I woke up Friday morning to discover that I’d become a cat herder. You know the role: trying to get dozens and dozens of pieces and people corralled into some semblance of order. I should come to expect it in the few days before a DEMO Conference is set to begin. After all, I’ve been reprising this role twice a year for most of the last eleven. Still, it always strikes me that otherwise smart business people can get so caught up in the weeds that they lose focus on their own objectives.
Here’s a case (and would that it had only happened once these last few days): An exec from a demonstrating company scours the news wires, looking for mentions of other companies also participating in the event. Spying a perceived competitor (for the record: we don’t think these companies compete), the exec searches for every mention anywhere in the media, on blogs, on the company site, that might serve as evidence that the company “broke the rules” of DEMO. The “evidence” is packaged into a stern e-mail — usually couched in a tone of “far be it from me to call out another company, but…” — and sent along to DEMO’s PR team. I then get a call, confirm that the assumptions of the exec are, in fact, wrong. This is followed by an e-mail or phone call that assures the exec that we’re “on the case,” politely thanking him for his diligence.
Normally, I’d let this sort of thing slide, and it certainly wouldn’t be fodder for a post. But this time, the predictable tattle-tale thread dropped onto my desk at about the same time my Guidewire Group co-founder at and I were talking about focus. Read the rest of this entry »
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