I’m still a fan of the handwritten to-do list.

I know people really like many of the electronic alternatives, like using Google Tasks, or Trello, but I really like handwriting my to-do list.  Somewhat it’s habit, and somewhat it’s because years ago mrDiva took a Franklin Covey class and part of the system is to re-write, by hand, your to-do list each morning.  I don’t do that but I appreciate why it’s advised, so I stick with the handwritten list.

Also, as I go through the week and attend meetings, I take handwritten notes, and then put a circle in the margin next to anything that is a “to-do” for later.  Then when I have downtime, I either do those things, or transfer them to a central task list.

Starting this week, I’m trying two new things.

The first is something that I’ve been thinking is a good idea for a long time, but recently got re-affirmed when I attended Carson Tate’s session at the Mass Conference for Women.  Everything I put on my to-do list is going to start with verb.

No more “2016 budget.”  Now it will be “Draft 2016 budget.”  No more “Blogger strategy,” now it will be “Analyze blogger strategy.”

The reason for this is two fold. One – it’s more obvious how big a task it is if I write it as a verb. Analyzing a strategy is different from creating a strategy which is different from executing a strategy. They take different amounts of effort.  Two – another piece of advice from Tate is to group similar types of tasks together; as such, it is hard to do that if you don’t know what the task actually is.

The other new thing I’m trying with my task list is to keep a yellow post-it on my computer with the tasks that absolutely must get done that day.  I know a lot of people think that it’s a bad idea to keep different to-do lists, but I have had too many time-sensitive things fall through the cracks lately.  I’m hoping this is a good solution to that. Kind of like HSM for tasks.

I’ll let you know how everything goes.

Big data has been abstract to me for a long time.  Sure, I understand it in the context of things like “genomic research” and applications in Oil and Gas.  But how my own field of Marketing as a discipline is changing because of Big Data – that was not so clear to me until about a week ago.

Using (little-d) data in marketing is nothing new.  Through tools like Hubspot and Salesforce, it’s easy to track things like “ratio of qualified leads to leads for different marketing tactics” and answer questions like “what is the point of diminishing returns for the number of times we call someone?”

At Infinio, we are very data-driven.  We make nearly all our marketing budget decisions based on data.  I’m not sure how you’d do it otherwise. A few of my vendors have recently commented that we have a lot more data and track things a lot more carefully than most of their other customers.  But again, I’m not sure how else you’d do it.

But that’s “little-d” data, now onto Big Data.

In budgeting for 2016, I decided to look at 10 new vendors that are doing innovative things in marketing.  I’m pretty new to demand generation and online marketing (my background is in product marketing) so I thought it would be a good exercise to look at vendors with leading-edge technologies around things like demos, landing pages, retargeting, social advertising, and improving abandon and bounce rate.  I unscientifically picked a handful that looked interesting and started investigating what they do.

Nearly each and every one of them was trying to differentiate their value based on using data to drive decisions and actions.

• “We use data about the people on your website and where else they go on the web to find other people who go to similar sites and might be interested in your company.”
• “We track what people are doing on your website and show them content that other visitors who completed similar actions were interested in.”
• “We look at all the conversion rates for landing pages across all our customers’ sites to dynamically adjust your page design to increase conversion.”

Marketing is not about the “next big thing” right now.  There’s no new way to market, or new medium.  It’s about harnessing the power of data to get better results.  And I sound like an ad for something right there “harnessing the power of data” but it’s true.

It’s been suggested in several places that the CMO is the next CIO, and I think there’s something to that.  That article quotes a recent Gartner report predicting that in 5 years, Marketing will be spending more on technology than IT will.

Our company isn’t an “online” company, we don’t complete transactions online, for example. But the success of our company in the next 5 years is likely going to be attributable somewhat to our ability to leverage data about our customers and prospects and their online activities.

It’s creepy.  Knowing more about what these companies do, every time I hover over my mouse or choose a particular menu item on a website I think about how someone is tracking me. Even incognito browsing isn’t untrackable.  If you haven’t read The Filter Bubble, go read it, then think about these tools in that context – your activities (and various vendors’ budgets) determine what you see on the web.

