Archive
Blog archive
182 earlier posts on innovation, strategy, brands, customers and technology. For current work, see my Forbes columns.
3rd Wave Capitalism: Podcast
I was recently interviewed by Scott Henderson for the site New Empire Builders, which is a site dedicated to finding new startups, interesting non-profits,...
3rd Wave Capitalism: Radical business innovation begins anew
Last week, on Thursday night September 16, 2010, I had the good fortune of speaking to the Society for Information Management's (SIM's) Boston chapter about...
5 Things That Create Ridiculous Customer Experiences: Can't we avoid Catch 22?
The other day I was on the phone with my insurance company because they had rejected, for a second time, a procedure for my son which was performed by a...
7 Non-traditional Barriers to Innovation
A friend of mine recently asked me: What do you think are the biggest barriers to innovation? If you look at the literature on innovation many folks cite...
A Better Way to Rate Bonds
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant." – Justice Lewis Brandeis A day before Lehman went bankrupt, they carried an A rating from Moody's on their debt....
A Tale of Two Economies: How to regain trust in our markets…
Our economy relies equally on rational economic transactions and mutually felt trust in the trustworthiness of the system. In this current economic downturn...
Amazon.gov?
The US and China dominate global consumer competition based on the power of a few platform leaders. In the US, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft...
An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Ton, Not Pound, of Cure
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an article about how insurance companies are starting to pay for remote treatments, and this off-site consultation is...
Are You a Vendor or a Business Partner?
One of my colleagues just asked me: What's the difference between a vendor relationship and a true business partnership? This is a vital question when any...
Are You Swimming in Data? Three benefits of Data Visualization
"A good sketch is better than a long speech..." -- a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte The ability to visualize the implications of data is as...
Are You Worldclass Online? Seven principles to think about...
The other day I was talking with my partner Jamie Yoder about a client who was asking him: What does it mean to be a world class online organization? Here...
Are Your Assets Live or Dead?
My good friend and colleague Miles Everson is one of the smartest strategic thinkers I’ve ever met. The other day he said to me: “An unconnected asset is a...
Barack Obama’s Edge-Based Organization
President-elect Obama is the first politician use the power of the network to create an edge-based organization -- and thereby raise more money than any...
Be Sheepish!: The mammalian manifesto for brand reinvention
April 24th's New York Times featured a front page (below the fold) picture (and story) of hotels.nl's advertising on the side of sheep, bedecked with...
Beethoven Had It Right: Let the audience invest
About two months ago I was having a discussion with a senior executive from a world class animation studio about Avatar , James Cameron's blockbuster movie...
Blue Water Thinking: Why deep innovation is so hard
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. -- Albert Einstein Deep innovation is really hard. If you have ever swum in the open ocean,...
Brain Brandy: A plea for information density, not information for the dense
The other day I was reading the New York Times online which was reporting on the financial crisis a year after the crash. They created the most fantastic...
Brand Management and the 10:45 Per Day Generation
The Kaiser Foundation recently released a study documenting the astounding fact that 8-18 year olds in the United States have increased their media use from...
Bureacracy Termites: Blogs, Wiki's, and Information Markets
Despite much talk about new organization forms, and networks, most profit making organizations have more in common with the Roman Army than any new form of...
Can Behavioral Economics Bend the Healthcare Cost Curve? Reports from the field!
In the great debate and political firestorm surrounding healthcare it is easy to forget that the majority of the medical problems people have are due to...
Can the USA Regain its Love of Speed?
We used to love being the nation of the leading edge: the fastest and tallest of everything: fastest computers, tallest buildings, fastest cars, and so on....
Can You Draw Your Innovation Process?
A dear friend of mine Barbara Feinberg researched many new product development processes and she helped Kim Clark and Steve Wheelright of the Harvard...
Checkout Checkout:Google's attacking PayPal, but where is Amex?
There are few things in the world of commerce that I find more beautiful than the creation of a strategic itch that your main competitor can't scratch....
Cognitive Continuity: Key to winning in the Marketspace
A dear friend of mine was asking me about my 1994 article on Managing in the Marketspace , and I wanted to share some of my email to him because I think the...
Confessions of a Really Dull Guy
Well, I admit it. I am fascinated by architecture. Not only the Notre Dame, can you believe the French are so conceited as to put a defect in one of the...
Convenience is No Longer a Differentiator
Blame Robert Wodruff. In 1923 he became president of the Coca Cola company at the age of 33, four years after his father Ernest bought the company from Asa...
Cool Idea: A smart coffee cup named Smug
I love the story of Chris Halberg the founder of Smug Coffee . He was in class at Marquette University and invented the idea of adding an RFID chip to a...
