There is a lot of talk about Google (GOOG) these days because they broke the 500 dollar/share roof. The valuation seems crazy, but I haven’t looked into whether it is sustainable or not, so let’s not discuss that :-)
However, I had a little look into the money Google spends on innovation (or research and development) versus Yahoo (YHOO) — and Yahoo has outspent Google every year for the past five years (I didn’t look further back). Still, if we look at the stock price since Google went public, Yahoo’s share price is flat compared to Google, whose share has quadrupled.

Here is a slide illustrating that point exactly from a presentation my good friend Thomas Joachim Hansen and I held yesterday.

If you want to get ideas, don’t kill them:

“An idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”

Then, aside not killing ideas, how do you get (more of) them? I thought that I’d share with you some of the thoughts I had during my latest read, Jack Foster’s How to Get Ideas. Jack is a former creative director in the advertising industry (in which he has worked for 35 years), and the people in that business are among some of the most creative on the planet.
Don’t you know these people who seem to be able to come up with ideas one after another—they could put them onto an assembly line if they wanted to. How on earth do they do it? Jack has a very good story:

When I was a kid I hung around with a guy named Johnny-Boy Boyd. JB was a klutz. Accidents just seemed to happen to him; if one didn’t run into him, he ran into it. Nowadays psychologists would say that subconsciously JB made accidents happen, that it was his way of getting attention. Back then we just called him “accident prone” and let it go at that. As an adult I hung around with people who were “idea prone.” Ideas just seemed to happen to them the way accidents happened to JB.

So how do we get ideas to “happen to us”? I think one of the most important things is putting your mind, both your conscious and sub-conscious, to it. If you think you can’t (or don’t want to) get new ideas, then you won’t get them.

After that, I think the most important thing is to feed your mind with raw material. The reason for this is that “an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.” (James Webb Young). So, if an idea is a combination of something you know, then you better know a lot.

What’s frustrating, however, is you don’t know what you need know. Again, looking at the very idea-prone people you know, notice how they know crazy details about crazy stuff. They suck information out of everything, because what if they need it?

One way of going about this is to do new and different things all the time. Read new books, different books, do different things, meet new people—and—ask a lot of questions; obvious questions, stupid questions, questions that have already been asked, questions that have never been asked. In this way, you’ll position yourself better to get new ideas, I’m sure… or that’s what Jack Foster says in his book anyway, and I think he is on to something.

Another thing that I think he is on to, is the paradox of creativity within limits. Sometimes, posing limitations on your creative process can help idea generation. He offers a story from his teaching, where he tells his students over-night to produce a poster for a Swiss Army knife. The next day, students complain that it was so difficult—and some were not able to do it at all. In another class, he gives the students the same task, however, they need to come up with 10 proposals for the poster—not for the next day, but for after the lunch break. The result was dramatically different, and the students were much better at producing ideas.

It is a paradox. In The Courage to Create, Rollo May calls it a “phenomenon.” But he explains “that creativity itself requires limits, for the creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them.”

This post is already too long, so let me just finish with yet another quotation from the book:

Man can live without air for a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months—and without a new thought for year on end.
–Kent Ruth

Let it better not be us that do not get a new thought for years on end :-).

The book is extremely well written has countless anecdotes, which you will want to read if you like well-placed stories that illustrate important points (about the process of getting ideas).
Read more:

• Jack Foster: How to Get Ideas
• James Webb Young: A Technique for Producing Ideas (a classic, which Foster references numerous times)
• Wikipedia on Ideas

(All quotes in this post are from Jack Foster’s book, if you had not figured it out already :-) ).

The best case competition in the world — at least I think so :-) — is now blogging about everything from organising the competition itself over the life of the organisers to competition tips and tricks… you name it. The entire organising committee will be blogging.

CBS Case Competition is the first on the planet to blog — we define case competitions :-). It is the work of the PR/Marketing and IT groups of the organising committee, and I am really impressed with the speed and professionalism with which they have carried it out.

I hope you’ll go pay the blog a visit — I will be blogging both here and there — and participate via comments. Also have a look at my blog profile at the CBS Case Competition blog.