What it boils down to is that this is the next generation of what marketers are doing. When I started in marketing, “Inbound marketing” (making good content available, becoming thought leaders, and attracting buyers to interact with you) was all the rage. This is what’s next.  It’s still about putting out the right messaging, but it’s doing it using technology and tools to automate finding the right people.

Those of us who sell things like to think it’s easy to buy them.  Meaning, if someone is interested and has budget and is motivated, then it’s simple for them to actually make a purchase. Even if it may be a slightly complicated process (Quote-PO-Invoice-Check) it’s not so difficult that someone can’t get through it.

But sometimes it is hard to buy something. Like, there’s an error in your shopping cart checkout process online and you have to re-load your cart up and buy everything again. Or you’re at a tradeshow (as a customer) and all the vendors are on their phones or laptops and you can’t find someone to talk to.  Or you’re at the supermarket and the person in front of you needs a price check on kumquats.  Then on tangerines.

Yesterday I had a hard time shopping – at a shoe store.  I went to a big shoe warehouse downtown that has several floors so it has two pair of escalators.  On the first floor, one escalator was broken, but that ok – I just used the other one to go up.  On the second floor, again, one escalator was broken.  Except the second escalator was going “Down.”

In order to go up to the third floor, you had to leave the store and use a common building elevator or stairs.  Even worse, you couldn’t take your merchandise with you. There was no way to easily compare items from the two floors without leaving items on the second floor, going up to the third, getting other items, and bringing them back to the second.  (And lest you think I am unusual in this regard, the store provides large mesh bags for you to walk around with multiple shoe boxes while shopping.)

I heard at least half a dozen people – clearly regulars, aka shoe addics- exclaim, “this escalator’s down? how do I get up there?”  And I was not the only person who accidentally walked through a theft detector with unpaid merchandise not realizing it couldn’t come with me.

It was hard to get to the product I wanted to buy.

It was hard to shop.

And the solution wasn’t complicated.  Escalators can be set to run in either direction. Frequently, escalators in transit stations change direction based on time of day (much like carpool lanes on highways.)  All this store had to do was reverse the running escalator to carry passengers up, instead of down.

By doing this, it would have been easy to get from the street to the second floor, then the second floor to the third.  There are checkouts on both the second and third floors, so wherever you ended up, you could pay.  And then the hassle would be getting out of the store, not getting to the products.

Either the store needed a creative manager, more autonomy for store personnel, or a way to get in touch with the escalator’s maintenance person.  Because we have *got* to be able to get to the shoes!

It has been years since I’ve owned boots that actually keep my feet dry.  With winter on its way, I asked the manager of our dog walking service what she recommends because I figured she’d have to have good boots.

Without hesitation, she said “I love my Bean boots.”

And I thought, “Duh.  I live in New England.  Why don’t I just get Bean boots?”

Except.

LL Bean is out of boots right now.  Yup, OUT OF BOOTS.  How is this possible you ask?  Me too. Most styles and sizes are backordered.  And it’s December.  In New England.

It’s one of those things where you want to say, “someone’s getting fired over this one!”  Except I’m not sure that’s actually happening.

Eliyahu Goldratt would have a field day with this – clearly there is a bottleneck somewhere in Bean’s ability to deliver to demand.  The Boston Globe’s recent article suggested there was a stubbornness around keeping the boots manufactured in Maine, coupled with an insistence on very narrow quality acceptance criteria.  And that this was compounded by recent good publicity about the boot in fashion circles that LL Bean management didn’t quite trust was driving demand up permanently.  In November, they were 50,000 orders behind; and they only have capacity to make 2,000 each day.  Check your calendars, November is not yet prime boot-buying season, so this will only get worse.

Think LL Bean has successfully made the shift from catalog to online?  I do 🙂  People talk about the internet as changing commerce and globalizing where goods come from and can get to.  All of which it has.  But LL Bean was doing that long before there was a Google or an Amazon. They’ve been successfully selling to a geographically dispersed audience for decades. You could argue that the demand is exponentially greater than it had been before the Internet, but I’m not sold that impacts LL Bean as much as other companies that weren’t as able to reach a broad audience before Internet.

