I confess that I like to start up conversations with strangers. This is especially true if you happen to be stuck next to me on airplanes, trains, or what have you.  On my flight out to the CES show, I sat next to two very different kinds of people, and we were stuck on the runway for a long time.

I sat next to a professional photographer that has a really nice business doing pet and family photos.  More interesting to me, he is a Canon representative and really knows his stuff when it comes to technology for photography.  Photography is one of my passions, and he is an expert.  He was going to be part of the Canon exhibit at CES.

I also sat next to Angie Simmons, a senior management executive from Liberty Media Interactive. As it turned out, in the new Fortune magazine, which I was reading on the plane, one of the analysts in their investor’s guide recommended buying them because are breaking out their interactive media into its own business unit.  I think that makes sense both financially and operationally.  

I often get envious reading about Silicon Valley and its ecosystem.  There are all of these vibrant interconnected new media companies springing up out there with what seems to be unlimited energy and potential.  I often forget that the Mid-Atlantic region as a flourishing interactive media community established as well. 

One of the key premises of the event is the idea that the days of the vertically integrated organization that characterized the industrial age are over, along with the company test labs that drove their innovation.  AT&T’s Bell Labs, IBM’s Watson Research Center, and XEROX’s PARC all are iconic labs that represent some of the era’s leading innovators.  As those vertical mass production corporations have evolved, so has today’s innovation laboratory, which is no longer contained within a single organization.

I was lucky, having grown up in the Princeton area to become involved with the David Sarnoff Labs at a pretty young age, and got to know some of the people that helped develop some really pivotal consumer electronics technology, such as the VCR and lots of hi-fi audio technology.  Much later on, I wound up working for two different parts of the Bell Labs legacy, Telcordia and Lucent.

I always enjoyed watching the presentations from the advanced research teams, because first, and foremost, most of them have really good senses of humor and put on killer presentations.  The second point was that it always felt like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future.  The painful reality was that most of the really, really cool research stuff was pretty far away from the pedestrian commercial world of selling stuff and making this year’s numbers that I live in.

I think that the focus on strategic alliances to drive innovation is right on the money, although probably closer to the more tactical “while I still have a job” couple of year range, as opposed to the more realistic 20 years that it takes for most really revolutionary designs to find a commercial marketplace.

The full quote that I took the title from was by one of the Marriott brothers, who said “Motivate them, train them, care about them, and make winners out of them… they’ll treat the customers right. And if customers are treated right, they’ll come back.” It’s a great focus for building a successful business of any kind.

All too often when technology, management, and process analysis come together, we wind up with phrases like CRM, Contact Management, pipeline, funnel, quotas, retirements and so on. The phrase Sales Force Automation is an industry standard one, but I like to start any analysis of these systems with a reminder that at the center of it all should be customers and ways to make sure that we treat them right.