Does Twitter Need A New CEO?

Twitter is all over the news after its big misses in Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Revenue.  While this is not a good sign for Twitter, does it really need a new CEO and a revamp of their leadership?  In todays article on Stratechery, Ben Thompson outlines his case for new leadership in the ranks, and I don't disagree with his sentiments.

TWITTER’S FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM

Twitter’s fundamental problem is that their active user growth is simply too small given their current size. Twitter yesterday reported the service had 302 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs), an increase of only 18% year-over-year and 5% quarter-over-quarter (and the company said the current quarter would be worse!). This is a fraction of Facebook, half of Facebook Messenger, fewer than Instagram and not that much bigger than SnapChat; presuming the latter service passes Twitter later this year, Twitter will be only the 5th most popular U.S.-based social networking service looking to monetize through advertising. This distinction — which excludes WhatsApp, at least for now — is a critical one, because the issue with advertisers is most don’t have the time or ability to work with multiple services; it’s likely most digital advertising spending (which I believe is set to expand greatly) will be consolidated onto the biggest networks (along with Google’s properties), with Facebook taking the lion’s share. Were that to happen, it’s easy to see Twitter as the odd network out.2

302 million MAU's is a lot of people, yet it's too small for advertising?  I agree with Thompson here.  Even though I have said before Twitter has enough users to monetize efficiently, they are being dominated by other networks when it comes to size and reach for advertisers.  Without the reach, advertisers will not use Twitter in their bag of tricks, they will opt for the platforms that give them the most return for their time and money.  

This is where I believe the argument for new leadership is warranted.  They need the reach because they are trying to play the same game as all of the other social networks.  The game is garner the most active users and create the reach that advertisers will jump all over.  What if that is not the game Twitter should be playing?  When in a position of weakness, which Twitter clearly seems to be in at this point, the strategy has to change.  By following the lead of Facebook and the like, Twitter can't win.  Facebook will always win in this scenario.  Facebook as the leader can follow competitors, because they are the biggest.   Facebook's competition has to find a different strategy to make the most profit in the social arena.

Instead, Twitter should redouble its efforts to acquire new users even as it redefines what Twitter the company is all about. I wrote about this in What Twitter Might Have Been: 

Alternatively, Twitter could empower third-party developers to build these sorts of applications that feed back information into the Twitter interest graph. An application like Nuzzel, for example, which uses your Twitter graph to create a news app, has much more of a one-way relationship with the social network: Nuzzel is getting all the benefit, and not sending much information back to Twitter. Twitter would be better off retooling their API and developer agreements to ensure they are learning from every application they interact with, and in return sharing their graph along with advertising in the form of their MoPub or Namo Media-derived offerings. The advantage of this approach is that the imagination and ingenuity of a massive developer ecosystem will always be far faster and more innovative than anything any one company can do on its own — just ask Apple.

I really like this strategy.  Third party developers are what made Twitter in the first place.  The firehose which is Twitter is better served as a platform for news and advertising that any third party can reach into and intake.  They just have to intake the advertising to be a part of the program.  I use Tweetbot and I don't see a single ad.  This should never happen for a company like Twitter.  Tweetbot, for the right to make a living off of the Twitter platform, should be required to show me advertising.  

My issue with Twitter is the firehose.  When you start to follow enough people, it is too hard to keep up with everything you want.  Facebook uses their algorithm to eliminate this phenomena, yet it does so in a way that doesn't create a bad experience for the user.  In fact, the user experience is greater because over time the user will see what they want as Facebook learns.  Third Party apps could do wonders with the firehose.  There would be so much innovation with the Twitter platform if Twitter embraced their third party partners.  This I believe would triple the MAU's for Twitter as the third party innovations would bring different ways to interact with the Twitter firehose.

Twitter also needs to eliminate partners that don't provide it with as much value as they provide.  When Steve Jobs took over he killed many projects and I believe Twitter cannot let other parties use their social graph for nothing in return.  There needs to be an ad platform that is established for this right.  When a partner uses the social graph, they have to use the Twitter ad platform.  