Bloomberg posited that it might be a PR stunt, or at least an unfortunate issue that isn’t hurting PR.  The Bloomberg article also points out that this happened last year, so the issue of if demand is permanently increased may be that indeed it is.

There is some amount of panache associated with scarcity. The Bean boot has become the Birken Bag of winter footwear, but I don’t think that fits with their brand.  I think of them as being accessible, practical, and of the boots themselves as transcending fashion.  The Globe article indicates that LL Bean management is apologetic, and distressed, not that this is purposeful.

Whatever the case, I can’t get my hands (or my feet) on a pair.  So like many other New Englanders, I’ll slog around with wet feet this winter, disappointed.  But holding out hope that my order makes it through their system, before the first storm of the year arrives.

In a previous job, we used a phrase, “rock fetch.”

The idea is this –

Asker: go get me a rock roughly this shape and weight.

Doer: here you go.

Asker: no, not that one, a different one.

Often, the Asker is a manager.

As the Doer, it’s awful to be involved in a rock-fetch exercise.  It feel like a waste of time.  It feels like a moving target.  It feels like a bad game where someone knows the answer and is making you guess.

But as the Asker, that isn’t always what’s going on.  I sent someone on what could be considered a rock-fetch exercise last week.  It wasn’t because I knew the answer, I didn’t.  But I also didn’t know what I was looking for until I saw a few things that I wasn’t looking for.

Here’s what happened – we were preparing an email to a set of people in our marketing database who had been interested in our product in the past but hadn’t engaged with us due to timing or budget.  I wanted to understand these leads before we emailed them.  I was interested in things like where we had gotten the leads, how old they were, why they hadn’t engaged, and how else we had interacted with them.

The problem was, I didn’t know how I wanted the data organized.  Mostly because I didn’t know what shape the data would take.  We had a meeting where we chose a bunch of criteria to build a list of contacts.  Since it was a complex query, though, I didn’t know the composition of the list.

Let’s say 85% of the leads were people we met at tradeshows, then I didn’t really need it broken down by lead source.  But if the leads were equally split among tradeshows, seminars, and webinars, then I was interested to see that breakdown.

And I was even more interested to know if all the tradeshow leads were old and all the webinar leads were new; but if the date distribution was pretty even across the event types, then I didn’t need to see it broken down by date.

And then if we knew the leads were distributed evenly across events, but with certain date affinities, I wanted to understand why (for example) tradeshow leads from 18 months ago had an unusually high number of leads who had no budget.

I had a reason for wanting to know all this.  Actually, a lot of reasons.  For this email campaign, I wanted to be sure our messaging would resonate with our audience.  For my future planning, I wanted to be sure we were going to events where we were meeting the right people. I wanted to know – did we use messaging at certain tradeshows that is attracting the wrong crowd?  Did we say the wrong things to prospects after events?

So I did send someone on a rock-fetch exercise.  But I think I had a good reason.

This is not one of those posts like, “how do you break down a complex idea like supply chain and explain it so a 2-year-old can understand it.”  This is the story of how I actually tried to explain the concept of a supply chain to babyDiva, who is now 2 1/2.

babyDiva is obsessed with trucks and construction right now.  On our way to school each morning, we discuss the trucks and construction sites we see in great detail.  “That an excavator or a mini-excavator?” “Why that bulldozer not have tracks?” Etc.

Earlier this week, a local restaurant in our neighborhood was receiving a delivery.

It was very exciting.

“Look!  Delivery truck!”
“You’re right, that is a delivery truck.”
“What truck delivery?”
“Water, I think, maybe some juice too.”
“Who those people?”

She was asking about the pictures of the people on the truck.

“Well honey, those might be the people who put the water in the bottles.”
“Oh, those people in the truck?”
“Well, no, it’s just pictures of them.”
“Those people driving the truck?”
“Well, no, the people who drive the truck might be different from the people who put the water in the bottles.”
“Oh, one people put water in bottles, then one people drive truck?”
“Well, actually there might be people who bring the bottles from the factory to a center, then someone else who brings the bottles to a restaurant.”

