Ekaterina Walter

Ekaterina Walter: “Purpose. Every successful business has a clear purpose. Having clear purpose and sticking to it is, I think, the hardest thing any company leader can do. There is some agility required, but with that, if you know where you’re going and what you’re doing, and you stick to it, I think you are going to be successful. It is the hardest to do because in our time, it’s like ‘if this doesn’t produce the desired results in 3 months, lets kill it and move onto something else.’”

John Taylor: How do you feel about – in the startup world – the need to pivot? Pivot and purpose are not different things – but pivoting means to take an entirely different direction.

EW: I think that’s required. With your focus comes the challenge of what you need to sacrifice. Ive seen a number of startups that have had to scrape their whole product that they’ve worked very hard on and launched, and re-do it based on how well its adapted in the marketplace and what the feedback they’re getting is. A lot of companies cut the businesses they’ve acquired or started to focus on a particular thing, or go back to their core competency which they were really good at. Each business is different. It is this perfect balance between being agile and moving fast. If you want to move with culture, it’s like moving this big tank little by little – I see it at Intel – but having the agility to be innovating, risk taking. That’s why Intel is so successful, even though we’re such a big organization – because risk taking is one of our core values. We’re going to try new things to figure out what works and what doesn’t work. So, whether the business is small or large, that sort of agility needs to exist, and not only in big decorations and marketing and all these kinds of aspects of your business – but at the same time, sticking to the core purpose and higher values. Intel’s core purpose is to connect people around the world and enrich their lives – we’ve had that higher purpose for a long time. Making sure you have that purpose and a clear vision of where you’re going, that’s important. Your employees will move you in one direction, your customers will move you in multiple directions, your stakeholders demand to go in multiple directions, and a lot of it is very shortsighted a lot of times, so the leader of the business, if you have that purpose and that vision, you come back to it and say “what is that – what is our vision, what is our purpose, are we really serving it, what is our competency that we’re focusing on?” I think the other thing is people. If you look at growing businesses, they cannot afford to not have good people, because those are the people who build the product and the culture. Now if you look at Intel, we are not a growing business anymore, we are established, but we also cannot afford not to hire people who aren’t in it for that higher purpose, because that’s all we have going for us, is our people – our technology comes from our people. You build the right culture and bring in the right people to partner with. I think of employees as partners. Anybody who helps drive you toward that single vision and ensures that there’s a full synergy and understanding among you and your customers and your higher purpose and the people who work with it and surround you, really has that understanding and capability that’s required to propel you forward.

JT: When social media goes out to the unknown masses, what’s your viewpoint on the people that aren’t connected to Intel today and what’s in it for them?

EW: When you connect with your customers, your customers are your partners, and if you don’t realize that, you’re not going to be successful. The customers that already know and love your brand will buy your brand and spread the word of mouth around. Social media is cool because it provides a platform to have a conversation – Facebook, Twitter, or any kind of social media. On our Facebook, people post images they drew just for us, how they see Intel. They’re not asking for anything, just offering them to us. Then there’s another subset of customers that have no idea about Intel, are not connected to the brand. If you find a way to have conversations with them, relevant conversations, by offering my knowledge, by speaking on our mistakes and such so that they can use that value for their businesses, then I am adding value to their lives, and sticking with Intel’s core values. There’s a lot of ways to find relevancy through particular topics and products. How is it that you extend your passion towards your purpose through your people? If you’re living and breathing the purpose and passion you have, you will find a way to relate to your customers, and customers who don’t know about you will find you through touchpoints on which you are both passionate about. Producing a great product is only part of it. It is living the core values – to me, there is more to it than “here’s my brand, heres my mission statement, heres my product.” That’s how great businesses connect with their customers – by telling stories and why they are passionate about those stories. I think social media definitely provides the connection and the opportunity for those dialogues.

JT: Intel was an early adapter of social media strategy. If you were to predict the future, where do you see it going?

EW: Social media is just a natural progression of how people connect, whether you use it for your own personal advantage or your brand. Social media as a term wont exist pretty soon, because everything you do is inherently social, and the internet empowers you to engage in a different way, but it’s nothing new. Since cavemen existed, we’ve been social beings – now it’s just brands and customers learning new ways to connect with each other. The world is becoming smaller – 6 degrees of separation or less. What social media is doing, is empowering our world – we cannot ignore that trend, that’s why we were in it so early. It’s just a natural extension of evolution as people connect. It’s allowing a new platform, new ways of freedom for people. It’s going to become a fabric, no longer a term, that goes through everything, lives in every single department, has widespread adoption throughout companies, and if I’m thinking about talking to my customers, that will be the natural way to do so. There’s a lot of integration happening. Becoming a fabric, that’s definitely where it’s going.