I try to buy as many books about presentation technique as possible given certain (and other) constraints such as money and time — and given that the book at hand looks sufficiently interesting, of course.

So, when I heard of Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullet Points, I quickly put it on my Amazon wish list, because I hate bullet points on slides — they are misused, abused and what is even worse. Finally, this September, I got around to buying it. Here is my take:

The message of the book is essential: Stop using overcrowded slides, stop being bound by the standard bullet point template and start to think. I like that. And Cliff has a very good tool kit to use, if it is difficult for you to move from bullet point slides to “simple” slides with practically no text in them.

He introduces a running Hollywood metaphor and compares the making of a presentation to the making of a movie. It is a good and useful comparison — and his introduction of two techniques, namely the story template (equivalent to filmmakers’ manuscript) and story board comes directly out of this comparison. The story template tool is the single largest takeaway from the book — and you can download it for free (Word template) here.

On the negative side, the book is extremely repetitive and in some passages very basic. And, it, especially the repetition, becomes boring at times – very boring. And for savvy presenters (and savvy Keynote/PowerPoint users), it may not be a revolutionary read, in fact it may be the contrary.

Finally, let me just share a quote from the book, which is very true, but may be obvious, but nevertheless, sometimes, someone has to state the obvious. And Cliff does it well:

You use PowerPoint well when people don’t even notice you use PowerPoint at all. The last thing you want is for someone to compliment you on your slides — that would mean that the medium called attention to itself instead of your ideas. The most important outcome of the presentation is that the audience understands the meaning you intend to communicate. When you finish the presentation, you want the audience to talk about your special ideas, not your special effects.

You can also visit Cliff’s website and his blog.

All in all, the book is good, if you have difficulty in producing text-light slides, and seem to be stuck with bullet points. If that’s the case, buy it.

Also read:

• Go Own the Room: Sincerity
• Great Presenters
• Those Who Practice Improve
• Visual Display Workshop

This is the first post I’ve written, which is rather technical in nature (not really, but it’s the most technical I’ve ever written on my blog anyway). It is about deriving an expression for how changes in leverage, profitability, sales, and firm value multiples affects value creation, and by how much. The reason for writing this post was that I couldn’t find anything on the web, which satisfied me in explaining the derivation—so I did it myself.

We can look at value creation in companies in many ways—however, generally, we define value creation as the value created for shareholders from one point in time (t) to another (t+1), as follows (where S is equity value):

We are often interested in analysing exactly how this value came about, i.e. which factors influenced the value creation. As mentioned, there are several ways of looking at this and of breaking it down—here, I will focus on the very popular break-down into debt reduction, multiple expansion, and growth in earnings. The latter can again be divided into sales growth and margin expansion.

In other words, we want to arrive at an expression that groups value creation into what was created from debt reduction, multiple expansion, sales growth, and margin expansion. (more…)

Management guru Tom Peters presented in London one of these days. Although I like Tom’s writing, his slides are not the prettiest on Earth. But they are worth while, and the ones from his London event is one of the best sets I’ve seen recently. In them, he treats topics such as:

• Women – and why they contribute/will contribute more to GDP growth than emerging markets (the BRIC countries) or the Internet
• Washing your hands – is the single best thing you can do to stay free of diseases
• “Nobody gives you power. You just take it!”

And much, much more. They are really worth while, so go have a look, a laugh, and gain some insights (albeit, not from slide design :-) ). Here is the link.

China trip, Day Eight—April 13: About half way through the trip on this beautiful, sunny Thursday. The sky was still a bit clear from yesterday, but it that slowly became history as the day passed by. We started the day at the Renmin University (the People’s University), which has a new and pretty campus in a quiet and quite nice neighbourhood. Picture of one of their, I guess main buildings, below:

The entire morning was a seminar with a couple of presentations on human resource management in China by some of their MBA students, which was followed by a discussion with a number of MBA students. It was interesting to see their perspective on things, and—especially—debating culture. We had to “warm them up” in order to really get the debate going, and, still, at that point you could not be entirely sure that what we heard was their opinion or that of someone else (say, Chinese Government?). In any case, all of the students were friendly, warm of heart and sociable.

