• It continues to be tough to scale and grow firms sustainably
• AIM market - 2/3 of companies that went public on AIM are not at IPO levels now
• Outsourcing trend to continue as it makes economic sense
• Foreign relations becomes more important as companies become more international
• No materials changes in Sarbanes-Oxley or stock option back-dating for this year expected
• Corporations will continue to give back to the community, through corporate foundations for example
• Investments in consumer-facing companies that are compelling products, easily delivered with a unique value
• Companies are successfully using viral marketing techniques to build brand, momentum and revenues

Technology Trends

• Wireless is hot, especially when it involves education, entertainment, social networking, video uploading, business collaboration, inter-connectedness
• Increasing importance of 'local' applications, targeted local marketing
• Software as a Service and Open Source will be very attractive
• Life Science Trend - There will be more opportunity/more up-sides in life science companies in Southern California
• Clean Energy Trend - Filtering, purification, pumping and other local activities that don't involve distribution of energy are easier to implement. But when distribution is involved, safety, connectivity, legal and other issues arise which make it more difficult, more time-consuming to develop.
• Media is hot - content and advertising plays like Yahoo and Google are examples of how we are becoming a 'Media Valley'

Silicon Valley Remains Strong

• 35% of VC investments in the US are in Silicon Valley, and US gets 20% more financing than anywhere else in the world
• Market shared hasn't declined in 10 years
• Our rich culture of failure-tolerance, innovation, multi-ethnicity, business-technology integration remains strong. Our solid infrastructure of support services from VCs to lawyers and accountants to serial entrepreneurs to academic institutions and their partnerships with businesses has been developed over many decades. This makes Silicon Valley difficult to replicate elsewhere.

Trends that Affect Our Personal Lives

• There will continue to be breeches in privacy. Until there is accountability for parties responsible for protecting our privacy, privacy breeches may continue to occur.
  Lines will blur between business and personal lives
• Entrepreneurs are less likely to make the financial returns once expected. Entrepreneurs should choose start-ups for the culture, lifestyle, passion, not as much for the money as there is less to be had and less favorable distribution to entrepreneurs after investors take their share
• Education for our children becomes more important - there will likely be fewer jobs for well-educated, liberal arts majors
• Pensions are gone; only 20% of Fortune 500 companies have them vs 80% of them 20 years ago. We need to manage and plan for pensions ourselves.
• The aging baby boomer population will impact us all - from the strain on social security, to caring for elderly parents to retirement ages.

Thanks to our facilitator, John Verrochi, for compiling other trend reports below:

McKinsey

• Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally. As a consequence of economic liberalization, technological advances, capital market developments, and demographic shifts, the world has embarked on a massive realignment of economic activity.
• Public-sector activities will balloon, making productivity gains essential. The unprecedented aging of populations across the developed world will call for new levels of efficiency and creativity from the public sector. Without clear productivity gains, the pension and health care burden will drive taxes to stifling proportions.
• The consumer landscape will change and expand significantly. Almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace in the next decade as economic growth in emerging markets pushes them beyond the threshold level of $5,000 in annual household income—a point when people generally begin to spend on discretionary goods.
• Technological connectivity will transform the way people live and interact. The technology revolution has been just that. Yet we are at the early, not mature, stage of this revolution.
• Individuals, public sectors, and businesses are learning how to make the best use of IT in designing processes and in developing and accessing knowledge.
• The battlefield for talent will shift. Ongoing shifts in labor and talent will be far more profound than the widely observed migration of jobs to low-wage countries. The shift to knowledge-intensive industries highlights the importance and scarcity of well-trained talent. The increasing integration of global labor markets, however, is opening up vast new talent sources.
• The role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny. As businesses expand their global reach, and as the economic demands on the environment intensify, the level of societal suspicion about big business is likely to increase. The tenets of current global business ideology—for example, shareholder value, free trade, intellectual-property rights, and profit repatriation—are not understood, let alone accepted, in many parts of the world.
• Demand for natural resources will grow, as will the strain on the environment. As economic growth accelerates—particularly in emerging markets—we are using natural resources at unprecedented rates. Oil demand is projected to grow by 50 percent in the next two decades, and without large new discoveries or radical innovations supply is unlikely to keep up.
• New global industry structures are emerging. In response to changing market regulation and the advent of new technologies, nontraditional business models are flourishing, often coexisting in the same market and sector space.
• Management will go from art to science. Bigger, more complex companies demand new tools to run and manage them. Indeed, improved technology and statistical-control tools have given rise to new management approaches that make even mega-institutions viable.
• Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge. Knowledge is increasingly available and, at the same time, increasingly specialized. The most obvious manifestation of this trend is the rise of search engines (such as Google), which make an almost infinite amount of information available instantaneously. Access to knowledge has become almost universal. Yet the transformation is much more profound than simply broad access. New models of knowledge production, access, distribution, and ownership are emerging. We are seeing the rise of open-source approaches to knowledge development as communities, not individuals, become responsible for innovations.

