How to Innovate in a Hurry: An Interview with Hollander

It was 3:00AM. Mark Hollander was camped at 12,000 feet at the foot of an immense glacier when a freak storm blew in leaving his team under six inches of freezing water with no one around to help. If the understandable, and frankly forgivable response was to panic, Hollander did not go down that path. Instead the Manhattan-based new media strategy consultant huddled with his fellow climbers and ate oatmeal. Deliberately.

“The value of that was it gave us time to think, take inventory, find the one thing we could do that would make a huge difference,” he explains. “And the single most important thing was not to freeze to death, which was why taking in calories was crucial. You can’t do any work if you’re shivering uncontrollably.”

Not only did the group soon strike camp, move it and set it back up successfully, but in that crisis Hollander had just exhibited the fundamental principle of his business practice: The 80/20 rule.

80/20 Thinking

“As a rule of thumb, 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts,” says Hollander, founder and president of Group 8020. You know how it is. In sales, 80% of revenue comes from 20% of your customers. In software, 80% of users require only 20% of the features. So identifying that 20% is crucial, whether at the foot of a glacier or launching a pharmaceutical blockbuster. It’s the proverbial ‘make or break’ point.”

It also happens to be Hollander’s forte, which explains why his clients report finishing projects three months faster and 20% under budget. One of the key components to Group 8020’s proven approach is mapping what Hollander calls the “business ecosystem.” This process allows Hollander to “see around corners,” an ability for which he is highly reputed in the industry.

This unique skill was highlighted in a 1997 Washington Post article [click to read full article] that singled him out as one of the first adopters of the high-tech speech recognition-based phone service Wildfire. At a time when most executives were using answering services, using the cutting-edge Wildfire technology enabled Hollander to be available to his clients without regard to timezones or complicated phone numbers. Wildfire was ultimately purchased by AT&T and grew into the interactive service now in widespread use across the country.

Map Your Ecosystem

“A well-mapped ecosystem shows you where you are, where you want to go, and the nature of the relationships affecting you. This includes the landscapes both inside and outside of the company. Internally, you have to see how your various projects will synergize and fit with goals, budgets and reviews. Externally, you need to identify potential advocates and threats in the market as well as changes in technology that might affect you.”

Hollander attended The Johns Hopkins University and NYU Film School before founding OnLine Communications, a digital media agency specializing in pharmaceutical marketing and education. From its startup in 1985, he grew the company from one to one hundred employees and served as the web agency of record for the launch of Celebrex™, the merger of Pharmacia with Pfizer, and the first distance learning / CME site for Pfizer’s Viagra™.

By the time he sold OnLine in 2000 to subsequently launch the consultancy Coaching Creative Minds, 26 of the top 28 pharmaceutical companies worldwide were clients. In 2008 he founded Group 8020 to provide rapid response project development. Obsessed with speed and metrics, his company masterminds product launches, communication plans, and product prototyping for customer testing in the real world.

Although Hollander’s background is in pharmaceuticals, Group 8020 works with clients in a broad range of industries.

Questions & Answers

Q: With a business environment full of project consultants, what was the rationale behind launching Group 80/20?

A: I saw a problem. Smart clients were being made to feel dumb by the rate of change in business technology. They’re not dumb. If someone just gives them the big picture and discusses technology in honest, forthright terms they can do anything. So I built a consultancy on the ability to move between the two worlds of business and technology.

One of the reasons for the success of my first company (OnLine Communications) was the fact that we never thought of ourselves as being in the “film business.” Instead, we considered ourselves as being in the business of creating messages. So when film became video and video became the web it didn’t matter. We were still creating consistent messaging for our clients. Only the medium has changed.

Q: You do this working holistically, via an ecosystem, which is frankly not a word you hear often in the business lexicon.

A: We like the word “ecosystem” because it captures the nature of the problem: nothing stays the same. No matter what you do today something’s going to come along tomorrow and mess it all up. But if you plan for and anticipate change, then you start to get a reputation as someone who can see around the corners of a problem. There’s great power in clarifying a business problem, explaining it to others without jargon, and leading the way forward because you’ve so clearly identified the interconnections. That’s what a well-mapped ecosystem does for you.

Q: When clients call, what is the common scenario?

A: Clients usually have a really clear idea of the end state but no idea of how to get there. Such as, “we need to sell the board on giving us a million dollars for a global e-commerce system, how do you make that sexy?” They could be launching a new product, turning on a new corporate site or rolling out something major to the field force. I do think that return on investment is what it’s all about, and if you start with a high level of perspective that we bring, you have a chance to maximize profits in more areas and minimize risks in others.

Q: What about the flipside, when project budgets suddenly have to be cut?

A: I learned to skydive when I was 30, and once my parachute didn’t open. I figured out very quickly what was important and what needed to be cut. In that case, the ropes wrapped around my legs prevented my chute from deploying. In a budget cut situation, if we’ve worked before, we already have scenarios for seeing around this corner. If this is the first time working together, then we employ the parachute scenario and get focused really quickly on what’s vital, as in, what’s going to save us, help us, and what we can discard?

Q: Once an ecosystem is completed, the Group 8020 approach is to implement a 100 day plan. Why this time frame?

A: It straddles the financial quarter, and lights a fire under people with the realization that “the goal” can and will be realized very fast, that others have gone before them with similarly big challenges and succeeded. If there is value in clarity there is even greater value in getting started. The idea is to do as much as you can in the 100 days, get it out there, get it making money, and then come back on a second pass and improve what needs to be improved. Since all projects we design have a metric component for feedback, if you’re immediately starting to gather customer feedback you are ready to report on your success and what you are going to do differently in the next period of time.

Q: One thing you have developed is a reputation as a straight shooter.

A: I think that’s why the BS Report is so popular. And by the way BS stands for Buzzword Status. Because it demystifies a piece of tech or a buzzword and attempts to make it relevant to what you’re doing at work that day. And since we don’t represent any particular solution or vendor, we’re like Consumer Reports and can pretty much say what we believe is true.

But all of this comes down to one thing: find your own, personal 20% and then run with it. Do that on your next project and you’ll surprise even yourself.