TWITTER’S ABANDONED USERS

The trouble for Twitter is that awareness of the service has long outstripped its usability. And yet, despite the fact that Twitter has struggled with new user growth for years, almost nothing was done to improve the product or on-boarding experience until just the last few months, when the company finally rolled out a new logged-out page meant to entice people with Twitter’s content, as well as an instant timeline that helped people get started. Unfortunately, both efforts seem to be too little too late: Twitter admitted on the earnings call that neither improvement had increased retention.

This isn’t a surprise: Business Insider reported last year that Twitter likely had 697 million abandoned accounts (and that number, presuming it was correct, has certainly grown). The problem is that those 697 million users, having already decided that Twitter isn’t a useful service for them, are much less likely to even experience things like the new logged-out page or instant timeline, even though Twitter @-handles and hashtags continue to be plastered all over TV and the web.

The focus should not be on finding new users to the service.  If these numbers above are correct, it is much easier to communicate and bring back these users ten it is to constantly find new users.  Any new users at this point would be low margin for Twitter at this point anyway.  They are more than likely new to the web, in emerging markets that don't have the income compared to the 697 million users that have already used the platform.

While inactive campaigns are very hard, it is essential to get these inactive users back on the site.  Step one is to find out why they abandoned.  Is there a common theme from inactive users that can be fixed by Twitter or a third party?  Next step is to get the word out on changes.  Twitter needs to jump at making changes to accommodate the inactive users and then let the inactive base know.  They have the emails from all of these users already, unless they spammed them endlessly and they have unsubscribed.  Email is a great tool and Twitter uses it poorly in keeping users active and getting return business.  

While I agree with Thompson that these changes aren't impossible to implement, the current team seems to be focusing on making Twitter, Facebook.  For that reason alone I would let them go.  Twitter should focus on service the customers that it has and providing an ad network that targets users so specifically the returns for advertisers is more compelling than the other networks.  Then the MAU problem goes away.  Easier said than done I know, but they have all the data and information to do it.  Plus they have the platform already built.    

Eliminating the “Graffiti” in Your Customer Experience Program

Leadership Behaviors Drive Change
Executive behavior is as much of an influence on employee behavior as graffiti is on the behavior of those who use the subway. It’s symbolic of the success of the system, and leadership needs to drive the cultural change required.  

A superb article by Nancy Porte regarding the cultural change needed to truly deliver on the customer experience and the role executives play to ensure its success. I recommend reading this article, very thoughtful writing.  

As I've been harping on for the past couple of weeks, customer experience goes well beyond creating teams and having initiatives.  Customer Experience is a culture, one that revolves around the customer and makes sure every decision the company makes is for the customer.  The rationale behind this theory is that great customer experiences will result in happy, loyal customers who will buy more and become advocates for the brand.  

The Real Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs part 2

I decided to break up this post into 2 parts because there were so many lessons and I liked most of them.  So here are the remainder of the lessons from the Walter Isaacson HBR article.

Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups

When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his version of empathy—an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers. He developed his appreciation for intuition—feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom—while he was studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”

When I was a product manager for a software company that catered to database marketers and analysts, customers would always speak in terms of features.  "I want the product to do this" was a common request.  I quickly learned that putting features into the product just made the product more complex.  The true genius is in solving the problem the customer is having in the most elegant and simple way possible.  Customers mostly focus on what they can see and what they already know.  To be great you have to translate what your customer is asking for and then really solve their problem, because adding features can spaghetti your product before you know it.

Bend Reality

Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force. An early example was when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wozniak to create a game called Breakout. Woz said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Woz knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it.

I believe that people want to be great at what they do, but when left to their own devices will let the fear of failure get in their way.  Failure is a much bigger enemy of greatness than the lack of talent for the individual.  The fear of failure gets in the way of taking risks and leapfrogging yourself.  If you can put your team in an environment where failure is viewed as a success or a learning opportunity on the way to greatness, your team will succeed in greatness.

Impute

Jobs’s early mentor Mike Markkula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three principles. The first two were “empathy” and “focus.” The third was an awkward word, “impute,” but it became one of Jobs’s key doctrines. He knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. “Mike taught me that people dojudge a book by its cover,” he told me.