Red Herring

• Brain Implants The hope is that by sending or blocking electrical pulses, the power of the nervous system can be harnessed to treat problems like depression, migraines, and even blindness.
• Attack of the Mobile Virus Nasty viruses, long a threat to PCs, will likely start to menace the humble little cell phone in 2007. With cell phones getting smarter and with the proliferation of mobile advertising and applications, the communications world’s first widespread cell phone virus attack is a near certainty.
• Private equity goes shopping for technology giants. EMC, Dell, Yahoo Become Buyout Bait
  Google signs first ad contract, step one in dominating the 30-second spot.
• Nanotech Will Heat Up now know that when materials like metals are broken down into particles the size of a few atoms—called nanoparticles—their properties change, enabling a host of innovations like stronger, lighter tennis rackets, better flash drives, and stain-resistant fabrics.
• Some day, it might provide cheap solar energy in homes across the world.
• SOX Gets a Makeover Law will be fixed to make IPOs less costly.
• HD-DVD and Blu-Ray: DOA Internet downloading will bypass physical media.
• Rollins to Get Booted Out At Dell? Watch for Kevin Rollins to gracefully step down to "spend more time with his family" in 2007, but don’t expect him to do it willingly Dell shares were down about 38 percent at one point in 2006, over worries that top management had become overly committed to the direct-sales and made-to-order business
• Solar Gets Simpler Solar will get easier in 2007, which will be a step up from where it’s been
• New Year, New Jobs This year will usher in a boomlet for a new breed of jobs. With two populations—MySpace and AARP—seeing explosive growth, there’ll be a need for a Social Networking Liaison for the Over-50 Set. This person’s job is to find a way to bring them together

San Francisco Chronicle

• Clean tech -- which includes technologies for removing heavy metals out of groundwater or reducing power consumption through sensors and switches. Clean tech plays to the region's strengths. Silicon Valley excels at making tiny products such as controlled chemical and biological processes and electronic devices
• Net neutrality (in which telephone and cable companies prevented from charging exit tolls on their high-speed Internet wires) 2.0 fight to resurface in 2007
• Shift to a consumer-driven tech industry (see CES and MacWorld shows) will continue to cause friction within the industry as well as a general anxiety because fickle consumers with short attention spans make for brutal product cycles
• Nanotech, biotech, robots
• Round 2: Blu-ray vs. HD DVD fight heats up
• More video on the Web

San Jose Mercury News

• You (recall Time’s person of the year, community, collaboration
• Mobility, e.g., video to go (cell phones, iPods)
• Renaissance of electric car (see Tesla)
• Windows Vista: reliability, security, compatibility, new features. Estimates are that 82M units will be sold, primarily on new PCs
• Games: Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo part of $28B WW market in 2006
• Continued reduction in privacy (hackers, identity theft, social networking sites like My Space
• Digital living room (AT&T and Verizon rollout of IPTV, Apple’s iTV device
• LEDs replacing conventional light bulbs
• GPS in cell phones

Succeeding in a Man's World

FountainBlue's January 12, When She Speaks Women in Leadership Series event was on Succeeding in a Man's World. Our panelists included Patti Wilson, CareerCompany; Linda Fosler, Linda Prowse Fosler & Associates; Francine Gordon, President of FGordon Group and President of ATW for 2007; Mona Hudak Senior Diversity and Inclusion Program Manager from Cisco Systems; and Panelist Praveena Varadarajan, director of engineering at Sun Microsystems.

Below are some big-picture take-aways from the meeting:

Historical events have impacted a woman's participation and leadership in the workplace

• in the 40s, women went to work to support our country, and our men who were serving in the war.
• in the late 40s when the men returned, the women gave up their jobs
• in the late 50s women who went to college were generally looking for a husband and got married and raised families
• in the 60s, more women were in the workplace, but the types of jobs available for women such as teaching, nursing, administration, were generally lower level or more lowly paid
• in the 70s, more women entered the workforce out of necessity. They were known as the 'displaced homemaker'.
• in the 80s, with affirmative action, there was a rise in women in non-traditional women jobs from firemen to engineers
• in the 90s, with the dot com boom, salaries for men and women jobs were fairly comparable
• now, in the 2000s, women are back to earning .7-.8 for every dollar a man does, and are not well represented in traditionally male professionals and at the most senior levels

Advice for women seeking to succeed in a man's world:

Be a good leader

• Be true to yourself
  Have passion and desire for what you are doing
  Know yourself - your strengths and challenges
  Have a strong moral compass
  Don't tie your ego with your position
  Stop competing with your self Work Hard
• Focus on relationships: Be trustworthy, have integrity
• Collaborate
  Bring out the best in other
  Leverage your strengths and partner with others to help you address your areas of need
  Focus on the ideas rather than the politics
• Focus on the ideas rather than the politics
• Have high standards and make plans to achieve them
  Decide to be successful
  Correct the mistakes you make
  Be competent, and do your homework
  Know when to cut your losses
  Be powerfully focused
  Don't shy from conflict, but don't invite it
  Be better today than you were yesterday, better tomorrow than you were today
• Communicate your effectiveness as a leader
  Behave as if you belong at the table
  Don't downplay your accomplishments
  Don't give away your power
  Take the initiative at meetings when appropriate
  Have and project confidence:
  Watch your body movements and amount of space you take at a table
  Monitor your voice intonations
  Communicate your confidence with your handshake
  Consider the cultural and personal background of those you're interacting with. Be sensitive to the feedback you are receiving regarding the confidence you are projecting.
• Have and project confidence:
  Watch your body movements and amount of space you take at a table
  Monitor your voice intonations
  Communicate your confidence with your handshake
  Consider the cultural and personal background of those you're interacting with. Be sensitive to the feedback you are receiving regarding the confidence you are projecting.
• Be opportunitistic
  Be prepared and take advantage of serendipitous opportunities as they present themselves
  Ask for help when you need it
  Find ways to support others and give back
• Find a way to fit into male-dominated culture
  Accept that the high tech world in Silicon Valley is a man's world and work from there
  Be conversant about sports and/or participate in male dominated sports like golf
  Be comfortable and confident about being a woman
  Leverage traditionally female strengths, from collaboration to communication, from empathy to multi-tasking
  Don't conform to standards that don't fit your identity as a woman, as a leader
  Don't use femininity in negative ways
• Advice on how to integrate work and life as you're rising up the corporate ladder:
  Collaborate with your spouse as a partner
  Plan your work around your family's needs. Sometimes working in a global economy with late-evening phone calls helps you make that balance.

Knowing and Communicating Your Personal Brand of Leadership

FountainBlue's first Leadership Workshop on Knowing and Communicating Your Personal Brand of Leadership was conducted on February 2, 2007. Ellen Rudy and Victoria Hayden from The Hayden Group launched our leadership series with our first workshop focusing on the foundation for leadership: Knowing yourself and your unique value proposition to any leadership opportunity. This is absolutely critical as it helps define who you are and what distinguishes you from other leaders, first to yourself, and then to those around you. Exploring your unique contributions, passions and capabilities and successfully presenting / promoting that to the marketplace is more integral than "skills" or "strategy" for career success. It not only helps you better succeed and lead in your current position, it also helps you to plan your career development path in alignment with your unique offerings, in order to optimize your success and enjoy greater fulfillment along your career journey.

Leadership comes first from within and this workshop will help you lead more effectively by helping you to identify, articulate and communicate your personal brand. Doing so will help you proactively manage the feelings that people--your boss, your colleagues, your employees, your customers, and your family and friends--have about you, and about how they feel about interacting with you, observing you, and even thinking about you.

Below are some big-picture take-aways from the meeting, based on Victoria and Ellen's presentation.

Start by performing an audit of your leadership style:

• What are your leadership goals, personal and professional?
• What external factors impact your goals?
• What are your values?
• What are your internal strengths and challenges?
• Who are your constituents? What are their perceptions and needs?

Consider the three major elements of brand as it relates to your leadership style:

• Message - What do you stand for? What is your philosophy, what are your strengths? How do others perceive you?
• Image - What do you want your desired image to be?
• Experience - What changes do you commit to making to ensure your constituents are experiencing your intended leadership brand?
• What revelations have you seen or resolutions will you make when considering? How does one leverage one's personality traits to address personal and professional challenges?

Below are additional big-picture take-aways provided in the session, by the facilitators and the audience:

Brand exists in the minds of your constituents, so consider carefully:

• who your constituents are,
• what their needs are,
• how you are communicating to them,
• what's the delta between who you want to communicate yourself as and how you are perceived
• If there's a large delta, how do you change impact without changing intentions

Leadership is a journey and a process:

• You must see who you are as well as who you would like to be
• Creating a structure for reviewing and considering your leadership style will help ensure progress on the journey
• There is a close intersect between the personal and the professional - how you do one thing is how you do everything.
• Your strength can be a weakness, your weakness can be a strength.

Focus on Your Strengths -

• Accept and embrace what's inside you, remind yourself of what's remarkable about you - not just in achievements, but also in who you are.
• But invite yourself also to step outside your comfort zone
• Clearly communicate your value proposition, not just your resume
• Align your professional work and personal style with your leadership brand, your values, your leadership style