Terry Jones Source: Kayak.com
Terry Jones is not the Monty Python Terry Jones.
But this Terry Jones, the business Jones, is a witty guy, a good thing in a public speaker. This Jones also happens to have Internet credentials out the wazoo:
Founder of Travelocity. Before that, CIO of Sabre Inc. Before that, president of product development for American Airlines. Today, managing principal of consultancy Essential Ideas. Chairman of the board of Kayak.com. Board member of Earthlink Inc., Smart Destinations Inc. and Rearden Commerce. (Look 'em up.)
Jones also is dropping into Denver to speak to the Association for Corporate Growth-Denver at its Rocky Mountain Corporate Growth Conference March 11-March 12 at the Inverness Hotel and Conference Center. Your faithful Denver Small Business Examiner was so pleased to be able to interview him at length for ColoradoBiz magazine for the occasion.
Talking to Jones was a kick because he has a rare view of two critical components to business success: innovation and intelligent management, which you will be surprised to learn is not an oxymoron. And he also is a world expert in a third key component of success today, the Internet.
That's why we want to bring you his remarks in this edition and the next one.
Let's get to the witty part.
In an increasingly complex world many businesses, small and large, suffer from what Jones calls the “Dopeler Effect.” This is not the rising-falling siren sound you hear as a fire truck races by, but a description of what happens to managers when too many new ideas come at them too fast.
Then there's the "Bozone Layer," which is not a fragile envelope of gas around planet Earth, but middle management, which too often seems bent on squashing innovative ideas before they can be implemented.
“Encourage success; be OK with failure,” Jones advises businesspeople. “You have to listen to people and act and try. Then you can be successful in creating a culture where innovation is OK. Because innovation is hard--nobody wants change. But if you're going to lead you've got to innovate.”
(For some great samples of Jones's speechifying, see http://tbjones.com.)
Lots of what's going on in the small business world today is, face it, discouraging. But Jones sees two shafts of light, sort of.
One is that the Internet finally is living up to an initial promise—about eight years too late for those of you who invested in Webvan and Pets.com.
“Finally, the Internet, which had this initial promise that we would have frictionless commerce, with no middlemen, is living up to that promise,” he says. “Of course that did not happen [during the Internet bubble]. But it is starting to happen.
“It is interesting. I talk about the short-circuiting of business. In my business, the travel business, we have lost 10,000 retailers. Now other businesses are being fairly dramatically rewired because today I can get information from many more sources than just their retailer. I can go to a distributor or I can go direct the manufacturer to get information about a product.”
Here's the sort-of cool innovation, a re-run for those of us who remember the recession of the early 1980s:
“I had this discussion with someone yesterday who said, 'Well, are we going to see a lot more experimentation with mobile advertising, are we going to see a lot of new creative marketing?' And I said, 'No, I don't think so. People are not going to take the risk.'
“But where you are going to see innovation is around cost. You're going to see a lot of people looking for products, services or methods through which they can save money, because they're not going to take the risk that they can increase revenue in this kind of market. It's just going to be awfully tough to increase revenue, not impossible, but tough to take the risk of dropping in something new. So I think we are going to see a lot of people encouraging their employees to be extremely innovative about how we do our business in a different way.”
More from Jones shortly. Thanks!
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