First impressions make all the difference.  The product, experience or the deliverable have to focus on delivering an experience worth returning to in order to succeed.

Push for Perfection

During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt it wasn’t perfect. That happened even with the movie Toy Story. After Jeff Katzenberg and the team at Disney, which had bought the rights to the movie, pushed the Pixar team to make it edgier and darker, Jobs and the director, John Lasseter, finally stopped production and rewrote the story to make it friendlier. When he was about to launch Apple Stores, he and his store guru, Ron Johnson, suddenly decided to delay everything a few months so that the stores’ layouts could be reorganized around activities and not just product categories.

In the world of database marketing there is always a push for perfection.  The mantra I use is "The campaigns are a living, breathing entity".  A good database marketer is always looking for ways to improve the performance of a campaign.  It is never complete, it will never be perfect, but one should always strive for perfection. 

Tolerate Only “A” Players

Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of preventing what he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around. “I don’t think I run roughshod over people,” he said, “but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest.” When I pressed him on whether he could have gotten the same results while being nicer, he said perhaps so. “But it’s not who I am,” he said. “Maybe there’s a better way—a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code words—but I don’t know that way, because I am middle-class from California.”

It’s important to appreciate that Jobs’s rudeness and roughness were accompanied by an ability to be inspirational. He infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. And we have to judge him by the outcome. Jobs had a close-knit family, and so it was at Apple: His top players tended to stick around longer and be more loyal than those at other companies, including ones led by bosses who were kinder and gentler. CEOs who study Jobs and decide to emulate his roughness without understanding his ability to generate loyalty make a dangerous mistake.

Find great people and then get our of their way.  Great "A" players will be great without you telling them what to do.  Set the expectations, guide them when needed and then be hard on their results.  If their results are subpar, let them know.  You don't have to go Steve Jobs on them, but an "A" player will be harder on themselves then you could ever be.

Engage Face-to-Face

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

Jobs hated formal presentations, but he loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings. He gathered his executive team every week to kick around ideas without a formal agenda, and he spent every Wednesday afternoon doing the same with his marketing and advertising team. Slide shows were banned. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Greatness happens with spontaneous collaboration between individuals who trust each other.  Meetings with different groups who are not accustomed to working together and are forced to collaborate never work.  Grabbing a few individuals from their work space, bringing them into a meeting room, getting into the issues at hand can encourage an atmosphere where greatness can evolve.  Great ideas do not happen on a timetable.  They happen spur of the moment and they can be lost if left to fester.

Know Both the Big Picture and the Details

Jobs’s passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule. Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design.

Probably the biggest issue with leaders is they are one dimensional.  It's great to have a vision and be able to articulate that vision, but if the leader is so detached from the execution of the vision, they lose respect from the team.  Beyond just losing the respect, the team may build or execute on something that is in an entirely different direction once complete.  The leader needs to be involved with the team on the details to ensure the vision is executed to perfection.  Being both visionary and implementer is key.

Combine the Humanities with the Sciences 

He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation. And he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.

Combining two disparate disciplines into one creates bridges for teams to collaborate in one distinct language.  This ability os very rare in individuals.  The passion that an individual has usually overtakes one discipline for another.  When doing analytics, I often articulate to the team it is a combination of art and science.  The science part can give you an answer, but without the art side, the articulation and strategy coming from the data will get lost in interpretation.  The nuggets of information cannot be articulated in pure scientific form for a strategy to unveil itself to the business side.  

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.

An admixture of these cultures was found in publications such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space, and its subtitle was “access to tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Jobs—who became a hippie, a rebel, a spiritual seeker, a phone phreaker, and an electronic hobbyist all wrapped into one—was a fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school. He took it with him to college and then to the apple farm commune where he lived after dropping out. He later recalled: “On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’” Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life—the women he dated, the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis, the way he ran his business—his behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence, and eventual synthesis of all these varying strands.