JT: For small companies in the startup world, solopreneurs and entrepreneurs, all these components of creating the social media fabric take a lot of time and consistency and effort to get the voice out. How integral do you see it for small companies as something that they must do, and where’s their time best spent, given the amount of effort that it requires, versus engaging with customers face-to-face?

EW: Curators of the best information are actually more powerful than content creators. That definitely comes up with small businesses. Small business – that’s where the best innovation happens. What they come up with using social media to engage people in the most agile ways – it’s just amazing what comes out of small businesses, since they don’t have all the corporate layers to go through. That is where the most amazing, real time innovation and creativity can happen, if you’re up for it. You understand your audience well, so know where they are. It’s so fundamental. As a business, you know your customers, so if there are particular channels your customers prefer more – for example, a lot of musicians are still on Myspace – whereas most other brands say “Come on, Myspace? That’s dead…” So, it’s in finding what your specific customers will relate to. Even big brands struggle with that. Focus on the communities where you know you’re going to get the customers to engage. Just do small things, or a limited number of things, but do them amazingly well, and that will bring you true word of mouth.

JT: I think that’s excellent counsel – laser focus, with a high degree of excellence.

EW: That comes back to our initial conversation, that businesses need to have focus, whether large or small. If you don’t have that focus, you won’t be that successful.

JT: There were different schools of leadership in the past that were more the factory, structured model, and I would assert that if one looks at the corporate domain over the last few decades, being nimble has become the main skill set, and it seems future leadership means being abreast of information at a completely different pace than in the past. What are you seeing as predominant leadership traits now?

EW: That’s huge. I read a lot on agile project management. Agile marketing, to me, is the most exciting. Imagine, your Facebook or Twitter community – that is your focus group, 24/7, willing to give you their opinions in real-time. Surpassing market research and all that – here’s all these passionate people willing to give you their opinion. I think that’s why executives are paying more attention to it, the real-time insight. There’s a lot of conversation happening among a number of people about the spirit of entrepreneurship. A lot of people think of entrepreneurs as dropping out of school or college or jobs and boom, they leave and create something else, like Bill Gates. The whole perception that to be an entrepreneur, you have to create something else under your own umbrella – well, really, anyone can be an entrepreneur, whether it be within a brand or under your own company. The spirit of entrepreneurship is more alive than ever. A huge amount of entrepreneurs, self employed, are saying we are not going to be working for a brand, we’re going to run our own businesses. More and more people between ages 10 – 17 come up with the most amazing, mind-blowing inventions all over the world, that we never dreamed of when we were growing up. The younger generation is reshaping the way entrepreneurship is looked at. If you are within a brand and don’t run the whole company, you can still make a difference. Look at me- I painted a blank canvas over the past 4 years for Intel, creating something that never existed before, and that’s how I build my own reputation externally, and that’s what makes me an entrepreneur. I see that trend taking over and the young generation coming up and saying “we are in charge of our own destiny, we are our own boss, and companies will have to adjust to that.” A study has been done by Millennial Branding, finding that young students are willing to take a big pay cut if the company is not offering them the right ways to socialize with friends and colleagues. If all the company offers is email communication, they’d rather take a pay cut to go to a company that offers an internal social system – and say go ahead, access your Facebook and Twitter on your break or whenever, live a full life, and we trust that you’ll still add value and do your work. It’s amazing to watch how digital natives are totally redefining everything we’re doing, and the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s fascinating to watch. I believe digital natives are passionate and extremely independent, they will tell you what their opinion is, and they are smart enough to figure out how to simplify their life, how to make it easier – I actually see the young generation as less consumeristic. They are going to unclutter their lives and go back to basics, to what makes them happy, spending time outside, spending time with family, and not working 24/7. I truly believe we’re going to see that coming back.

Look out for Ekaterina’s upcoming book “Think Like Zuck,” and keep up with her work on Building Social Bridges.

Tom Foremski, named the 28th Most Influential Person in Silicon Valley by NowPublic – Crowd Powered Media, is the man behind Silicon Valley Watcher, the popular blog reporting on the business of technology & media. In addition to posting original articles covering cutting-edge news with his own intelligent, articulate opinions, he interviews highly prolific thought leaders, including IBM Venture Capital Group’s Drew Clark, HP’s Chief Administrative Officer Jon Flaxman, Girls in Tech founder Adriana Gascoigne, and “The Four-Hour Work Week” author Tim Ferriss, to name just a few. Here are the highlights of Maverick Masters’ founder John Taylor’s interview with Tom, speaking on the rapidly changing business of media, why he chose to leave FT, and the true role of Silicon Valley in today’s world.