In the afternoon, we had paid a visit to the Beijing Biotech and New Medical Development Center. It was, mostly, a sales pitch: Why place your pharma R&D in Beijing? and like-minded questions were answered. But useful stats and historical developments came about as well.

In the evening, and one of the many high-lights of the trip, was a visit to a theatre showing the story about Kung Fu; expected, but fascinating choreography, music full of fantasy, and a visual experience of calibre. I could go there again. Picture, below:

China Trip, Day Seven—April 12: On the programme for today was a visit to the Danish embassy and hereafter the Danish industrial company F.L. Schmidth. During the night there had been hurricane winds, which completely cleared the usually dusty air and smog-filled sky, which was wonderful. You really feel the clean air, when you took a breath, and you could see the sun for the first time, because the smog had been blown away. On a day like this, Beijing started looking attractive and got the nice spring-feel over it. Everyone had their sun glasses out. Our embassy was situated in an Embassy neighbourhood, so it was a rather calm place, with almost no traffic and people, but a lot of fences and guards. The nice weather, though, made these rather cold surroundings seem nice. Below, a picture of the entrance to the Danish Embassy.

After our morning visit, we split up for lunch. A couple of friends and I headed for PizzaHut to get some real proteins, something we had been missing ever since we got here. What stroke us about the restaurant, which is a normal McDonalds-like fast food restaurant in Western countries, was that it was a really upscale, nice restaurant here: Marble floor, starlight ceilings, luxury couches to sit in and so on. And—not to forget—the toilets were the nicest we had seen so far here in China, and they were up to par to any Western luxury restaurant.

Our afternoon visit was with F.L. Schmidth, a Danish industrial that makes concrete factories and related things. Their head office is located in a good looking apartment/business cluster called East Lake, which is in a very nice part of Beijing. East Lake Villas was actually established many, many years ago by another Danish company, EAC. Below a picture of the entrance to East Lake.

The audience doesn’t need to know if we are using 35mm slides, a Mac, a PC, an iPod or displaying slides from Keynote, PowerPoint, or something else. The content of the message and our connection with the audience are all that matter.

From Carlos Ghosn: The little things matter over at Garr’s blog.

Day Three—April 8: Eating breakfast on this—another grey (grey because of smog, not because the sun isn’t shining)—day, I was amazed by the fact that the Chinese seem to eat the same kind of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner: Rice with eggs, chicken, dumplings with mixed meat, water melons, etc. Then, so am I on this trip :-).
This was the day where we were going to visit the Chinese headquarters of Novozymes, the company around which the cases evolves. Below, a photograph of their building.

Novozymes’s Finance Director for Asia gave us a more detailed presentation on their activities in Asia, as well as surprising and knowledgeable insights during Q&A. Novozymes produces enzymes and micro-organisms (if I get the time, I’ll write more on the company later) and relies heavily on patent protection of these products in order to stay profitable. To my surprise, in China, intellectual property rights issues are of no concern to Novozymes—their products and the processes to make these are simply too complicated to become victim of the normal Chinese culture of copying things ruthlessly.

We were also introduced to NNE (my unofficial explanation to this abbreviation is Novo Nordisk Engineering), which—like Novozymes—also originates from the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. NNE is an engineering consultancy and has managed the construction projects of both Novozymes’s headquarters and their production site in TEDA (an economic development zone a couple of hours north of Beijing by car). In the case we’re solving, the issue is an expansion of Novozymes’s production capacity, which is why the viewpoint of NNE is extremely relevant. Below is a picture of Novozymes’s Asian Finance Director, Mads, and NNE’s General Manager for China, Christian.

After having spent the day at Novozymes, including an hour or two of case solving, we headed back to the hotel. I headed out to Beijing’s pedestrian street with a bunch of people to have a look—it is actually a pretty normal pedestrian street with McDonald’s, Nike, Häagen-Dazs, adidas, and what else you could imagine. Evidently, there are also stores carrying Chinese-made products, for instance, a store carrying all kinds of “cutlery”, i.e., chop sticks (photograph below).

This was also the day where I bought an incredibly expensive ice cream from Häagen-Dazs (RMB 60, just below EUR 10, which is about the same as three good evening meals would cost you here) and some of my friends ate beetles, so we covered a lot of ground.