Even as Apple became corporate, Jobs asserted his rebel and counterculture streak in its ads, as if to proclaim that he was still a hacker and a hippie at heart. The famous “1984” ad showed a renegade woman outrunning the thought police to sling a sledgehammer at the screen of an Orwellian Big Brother. And when he returned to Apple, Jobs helped write the text for the “Think Different” ads: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes…” If there was any doubt that, consciously or not, he was describing himself, he dispelled it with the last lines: “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

The world will miss out on all the great things Steve Jobs would have done over the years he lost.  

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

In the latest HBR article by Walter Isaacson, the author of the Steve Jobs biography, had more interesting things to say about the man who cofounded Apple and made it into the most valuable company in the world.  This article goes into the management style of Steve Jobs.  This article comes at a perfect time because I have been talking to my team and others about this very topic and how Jobs was portrayed outside of the company is probably too harsh compared to the reality of the day-to-day life at Apple.  My take on Steve Jobs is he demanded excellence, however if he was such a tyrant and maniac, he would never be able to keep "A" players.  

In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.

Isaacson goes on to list many reasons why Steve Jobs was a great leader that are getting missed by most pundits and scholars.  These are the attributes that made Jobs a great leader.

Focus

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

Focus is so important in an organization.  Without focus, organizations have individuals who determine what is important for themselves or their departments, even if it is not in the strategic direction of the company.  Many of these decisions might make a profit, but what all of these decisions will take is time.  Time is the most important asset of a company and if individuals are using their time to pursue endeavors that will not move the company forward in a focused direction, it is a massive opportunity wasted.  Focus comes from the top and Steve Jobs was more focused than any other CEO of such a large company.

Simplify

Jobs’s Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing brochure. To see what that means, compare any Apple software with, say, Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered with nonintuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features. It is a reminder of the glory of Apple’s quest for simplicity.

Simplification takes extreme time and effort.  Most organizations don't obsess over the details, they want to get the product to market, to be first.  Simplicity is what makes Apple successful.  I love reading tech pundits talk about Apple and they don't appreciate some of the simplicity that Apple sweats and what that means to a normal person using the product.  It's so easy to build products for yourself, it's very tough to build products for others.  Jobs had a knack at designing for others.

Take Responsibility End to End

Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated.

Own the entire experience.  An organization cannot create the ultimate experience without ownership of all aspects from beginning to end.  This is what Tim Cook is talking about at the end of keynotes when he says only Apple can do this.  Others are trying to copy the model, but it's very hard.

When Behind, Leapfrog

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

The obsession for great products or experiences allow for leapfrogging the competition.  So many times companies are content with catching up to the competition.  Always understand what the competition is doing, but focus on making the best product or experience. 

Put Products Before Profits

John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales executive from Pepsi. He focused more on profit maximization than on product design after Jobs left, and Apple gradually declined. “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”

I worked for a company where the owner had the philosophy of "Get famous first, then the money will come".  That has stuck with me through my career.  Focus on making great products and experiences because that is what will make you famous.

To Lead is to Decide

To Lead Is To Decide. Making change decisions is a cognitively and emotionally taxing activity that the average person will go to great lengths to avoid.

How true.  It is so easy to add on another initiative, but it is very hard to take one away.  In this day and age where so many companies are trying to make every dollar they can, it takes amazing restraint and leadership to forego money on the table for a strategy that is more sound for the long run.

But the one thing they all seem to have in common — the one thing that distinguishes them from ordinary people — is their willingness to decide when others could not.

Want to be successful? Be inconsistent

Embrace being inconsistent

My conclusion on the topic of consistency is that it’s not required for success. There is a lot of talk about hard-nosed businessmen needing to be true to their word and never change their mind. I think a better approach is to be open to making adjustments as you learn more. That’s the smarter thing to do. It’s also much more difficult.

Don't be afraid to change your mind.  Be decisive, yet flexible.  Communication is the key when changing views or direction.  If your team knows why the decisions have been changed and what is going on in your mind, they will buy into the change much quicker.  If changes are constantly dictated down without any reason for the change, teams will get frustrated and feel like they are constantly spinning their wheels.