TF: We’re in an exciting time, especially in the media sector. The media business is changing so quickly, and that’s why I chose to leave the Financial Times. Looking back at leaving FT, one of the best jobs in the industry, I’d do it again. What really excites me are the tremendous changes in the media industry, and now we have more media than ever before, so in some ways you could say the media’s dying, newspapers are closing down, TV companies, radio and so on- but yet, we have more media than ever before, so it’s wonderful to see these kinds of imposing paradoxes, and that’s a sign of something really important happening.

JT: What do you think that important thing is?

TF: It’s going to completely rewire how we think about things, and how we discuss and debate things as a society. I see media as this: it’s the way society thinks about important things, and unimportant things like the celebrity stuff, but media is important because it’s how we make decisions about important things. As a society, we face a lot of problems- energy, environment, economy, education… and not just things that begin with the letter E. So, the quality of our media refers to the quality of our thinking. If the quality of our media is on the fritz because the business model is disappearing, then the quality of our decisions is going to suffer. This is why I think that this is the most important issue we face on the Internet. It’s not the digital divide, although that is important. It’s not the lack of female software engineers, although that is important. How can we ensure that we have the media that we need? Special interest groups will gladly fund the media that they want us to read, but we can’t pay for the media that we need to read. So, it’s a real war of ideas going on right now – who’s going to be the best at using these new tools and distributions? That’s really incredibly exciting; it reminds me of a sci-fi novel, “Snow Crash,” by Neal Stephenson. I was reading that back in ’92 – it’s about a future where ideas are communicated directly into the brainstem, surpassing reason centers. This is exactly what’s happening. It’s great to be part of that, but it’s also scary because the business model is disappearing.

 JT: You left the Financial Times in 2004. Clearly, there was a shift occurring, but even in 2004 it wasn’t at the scale it is now, and wasn’t at the speed it is now. Many would argue that the media is very controlled in the corporate structures, so having true access to information, regardless of the amount of information available, is still quite hard.

TF: Yes, but I think there are some misconceptions about corporate control of media. Yes, large corporations control large media groups, but if people think that there’s actually somebody controlling the day-to-day work of hundreds of thousands of journalists and editors, they’re completely wrong, that doesn’t happen, that’s not the way media is produced. Even on the Wall Street Journal, their editorial page may be very conservative and right wing, but I know some of the writers there, they’re certainly not that way at all. So, corporate control in the media is overstated, but special interests groups can certainly influence the media through PR companies, they can commission papers, they have think tanks that produce media on their behalf – so the actual influence of what media covers is not done in such a crass way as, say, Rupert Murdoch telling his editors ‘don’t write that story,’ or some other kind of direct control. It’s done in other ways, through PR companies, think tanks – traditional ways special interests groups advance their ideas in society.

JT: What are your highest order observations and insights that you have gained from being in the industry for 28 years, on the pulse of so many social and technological means?

TF: One key, one that really marks the period of leaving the FT and doing what I do now, occurred when I was walking down the street in 2004, thinking about a question I’d often thought about. The internet is a powerful technology, and it certainly helped my job because I could do research very quickly. I used to have to cut clippings out of magazines and newspapers and file them away so I could refer to information, then I didn’t have to do that anymore – I could quickly research a story and find contact information. It changed my job tremendously. I was able to produce 10 times as much, but I was wondering, where’s the disruption in this technology? Where was the disruption from the Internet? All the same tech companies were still there… yes, there had been some consolidation, but all the big companies were still there and doing reasonably well – and then it struck me, oh my God, it’s in my industry, we’ve been going through 5 years of constant layoffs since the dot com burst – magazines and newspapers have suffered from a loss of advertising. The tech industry recovered, but the media industry didn’t, just kept on laying off, reporting lower revenues and so on… now at FT, my bosses felt that this was just the business cycle, that business would come back around as it had before. The epiphany I had was no, the Internet is a publishing technology, that’s where we’re seeing the disruption in my industry, the constant layoffs. The Internet allows us to publish a page to any computer, anywhere in the world, no matter if its a pocket computer or a desktop computer- that is the beauty and power of the Web, you can publish a page to any screen, anywhere. So where the disruption is, is in media, because it’s a media technology. I started seeing Silicon Valley as a media valley; the new generation of tech companies – Google, Yahoo – these are media companies, they publish pages of content with advertising. What’s not a media company about that?

JT: Who do you see as the real leaders in the space – companies and individuals?

TF: Intel started Free Press, which is a magazine produced by their people – some ex-journalists – done at a very professional level. They also recently launched Intel IQ, a magazine curated by Intel employees – they’ve got their employees, really brilliant people, choosing the best articles every day and presenting them to the world. IBM really got it early on, people like Jon Iwata at IBM, who does telecommunications, but is also head of marketing.

Stay up to date with Tom Foremski’s reports on the business of technology and media at Silicon Valley Watcher.