Create "Choosing" (Not "Shopping") Experiences
On a recent, gorgeous day in New York City I walked from Bergdorf Goodman at 59th Street & 5th Avenue past Cartier on 52nd street and continued down 5th...
Creating Customer Communities: Two different innovations in conversation
Valaria Moltoni, scion of the site Conversation Agent, has advocated (as many other have too) that you can benefit from creating communities of customers....
Creative Work Unlocked by Crowdfunding: A disruptive innovation
The other day I received a downright inspirational email from my friends at IndieGoGo, a site dedicated to the collaborative funding of ideas. ( Here's a...
Customer Service 2.0: Transparency, Tribes, and Talent
I confess that I have a warm spot in my heart for customer service operations. It is probably because I met my wife of 29.5 years Eileen Marie when she and...
Dematuring of Marketing & the TMT Cluster
Many years ago Peter Drucker pointed out, with the clarity that few management writers achieve, that corporations exist to create customers and serve them....
Designing Interaction 2.0: Microsoft Natal Reinvents “The Screen”, Google Wave Morphs “Context”
My friend, and Diamond Fellow , Dan Bricklin wrote a wonderful essay on July 7, 2009 called "New Modes of Interaction: Some implications of Microsoft Natal...
Designing Promotions in the Internet Age: Groupon’s Five Key Lessons for All Companies
There is an interesting experiment happening on the web - where Groupon.com is putting out one deal a day, in sixteen cities across the USA. They launched...
Designing Your Customer’s Decisions
There is a vital lesson buried in the August 19, 2009 Jet Blue announcement that they were suspending sales of the $599.00 "All You Can Jet" promotion...
Designing Your Customer’s Decisions
There is a vital lesson buried in the August 19, 2009 Jet Blue announcement that they were suspending sales of the $599.00 "All You Can Jet" promotion...
Desperately Seeking Certainty: Redstone should come to praise YouTube, not to bury them!
There is something very King Lear about Sumner Redstone striking out to sue YouTube for a billion dollars -- 83% of the cost of Google's acquisition of this...
Diamond Study Finds Financial Services Firms Focused on Innovation
I recently learned something fascinating from business and technology executives in the financial services industry. Despite the increased regulation and...
Diamonds in the Rough: Driven by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria
There are many books that I have read over the years that had a profound influence on me, and are almost unknown. I don't know exactly what that says about...
Digital Innovation in Social Space: The Patriot's Jumbo, Jumbotron
The New England Patriots are installing a 164 x 41.5 foot high definition television for this upcoming season, which is puny compared to the Dallas Cowboy's...
Disney Buys Marvel: How to Design 3D Brands
Many comic fans around the world, my eldest son John included, will bemoan today's announcement that the Disney entertainment zaibatsu will swallow up...
Disruptive Design: Icarus meet air traffic control!
Oliver Yeh a first year Mechanical Engineering student at MIT just successfully designed, launched and retrieved a camera 17.5 miles into the atmosphere and...
Disruptive Innovation Mashup? The Copenhagen Wheel
Big Think reported yesterday that the Copenhagen Wheel, which was designed at MIT's media lab is going to win the $15,000 Dyson Prize for design. The video...
Disruptive Thinking: 5 attributes to consider
Every once in a while you see something which is such a fresh solution to a problem you just say ahhhh. Check out this skytrain/bus idea about how to float...
Do You Curate Your Audience?
Earlier this week, in a hot New York City, I was having some tea and lemonade with a dear friend who is a senior publishing executive. When our conversation...
Do Your Knowledge Workers Have a "Bitsmith"?
Along with my colleagues Jeff Hesse and Terry Holliday, I have been trying to understand what makes some teams of knowledge workers more productive than...
Does Cisco Have its Head in the Clouds
Many pundits are railing about Cisco's move into the server market because the company's current gross margins are 10-20% less in the server market than in...
eBay Is Losing its Knack for Listening to the Market!
Everyone has less acute hearing as we grow older. Include eBay in this group as well. New eBay chief John Donahoe has recently done several things to...
eBay Sells Skype – should Facebook have bought them?
At $2.75 billion and 405 million users, Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen and company are paying $6.79 per registered user, and a little over five times 2008...
Economics of Cognitive Work Part II: Exploring the B2B Paradigm
In a recent blog post I began to explore some ideas concerning the nature and economics of cognitive work in the modern corporation. I made a distinction...
Every Product Could be a Platform
John Sviokla &Tony Paoni The pressure to create new value and extract it through both higher prices and intellectual property protection (where possible) is...
