My house is full of the stuff — as I’m sure yours is or has been. Ikea, once known as the ‘disposable’ furniture has slowly moved up the cost scale and is now no longer in the cheap category. In fact, you can’t even find a good, inexpensive couch there…when did that happen?

Anyway, not the reason for this entry, I want to focus on the subtle genius that goes into the Ikea building directions.

First of all, I love the fact that it is just pictures — brilliant. No requirement to translate the universal blob Pat-like character. I love the fact that Ikea has made mid-range furniture that you pay to build — brilliant. But what I truly love is the way they have orchestrated the directions to make you feel like you are moving forward and accomplishing something, quickly. THAT is brilliant.

I’m not sure if this is done on purpose but in a recent spat of Ikea ‘building’ I noticed a few things that made me wonder how smart these guys may actually be. It all started with a question: “Who’s job is it to build the furniture and then de-construct the furniture in a way that allows me, the common man, to rebuild it using pictures?”

This got me thinking a little more and I noticed that in every piece I built there was some really fast, immediate gains mixed in with some tedious, slow points of screwing endless odd-shaped fasteners into pre-drilled holes. Then it would be back to large structural advancements, mixed with more menial tasks. All the while, as I did this, I looked up from the pre-drilled holes and felt as though I was accomplishing something — despite the fact that I spent most of my time putting the fasteners in place.

And then I wondered who the genius was that came up with this process. They must know that a good majority of the people building their furniture are men and we, in general, are not patient and seem to demand immediate action or satisfaction. Did they reverse engineer these products with that in mind? Did they purposefully architect their furniture to trick us into feeling as though we were moving forward much faster?

I feel so brilliantly manipulated!

I’m amazed.

First of all, I don’t shop at Wal-Mart very often — there are many reasons for that but none more than the complete lack of service that is the ‘Wal-Mart Experience.’

What I’m really amazed by is the lack of knowledge the company has about its own channel. Let me explain: I found a reasonably priced television stand at Wal-Mart of all places. The problem (as always) was that I didn’t need the stand until we settled into our new house and, of course, once settled, they no longer had it in stock. No big deal, I thought, this is the world’s most efficient channel — they should know exactly when the next shipment is coming in. That is not reality.

Despite some of the most advanced and precise channel management in the history of retailing (and now grocery) — as chronicled in the great read ‘The Wal-Mart Effect‘ — the stores I’ve visited and called have no way of telling me if or when the furniture will arrive. This, to me, is unbelievable. Wasn’t Wal-Mart’s claim to fame its knowledge about the channel?

My next stop was, of course, their website and this was even more unbelievable. I’m in Canada and if you head to www.walmart.ca you can absolutely find the product in question, you can find out that it is in fact ‘in stock’ somewhere, I can even add it to a wish list that I can PRINT off and BRING into a store for REFERENCE. Yup, you can’t even order online in Canada. But even worse than that, you can’t see inventory at any store in Canada! This is something that seems so basic to me coming from Wal-Mart — even Ikea lets you do that!

So, despite the billions of dollars squeezing through the Wal-Mart channel, I am still forced to use the old-fashioned telephone to find out if the product has arrived. I did find out that new shipments arrive every Tuesday and Thursday — thanks.

I love baseball. I love it for its elegance, its style, its drama and its association with the summer (hey, I’m from Canada).

Baseball is a sport that you either love or can’t stand — watching paint dry is often how it is described by someone who doesn’t care for the game but what I see in every pitch, swing, catch and throw is a profound lesson in business and strategy. Let me explain.

Baseball is pure poetry. It is a sport where you know the expectations ahead of time: Your team has 27 outs to score more runs than your opponent. Simple. No timed clock to run out. No ties or shoot outs. Just 9 innings and one goal.

The most amazing quality of a baseball player is their duality. There are very few sports where the athlete needs to learn two distinct skills in order to be a complete player: In baseball you need to be able to hit a 100MPH fastball in one role and be able to field and throw a ball in the other. Football, hockey and basketball have skilled players playing offense and different skilled players on defense. Pitchers bring a third type of role to the team but is a more contemporary one-dimensional role for the most part — although there are a select few skilled enough to hit the ball and hit it well.

So what has this got to do with business? How does running a major league baseball team teach you anything about strategy? Oh, there are so many parallels:

1. Baseball is a game of distinct moments. Pitch by pitch the game changes; pitchers need to adapt and fielders need to react. Hitters have a strategy based on who’s on base, who’s pitching and what the score is.
Managers need to react to what they see and feel and lead appropriately. This is how business needs to be — malleable without fail.

