The Importance of Challenging Assumptions (INTERVIEW)

The Importance of Challenging Assumptions (INTERVIEW)Ceasars Entertainment CMO, Tariq ShaukatBy: Bizz Brown    Source: linkedin

For half a decade, it was assumed that the slightly older, affluent guests who make up the lion's share of casino patrons weren't tech savvy and therefore innovations in that area weren't necessarily a priority. After a while, this assumption became almost an urban legend, according to Caesars Entertainment Chief Marketing Officer, Tariq Shaukat. However, once he did some research, he learned the demographic he was looking at were actually fairly early adopters of technology. In an effort to improve customer experience and engagement on casino floors and entertainment facilities, Caesars responded to this new information by installing NFC chips. Now, instead of standing silently near the craps table trying to figure out how to play, customers can flash their Samsung phones over the NFC chip and get information on the rules of the game. Similarly, restaurant reservations can be made via mobile phones thanks to this new innovation. This is just one example of why Tariq says challenging assumptions is key to finding innovations.

4 Questions with Tariq Shaukat

1. How do you motivate your team to come up with good ideas?

You motivate them by giving them the mandate to do it. That’s one of the changes I made when I got here. I said, I want people to come to me with ideas and make me say no. I put out that challenge and gave them direct access to me and the CEO when they have ideas they want to present.

Secondly, giving people the opportunity to do it. You have lots of interesting projects going on and it’s about putting people into those projects and saying we need to do two things that capture the world’s attention, now go out and do that. And you give them the budget for it.

Third, I believe scarcity breeds a level of innovation and process success. In environments where marketing is well funded, you say you don’t have x amount of that budget anymore and challenge them to think very differently than they would otherwise.

2. Do you have specific rituals for resetting your team to be creative?

We do a quarterly top marketers meeting here. I give the team problems during the session and they have to work on them collectively. They aren’t problems to do with our industry. So in small teams we’ll ask them what would you do if you had to market Nike shoes digitally. I give them reading materials to go with that and the point of it is to force them to draw analogies to other industries and think of how they’d apply it to our industry. We do that every two to three months.

3. How do you identify trends?

I read Trend Hunter, to be honest. The hard part is a lot of folks here are focused on the United States and Las Vegas markets. We are blessed with a number of partners who do business globally and are plugged into the entertainment industry. I meet with them and talk about what the big things were in the last place they travelled. That’s good because we have a lot of people, whether they are entertainers, customers or partners, that talk to us so we have our ear to the ground on a lot of that stuff.

4. What is the biggest obstacle you face?

We think that we are our customers and know they really well. We often do, but sometimes we don’t. A couple big “ahah” moments have come when we didn’t realize things because we didn’t talk to customers before about that topic. The assumptions about our customers and how they behave, in this case relative to digital, were wrong. A lot of people said older customers aren’t going to be social media savvy, but after doing the research we found that most of our valuable customers are affluent, slightly older and are early adapters of technology. I tell people, if my mom is sending texts, then I’m pretty sure most people are tech savvy now. It was certainly true five years ago that our customers weren’t as tech connected, but that’s an assumption that was sort of an urban legend that we didn’t challenge until we did.

Getting Over Fear On The Way To Becoming an Entrepreneur

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Anna Vital  /  January 30, 2013

1. Fear comes from thinking you don’t know enough – when a CEO makes a decision they on average have only 10% of the information they need. 10% is very low for most people. The average person has at least 50% of the information they need. Naturally, people who force themselves to make decisions at 10% are scared. That is normal.

2. Another fear buster is just trusting your gut. First you have to make the assumption that for one reason or another your gut is right. That should be easy when you realize that you on’t have much choice- if not your gut, then whose gut are you going to trust?

3. Thinking about the worst case scenario makes you realize the worst is not that bad. I thought about my worst case scenario before I launched my Kickstarter campaign. Not only did I think about it, I actually went and found the most unsuccessful campaigns on Kickstarter, with $0 dollars pledged and imagined that it was mine. Would it be that bad? Yes, it would be completely devasting. But what would I do? I would change something, and still write the book. Basically no matter what happened with the campaign I still had a change to do the most important thing- write the book – but a failed campaign would make it a lot harder. Even though, I clicked the Launch button.

4. You can game your fear. I notice that when I am just doing my job, which is to write the book and make info graphics, fear goes away. When you think about work, your brain can’t focus on the fear. So you a playing a game, the more you do, the less you are scared.

5. Finally, once you just do something you realize it is nowhere near being as scary as you think. Thin about any big and scary thing you have ever done – do you look back and get scared? Mostly likely not. So, as Richard Branson says, “Screw it, Let’s do it!” I think he says that not because he has not fear. He learned that once you start doing, you can’t be afraid any more.

http://fundersandfounders.com/getting-over-fear-becoming-entrepreneur/

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author

Everyone Will Have to Become an Entrepreneur

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Anna Vital  /  February 20, 2013

I run a startup. Lean and mean, 16-hour days. Everything we do is ours. When we thought of hiring another person, it quickly became clear that we could not handle an employee. I had to become an entrepreneur. We could not pay for insurance, supervise them, offer them a stable salary. Why because all those things that are stable about a job are the opposite of a startup.