(Pause.)

“Those people like juice, too?”
“Yes, honey, those people probably like juice.”

“I like juice.”

And that was the end of Supply Chain 101.

It’s weird, synchronicity. Upon my return to work after maternity leave I have found an uncanny similarity between the challenges at home and those at work.

In both cases, I am in over my head taking on new challenges. At home, it’s a second child (an actual living breathing human being, another one!) and at work it’s demand generation and marketing strategy.

In both cases, I’ve had well-meaning people nod sympathetically at what I’m taking on and say, in a kind of parallel unison, “Well, it’s one of those fake-it-til-you-make-it situations, right?”

WRONG.

I don’t believe in “fake it ‘til you make it.” I believe in actually doing it, from day one, knowing I’m going to make some mistakes along the way.

There’s some science behind FITYMI: A 2010 study demonstrated higher confidence and cortisol levels from people using “power positioning” that physically positioned them as seeming more confident. (While this study wasn’t able to be replicated, the core idea, that people felt more confident, was.)

But this idea that we are supposed to “act the part” until we are the part doesn’t sit well with me.  It’s like a self-imposed impostor syndrome – and who needs that?.

I’m not pretending to be miniDivo’s mom – I am actually his mom.  And I’m not pretending to run demand generation – I am actually running demand generation.  I’m learning what miniDivo’s disposition is like, what soothes him, what upsets him; I’m learning how to allocate budget across demand gen tactics and understand the reporting that comes back.

I’m not faking these things – I’m doing them.  Just not at 100% because I don’t know how to…yet. If I’m faking it, I’m not asking enough questions, of myself or of others.  I’m much better off feeling like “I’m doing this for real, I’m not faking it, but I’m also not bad at it, I’m still learning.” I think it’s better for others around me to think that about how I’m doing too.

Why would I hide from my family and friends that adjusting to a second baby is HARD?  And why would I hide from my colleagues that I am doing things I’ve never done before and it’s going to be a little bumpy for everyone?  Well, those are rhetorical questions, I’d hide those things if I was ashamed, or embarrassed.  But I’m not, I just want to get better at them.

Brene Brown has researched and written extensively on vulnerability.  My favorite story about her is as follows:

“I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country — everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, “Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. We’d like you to come in and speak. We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention vulnerability or shame.”

“What would you like for me to talk about?” There are three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change.

So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”

And that’s where I am.  I’m making it without faking it.

This whole thing about women and girls and technology and achievement and how we talk about all of it – it’s real.

Just last week I was talking to a young woman about her post-college job search.  “There are some companies I’m interested in but their online job descriptions say that I need 2+ years of experience.  I don’t have that so I’m not applying.”

And I remember being that girl.  Thinking, “gosh, these companies must get a lot of applications, and I’m sure they discard the ones that don’t meet their published guidelines right away.”  But being on the other side now, I know that’s not how it works.  I know that someone graduating from a top school with two summers of real internship experience would at least be worth a phone interview.

I also know (being a hiring manager) that men don’t have the same reaction to job descriptions They don’t think “I don’t have this one qualification,”  they think, “I have all these other qualifications.” It’s a real thing – HBR even wrote up a study on it.

Then the other night I gave babyDiva a new toy.  It had platforms that snapped together, and gears you put on the platforms, and she had a great time figuring out how it worked.  She took to calling the platforms “tracks” and kept furrowing her brow and muttering how “this track needs to go with this track” with the seriousness of a two-and-half-year-old.

When it came time to clean up, she put the pieces away, then looked carefully at the box. “There girls on here?”  she said.

She was asking if there were pictures of girls on the box.  As in, “is this a toy girls play with?”

I tried to remain calm. “Are you asking if girls play with this?  Sure!  This toy is for everyone.  Did you like it?” I said.  But inside I was scared.  I was worried.  How is it that my two-and-a-half year old was already picking up the message that this toy might not be for her. I work in tech – it made me feel like Peggy Orenstein, acclaimed feminist author of, among other books, Cinderella Ate My Daughter.  We praise babyDiva for being strong as much as we do her appearance, she has tons of building toys and truck books.  How was this categorization already going on in her head?

