Datamaran: The Race To Dominate Tomorrow’s Data Oceans

When evolving new market categories, we need both navies and pirates

JE via Artiphoria, 2024

First, a public health warning: I have long preferred the pirate mindset to that of most navies. As a result, the organizations I have co-founded have inclined to the former—and when, almost inevitably, they later evolve naval traits, I have tended to embark in search of wilder waters.

Along the way, I have explored the ways in which sometime pirates led navies, as when Sir Francis Drake spearheaded English attacks on the Spanish Armada in 1588 or, vice versa, periods when the outbreak of peace shook large numbers of men out of navies.

One example was when the War of Spanish Succession wound down in the early 1700s, with many former naval sailors finding themselves unemployed—and so turning energetically to piracy.

All this came to mind when a colleague of Marjella Lecourt-Alma, Datamaran’s founder and CEO, described her as “a great pirate.” He meant it affectionately—and the description rang a strong bell for me, too. Often new areas of opportunity are first explored by people who are somewhere between outsiders and outcasts.

Indeed, I have always seen my own trajectory as that of an outsider-insider.

Now, as the world becomes increasingly awash in data, innovators are sketching new maps of risk and opportunity. Indeed, decades ago, when I was exploring the ragged edges of corporate environmental (and then later sustainability) reporting, I used the metaphor of Earth’s early oceans filling up with single-celled organisms, an algal soup with nothing to feed upon it. Yet.

Then along came the grazers and, beyond them the predators. The same would happen, I argued, to the oceans of data and information we were beginning to collect with organizations like Environmental Data Services, which we launched back in 1978.

Later, at SustainAbility, I spent decades promoting new forms of auditing, reporting and assurance—also finding myself part of the early conversations that resulted in the Global Reporting Initiative, and later serving for several years on GRI’s board.

Change was coming, that we knew, though it was soon clear that it wasn’t going to follow anything like a straight-line trajectory.

In it for the money?

Often, it was a matter of two steps forward, then at least one back. Some people burned out and left the sector, while others doubled down. As part of the next generation of leaders, Marjella joined GRI in 2007 and became its youngest female director at the age of 30.

Looking back now, it seems to me that GRI was itself a somewhat piratical enterprise when launched by founder Bob Massie and Alan White. But, unlike most full-throated pirate vessels, it had a fiercely non-profit mindset.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, when Marjella began to scout out for-profit opportunities, her more commercial mindset didn’t enjoy universal support. But her view at the time, she told me when we spoke recently, was that a new sector of the economy—and a new category of value creation—is “not real if people aren’t willing to pay money for it.”

That, in turn, led people in the not-for-profit world to ask her: “Are you just in it for the money?”

I was often asked the same question. And no, she replied, she wasn’t. But those of us long interested in subverting capitalism with its own tools know full well that market actors often value most what they pay for more than what they get for free.

You also soon discover—as Marjella and her team did—that the more people have to pay for a service, the further up the hierarchy the go-no go decision is driven. So, if your aim is to engage top teams, and perhaps paradoxically, hiking prices makes a great deal of sense as a business strategy.

Still, a top-of-the-range price point means that the service must blend new forms of value with high quality. Marjella puts it this way: “Quality really matters. So, at Datamaran we aim to create a ‘Gold platform’ at a time when many major consultancies seem to be content to offer ‘Silver’ options. But will the market be prepared to pay a premium over time?,” she asks. “We are betting that it will.”

Smart ESG

With the ESG field increasingly on the back foot, Datamaran has increasingly talked instead in terms of “Smart ESG,” an approach designed to unlock real business value:

·       using real-time insights for well-informed decision-making and reporting;

·       bringing ESG capabilities in-house—and so saving on outsourcing costs;

·       focusing on what matters, helping to mitigate inadvertent greenwashing;

·       in the process, transforming “ESG from a cost center to a value driver.”

A central concept informing Datamaran’s work is “double materiality”—where the fundamental aim, as they explain, “is simple: align your business strategy with your ESG priorities.” At a time when there “are hundreds of ESG issues, materiality helps you define what ESG means for you.” 

“Understanding which ESG issues to focus on is critical to a company’s longevity,” Datamaran say: “A material issue can have a major impact on a company’s financial performance, value creation, reputation and legal position.”

In terms of the most influential definitions of what materiality is and should be, the team spotlight definitions advanced by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC), the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), GRI and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG).

EFRAG is seen as particularly influential. Like GRI, it requires consideration of both the financial and impact materiality of ESG issues. In effect, this perspective recognizes that a company can affect and be affected by ESG issues. It also helps embed the ESG and wider sustainability agendas in both the governance systems and strategy of a business.

With the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive likely to drive even greater reporting activity, with Datamaran seeing its likely impact as akin to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which had global repercussions, Marjella’s ambition is clear, both in terms of impact and growth.

Currently, Marjella says, Datamaran provides data and strategic insight to 150 clients. A good start, but she aims to reach at least 1,000 clients.

Crossing the chasm, playing bigger

Then, as we were winding up our conversation, Marjella noted that two books have had a big impact on her thinking—and therefore Datamaran’s overall approach and culture—have been 1990’s Crossing The Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, and 2016’s Play Bigger, by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney. 

That strange resonance again. For many years I had used a version of the “Crossing the Chasm” visual shown below. I, too, had long relied on “The Chasm” as a sketch of the space in which the sustainability movement (and industry) found itself.

Most of our work at the time was with what Geoffrey Moore had dubbed “Innovators” and “Early Adopters,” with platforms like GRI serving to carry some of the new thinking out to the “Early Majority.” Now, with the sustainability mainstreaming, the bigger players are being drawn in, with growing numbers of predators among them.

Source: Craig Chelius, 2009, via Wikipedia

Playing Bigger, on the other hand, was new to me. But its sub-title was eye-catching: “How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets.” Still, perhaps the most interesting bit of the book, for me at least, turned out to be Part II, titled “The Category King Playbook.”

Or, as the book itself says, “the Part About How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets.”

Time to find your “missing”

I learned that the Playing Bigger team’s thinking had evolved out of a set of three questions one of the book’s authors had routinely asked entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. They ran as follows:

1.     Can you explain to me like a five-year-old what problems you are trying to solve?

2.     If your company solves this problem perfectly, what category are you in?

3.     If you win 85 percent of that category, what’s the size of your category potential?

A key part of the process, we learned, is to identify a “missing” in the world at large, something that could be tackled profitably with the right mindset, technology and business model.

Clearly, what Marjella see as largely missing from the marketplace is high quality market intelligence and, built on top of that, strategic insight and advice on what all this change is going to mean for businesses.

My parting question: Is she wedded to the ESG label? “It doesn’t matter what they call it,” she replies. “Companies will have to pay much more attention to non-traditional risks outside the business.”

While populist politicians in the EU, US and elsewhere may try to frame the ESG agenda as “liberal” or even “woke,” at its best, she says, it’s an attempt by tomorrow’s leaders to get their brains around the risks and opportunities that the coming transformations pretty much guarantee.

And if you want to know more about the continuing evolution of my thinking, my 21st book is a memoir called Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Business on Sustainability (Fast Company Press, June 2024). Our video trailer can be found here. Available in good book stores and on Amazon, in hardback, paperback, Kindle and audio formats—the last being the first audio version of one of my books that I have voiced myself. Let me know what you think!