After spending  significant time and building a career as an executive at various companies, I can summarize that for the growth of a company, KARMA matters. What is  KARMA? Is it just a fancy word?  Business KARMA is:

• Knowledge of the core competencies of the business and its competitors. The knowledge of what your customers want,  not just what you want to offer.
• Aversion to risk plays a big role in stunting growth. This also leads to lack of innovation in the organization.
• Repeatedly doing what worked in the past. Many a times management executives want to stay with status quo to protect their job, territory, power or people even though they are well aware that any state is transient state, including ones life on this  planet. Businesses with this culture lose to competitors that create a diverse organization to encourage innovation and challenge the status quo.
• Management’s lack of consensus, arising from the members of the management team who lack the knowledge of the growth areas in which business can grow.
• Arrogance in company culture, typically a result of previous successes. This arrogance leads to providing lip service instead of great customer experience to even some of the most valued and loyal customers.

Examples of corporations or businesses that are showing stunted or declining growth can be found in any business journal or newspaper. If one maps the above characteristics to their culture, one would find at least two or more of these behaviors are easily seen in these companies.

During this weekend’s technical coffee meeting, I presented this brief high-level view on how to choose the best Web content management system (WCMS) for social media and Web startups. A large collection of content management systems (CMS) are available. The list of features supported by these CMS’s ever expanding. This is creating a time consuming exercise for the entrepreneurs. I have devised a simple solution to this complex issue. The simple solution is to think in terms of the Content Systems Strategy Triangle. The three corners of the triangle are: (1) business strategy as it pertains to the content, (2) technology strategy, and (3) organizational strategy. Business strategy should allow the WCMS to address the business objectives and not just the technology solution. The FIRST step method can help in this regard.

• Flexible – The CMS has to be flexible to incorporate business objectives. For example, in today’s flat world, it should address multiple languages and provide personalized content using dynamic features for a diverse user base.
• Integrable – The CMS should provide functions to integrate easily with all business applications that are needed to successfully launch the product/service. The integration of segmentation techniques for providing relevant customer experience, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, and Web analytics tools should be taken into account.
• Restrictions – The CMS should have NO, or minimal, restrictions for Web site control for the content and user experience owners. Typically, the technology teams will make it programming focused thus increasing restrictions for the content and user experience owners, who have limited programming experience.
• Simple – The CMS has to be simple to use for content providers, writers, and owners.
• Timely – The CMS should allow changes to be made in timely fashion, that is, it should take minimal time from the time the new content is added, modified, removed to when it is displayed to customers/consumers of the web.