Well, lesson one in parenting is that you can’t control your kid’s experience. Still, I was disturbed by her question. Much as I was disturbed by my young friend’s inclination not to apply for the jobs she didn’t meet the requirements for.

How do we change this?  How do we build young women so they know they’re allowed to apply for jobs that they don’t fit 100%?  How do we build young girls so they know they can play with any toys they like?

I with this post ended with a grand solution; but I don’t know how to solve this.  I just know I have to do everything in my power to make it different for the women around me.

I worked at Dell from 2004 to 2013, in storage sales and storage marketing, which makes me about as qualified as anyone to comment on the news today. There’s plenty of great financial and strategic analysis available in your favorite publication, so here’s more of a personal view of the news.

Having lived through the days of Dell’s reselling and OEMing EMC products, to the acquisition of EqualLogic which weakened the Dell-EMC relationship, to the acquisition of Compellent which ended it, there’s no doubt that these companies have a storied history together.

When we were reselling EMC, this would be back in the 2005-2008(ish?) timeframe, there were many ways in which we were subservient to EMC.  We’d get deals done for them that their finance group didn’t want to extend credit for; we’d be happy for deals at 3 pts or 5 pts because we were focused on top line enterprise revenue. Most of our deals in the midmarket weren’t sold as strategic solution sales, they were just bundling our hardware with their hardware. It was a huge business to be sure – at one time 30-40% of all Clariion business was running through Dell. But it was a very small number of those that Dell really drove as our own. I should know – I did some of them.

When Dell bought EqualLogic, everyone thought it would be the beginning of the end – and it was. The management line was that there would be opportunities appropriate for each and as consultants, it was our job to recommend the best one. They made flow charts and sales aids and, as expected, it all went over like a lead balloon with the EMC sales teams. I’d work in the EMC office weekly, and increasingly, saw EMC reps working with other partners on deals. We managed to bring back some semblance of partnership at the field level, but with significant challenges around margins, renewals, and account control.

That lead balloon finally thunked down when we acquired Compellent. Within a few quarters, our relationship had ended and Dell struggled (and I’d say succeeded) in standing on our own two feet to sell enterprise server and storage solutions.  We learned to work with the channel communities we had inherited from our acquisitions.  We never would have succeeded in any of that with EMC looking over our shoulder. But we struggled with products that were more elegantly designed but with less mass appeal, especially upmarket.

So fast forward – and here we are today. Dell has purchased EMC and the companies and sales forces and partners and customers have to figure out what all that means. There was a time when Dell and EMC were both flashy, successful companies – Dell with an innovative supply chain advantage and EMC with best-of-breed hardware. And now they both need to be reinvented in an age of AWS dominating, Pure Storage and Nimble IPOing, IBM selling off their server business, and HP breaking up their business.

Now for the lightning round.

What happens to Dell’s storage lines? I spent years – literally – selling and marketing EqualLogic and Compellent. I positioned them against EMC in numerous ways – one-on-one to customers, in marketing materials, and in training sales orgs. This was after years of selling Dell’s OEM EMC line. So I’m very familiar with both. There are ways in which Dell’s products are significantly better technologies architecturally. And then advantages to EMC’s products, most notably more complete product sets and interoperability. All that said, I think EMC’s lines will likely dominate. They have more market share, more respect, and more than a small but exceedingly loyal customer base. It’s one of those cases, where the academically “right” answer to solving business problems isn’t necessarily the one that wins.  It’s mind-boggling to think that the ~$1B spent on each of EqualLogic and Compellent is 1/67th the size of this purchase.

Is this the best time for Dell to purchase EMC? It’s not a bad time. Had the companies merged sooner, however, they would be better positioned. The time and energy they’ve put into fighting each other over the past few years could have been put to better use innovating as a single entity – EMC’s R&D teams are world-class, and Dell’s ability to distribute technology widely to a broad audience is unmatched.