2. Baseball is a game of layers. In order to field a winning team so much needs to be right. There needs to be a strong base to recruit from (the minors). There needs to be a compelling argument (usually money) to convince people to play for a team. There needs to be a culture that creates a winning environment. There needs to be leadership that brings egos in check for the common good of the team. There needs to be a clear goal.

3. Baseball is a business. People have a clear disdain for teams with high payrolls like the Yankees and Red Sox but I wonder why that is. After spending my lifetime rooting for a low-budget team in Montreal I understand the frustration having a great farm system but not being able to keep the talent when it grows up. This is why I marvel that anyone has any animosity towards the Yankees. If you are an investor in a company (or invest time as a fan), don’t you want that company (or team) to hire the best talent available to put the best product on the field (or in the market)? Why shouldn’t that apply to baseball?

4. Baseball is BIG business. Innovation is the key to success and MLB has been doing their share of that. For example, they run a $100M+ business streaming every game, every day on the Internet. This subscription based service is only a few years old and already generates more revenue than what your local cable provider generates for their season packages. Merchandising is another example of baseball as a business. How many shirts, caps, balls or bats do you or have you owed — even if you aren’t a fan?

5. Baseball doesn’t forget its mistakes but isn’t paralyzed by them. Clearly there have been mistakes made in baseball: The Cocaine years in the early eighties, the ROID years from the mid-nineties, the strike year that killed the game in Canada and elsewhere, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire, Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe…the list is endless but the game has lived. The lesson here is that there is no easy way to make it in baseball. Barry Bonds, the all-time homerun champion is a player that nobody wants today!

And then there is the most important parallel:

6. There is NO crying in baseball — unless you were a Montreal Expos fan.

I work for a great little company nestled in Ottawa’s historic Byward Market. The company is now a mighty 27 (and growing) strong with a good mix of engineering, sales, marketing, support and administration talent. Most of this growth has happened over the last 6 months as we shot up from 11 to 27 during that period. While this was happening a not-so-subtle shift happened in the way this company operates.

When I started here just over a year ago we were a ‘product’ focused company — all our efforts were in product development and very little in people and brand development. Somewhere along the line — my feeling is when we hit 18 people — we shifted from the ‘product’ focus to people focused. Don’t get me wrong, we still focus on developing the best products in our industry, that will never change (and I would say we do a better job of that today than every before), but in order to make sure we continue to build our category-defining software we need the greatest talent we can find — that’s where this has changed.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve emphasized our brand — well, honestly? We started creating awareness about our company with the help of our PR firm out of NYC — and in doing so exposed our products to more people, potential customers AND potential employees.

As we started ramping up we also needed to focus on the folks that got us here. We needed to give those people who have been asking, a chance to do something else or do something that they’ve been wanting to do — this is also known as career development and was sorely lacking for far too long in this company.

A slight shift in focus — from product to people — has put us on a path that cannot be measured by lines of code or licenses sold but without happy, fulfilled people, our customers won’t stick around. Without customers, well, you get the point. Every company needs to switch from the product to the people and it is those companies that do it well that will excel.

I’m a student of business.

I’ve spent most of my life walking down the street and wondering (sometimes out loud) how and why companies stay in business. I understand the basics — have a product/service, find someone interested in that product/service, sell product/service — but what is it that turns a mediocre business into a meteoric success? What is that one thing that happens, however small, that transforms the opportunity into something of huge value? What is that catalyst moment?

There are so many examples of small changes that have made a big difference in the end but seemed innocuous at the time the decision was made — in baseball it may be a choice at the plate or on the mound, in popular culture it may be the right title of a song (think Daniel Powter’s Bad Day, the official boot song on American Idol), in history it may be something as simple as one person’s courage. But what about business?

Microsoft clearly comes to mind when you look at the history of DOS and IBM’s appropriate but legendary decision to hand it back to Bill & Co. Apple as well. A failing company in every facet of business (more on this in another post) but the reinvention of the MP3 player sent it places it had never been before. What about Google? The search war was dead until Google reinvented it then they did the same for online advertising. Did anyone think at the time that these companies would be so successful? It’s all easy in hindsight but most companies don’t have the luxury of hindsight do they.

Until I can comfortably predict hindsight I will continue to wonder how certain companies just stay in business and why others reshape communities, societies or the world.