And recently, the entire job market. It turns out that it’s not just startups that do not want traditional employees, Google does not want them, small businesses don’t want them, agencies don’t want them.

Who do they want then?

Entrepreneurs.

And companies are going to great lengths to get them.

For example 30% of large tech companies already set up a seed fund to provide capital for startup entrepreneurs. Inside companies, entrepreneurship is more welcome than ever before in history. The term “intrapreneur” dates back to 1992, but it is now that intrapreneurship became a global phenomenon with companies hiring entrepreneurs-in-residence, holding hackathons, which are company-wide startup competitions, and letting employees have the “20% time” to work on creative side projects.

The entrepreneurial worker is popular. The question is then, What happened to the traditional employee, the one that you could tell what to do and she would do it. Does literally everyone need to become an entrepreneur?

The answer is robots. Employees who acts like robot, that is just do what they are told, is quickly becoming obsolete.

Consider an airplane building factory. You have a choice of hiring two people at $50,000 per year or buying a robot for $250,000 that will serve you for 15 years, without coffee break, 365 days a year 24 hours a day and no personal circumstances.

No wonder robots are catching on. Today world’s robot population is around 10 Million. In South Korea, the leader in using industrial robots there are 347 robots per 10,000. How good are they? By 2030 it is estimated that robots will perform as well as humans at most manual jobs. That means most of us would be smart to reconsider if our jobs will still exist in a 10 years.

The good news is that the one factor that robots don’t have  - the human factor- sets apart entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the ones who understand humans, know the problems humans have and create value out of nothing.

I Don’t Want To Become an Entrepreneur

What if you just plain do not like entrepreneurship? You are a specialist at what you do and you just want to keep doing it? Ok, suppose in your lifetime no robots will yet be able to do what you do. There is another problem you have to deal with: people. There are people in other countries who are willing and able to work for less, being no less of a specialist. In a lot of field it does not matter that they live elsewhere. And here is the catch, wherever you live, there is probably another countries where you type of labor is cheaper. Everyone already realized that programmers from Russia code for 3 times less than American coders. In india, it would be even cheaper. But what about the yet undiscovered labor markets?

If there is any refuge from this entrepreneurialization of labor, it might be creativity. If your job is to be creative perhaps you can keep your job. Consider, though, that an entrepreneurial creative would probably try to sell his creativity outside his main job, so that he actually would be more recognized as a creative. It could be a blog, a book, or a portfolio on Dribbble.

It comes down to this: you need to create opportunities and sell. That’s entrepreneurship. If you are a lawyer, you’ll never make partner unless you get clients for the firm. That’s selling. And if you don’t want to make partner, than sit tight, you might be replaced by someone more entrepreneurial.

For those who do not like this whole thing, this news is actually good. The world is becoming better, the only thing is you also have to change with it – and the best way is to become an entrepreneur.

Sources:

• payscale.com
• Squire Sanders
• International Federation of Robotics
• Forbes
• Npr ”‘Acqui-Hire’ Is The New Normal In Silicon Valley”

http://fundersandfounders.com/everyone-will-have-to-become-an-entrepreneur/

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author

What Is Possible When You Want to Become an Entrepreneur?

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Anna Vital  /  February 3, 2013

Remember, when you where a kid and you thought you could do anything? But then your thinking changed, and you started learning the limits of what is possible.  Here is the infographic showing what happened since then:

As time went on you started wondering if you will ever achieve anything big. One day you read about someone who had the same idea as you. She made it into a company. Now she is a hero. And you think, “Why not me?”

What Is Possible?

Before anyone told you what is possible, you already knew the answer: anything.

http://fundersandfounders.com/what-is-possible-to-become-an-entrepreneur/

 

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author

What Are The Odds – Pareto Rule Applied to Business

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Anna Vital  /  January 29, 2013

Here is the infographic about 80/20 Pareto Rule, the odds of success.

Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients”. Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there must be a number k between 50 and 100 such that “k% is taken by (100 − k)% of the participants”. The number k may vary from 50 (in the case of equal distribution, i.e. 100% of the population have equal shares) to nearly 100 (when a tiny number of participants account for almost all of the resource). There is nothing special about the number 80% mathematically, but many real systems have k somewhere around this region of intermediate imbalance in distribution.

From Wikipedia

The original observation was in connection with population and wealth. Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population.He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.

Pareto Rule

Universal rule applies to the odds of success: your odds of winning go up to 80%  when you achieve the 20% that give you the most result. That is great odds.

http://fundersandfounders.com/pareto-rule-20-80-what-are-your-odds/

 

Written by Anna Vital

Startup Evangelist and Infographic Author