Will the cultures mesh? It probably doesn’t matter to the long term success of the sale, although it may feel bad to lots of employees for a while, and they may lose some great people as casualties to the deal. I think Dell’s culture is a little softer and friendlier than EMC’s, but they are both laden with bureaucracy and politics. Michael (as we called him) is a good leader, and has proven his ability to execute major financial and strategy moves (see, “private, taking my company”). There is a lot of overlap in the companies, which will lead to a lot of political positioning so I imagine it will be a long time before it feels like a single company.

Are you glad you’re out of the fray? Yes, mostly. The impact that I’ll be able to make in my current role and company is significantly bigger (by orders of magnitude) than what I would have been able to do at EMCell. Especially in a time of change like they are about to undertake, when it can be even harder to actually get anything done. But there’s something special about an underdog like Dell, led by an underdog like (Michael) Dell, pulling off a coup like this.

Stay tuned, I’m sure there’s lots more to come.

Marissa Mayer has provided me with a lot of air cover over the years.

She had her first baby right around when I told my manager I was pregnant with my first child, then announced being pregnant with twins recently, just when I came back from maternity leave with my second child.

Both times, it felt easier to talk about being pregnant, being on maternity leave, and coming back as a working mom because of her.  The concepts around being a working mom were in the public discourse, they were top of mind.

There’s a lot of criticism around her decision to return to work so quickly after her children, both times.  Her reported two weeks seems, to any “normal” working mom without a staff of thousands, unreasonably short.  She’s been accused of setting a bad example by going back to work a few weeks after giving birth.

No way.

She’s setting a great example.  A great example of how work-life balance can work.  In her case, being named CEO of Yahoo means that ‘work’ tipped the scales over ‘life’ right then.  She’s saying, “I can be a powerful woman and a mom at the same time.”  For all sorts of reasons the world hates that idea.  But I love it.

Even more, I love that her decisions are causing people to talk about all this.  I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve come back from both of my maternity leaves to a team that believed I was coming back and gave me more responsibility.  But I know myriad women who feel like having had children set them back on their careers, independent of what they would have wanted.

The Byzantine set of laws around parental leave and equality at work have left employers afraid to ask a woman if she is pregnant.  Unable to talk to a woman about work while she’s on leave. Scared to ask about a woman’s plans.  I know why these laws exist and I believe they protect women.  But they also hurt women.  They hurt women by not having childbearing and its associated logistics an audible part of the discourse.

These laws and rules make it hard to make a plan like “I’d like to take 6 week off entirely, except for the one video I didn’t have a chance to edit before I left, then be on email lightly for 5 more weeks, then start coming in to the office once a week for a few hours for 3 more weeks, then come in for half-days for a week before returning full time except for when I have daycare drop off (when I’ll be a little late) pick up (when I have to leave a little early), my kid has pinkeye (when you don’t want me to come in anyway) the Jewish holidays in September (a day off for each) and the 60 minutes each workday when I have to express breastmilk, which I’ll do for 3-9 months depending on how soon it makes me want to jump off a bridge.”  But that’s a real life plan.

I don’t think most women should be forced to take only two weeks of maternity leave prior to returning to work.  I wasn’t in physical or emotional shape to do that.  And I think that’s only reasonable to do if you have full-time help who follows you around including overnight, which most of us can’t afford.  And even then, it may not be reasonable physically or emotionally.  But it was for Mayer.  And my eagerness to return to work after the regulated 12 weeks seemed rushed for other people.  It’s pretty personal what works for whom.

People keep saying, “but twins, so different from single babies, she doesn’t know what she’s in for,” but you know what?  She’s an adult with extraordinary access to tools that would enable her to find information (see what I did there?).  She is going in eyes-wide-open.  And she may change her mind once the babies arrive.  But she may decide her plan will work fine.

What’s important is that people are talking about it.  Her right to privacy notwithstanding (because she did choose to be CEO of a publicly-traded company), her decisions are opening a long-needed conversation around how to support women who want to have high-powered positions but also want to have families.

And when you all figure it out, please put the answer in the comments.  Because I would like the recipe for that.