Eyeballs, Eyeballs Everywhere and Not an Ad to Link!
A few days ago (April 26) Gary Hamel wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal explaining what Google needs to do to keep growing. He said that they, like...
Finding Money in Hard Times
Many firms are trimming budgets - across the board. In general that is a bad idea - like when the Romans used to decimate the legions pushing every tenth...
Five Attributes of Paradigm Breaking Innovations
Recently, a team consisting of MIT students, along with Pratt & Whitney and Aurora Flight Science Corporation announced a radical new design for a jetliner...
Five Keys to Creating an Information Advantage
The value of having superior information has been true throughout human history, and the fact that my friend Tom Davenport's book on Competing on Analytics...
Five Ways Augmented Reality Will Change your Business
My colleague Anand Rao and I think that augmented reality is going to be a big deal for businesses. What is it? It is the idea that locations, devices, even...
Four Implications of the Internet of Things for Business
I believe we will see a 10,000 to 100,000 increase in the number of computers, phones, devices and living things attached to the internet in the next 5-10...
Free is Not Just Another Price: Storm may be the first device with iPhone potential – John Sviokla & Caroline
The iPhone is not just a device, it is an entire business design combining the device, price, and application innovation market. If BlackBerry wants to...
From Pigeons to Oodle! Wal-Mart move to the new info advantage...
Paul Reuter, who later founded the Reuters press agency, used a fleet of pigeons to deliver news and stock prices, including the outcome of the Battle of...
Get More Engaged in the Conversations About Your Company
Like it or not, there are people talking about your company on the web right now. You must be aware of that conversation and engage it with authenticity. If...
Gifting as Branding: How Coke & Pepsi Use Social Media
Coke & Pepsi are very active in social media and I think their hard work is helping to build up a "trust bank" with their audience. As has been widely...
Google Earth and The Demand Lens
My older brother Skip is a doctor who started and runs a substance abuse clinic in Rhode Island. His business is booming! But if you are not in the cheap...
Google v. Facebook: The battle for the world's attention
If you are the type of person who likes to think about where things might be going I'd suggest you start watching the evolving competitive battle between...
Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Now Foursquare? The loosely coupled operating system for the web...
Not long ago, I was presenting along with some folks to the senior executive team at a large division of a massive insurance company. I had the great...
Google: The best damn demand chain management company
Every desire turns into a search. Search is now the most popular function on computers. ComScore just announced that Google increased their share of search...
Google's App Inventor: More needed duct tape for our digital world
When something gets modular, the opportunity to create many more innovations skyrockets. Hundreds, or thousands or millions of inventors can give something...
Google's FastFlip: Good for us! Good for media?
Google's new fastflip technology which has launched with three dozen publishers -- including Slate, Cosmopolitan and the New York Times -- implements an...
High Frequency Trading – or “place” really matters when you’re working at the speed of light!
Office space near the Chicago exchanges goes for $2,000 per month for six square feet - because high frequency trading firms want to be close enough that...
How Barcodes and Smartphones Will Rearchitect Information
Check out my new post at Harvard Business Review which talks about the new physicality of information -- linking marketplace & marketspace:...
How Behavioral Economics Can Help Cure the Health Care Crisis
This post was co-authored with Bret Schroeder and Tom Weakland and is also posted at HBR at http://tinyurl.com/yel2j3y Noncompliance with medical advice is...
How Green Is Your IT? (With Kevin McGilloway)
For organizations yearning to become greener while also reducing costs, Information Technology may be an unexpected place to find relief. But it should be...
How Smart is Your Skin? Information as an Organizational Problem
When I was a kid, I played with mercury I harvested from thermometers. (I also made lead weight belts from scraps of lead I retrieved from gutter repairs we...
How the iPad is Like the Tesla Roadster
Courtesy of my dear friend Peer Munck (Founder of MunckMix , a music distributor), I just had my first ride in a Tesla Roadster , the $129,000 electric...
How to Make Decision Making More Adaptable with Layers
Co-authored with Chris Curran Never before has such a mass of data existed . Needless to say, all this information complicates the decision-making process....
I Need a Miracle Every Day: Fishy Sensors...
My grandmother Catherine McCaig lived to be 105 years old, and worked until she was 99. She cried when she saw the beginning of James Cameron's Titanic...
Icon Brands and Why Everyone Needs One
Bernard Lacoste's recent passing, is a good time to mark something that he brought to a high art -- the creation of an Icon Brand. When I was a college...
Idea Markets: How to use internal markets to help innovations run the budgeting gauntlet!
Bill Taylor, in an article in the NYTimes published March 26, 2006, told the story of Rite Solutions, a software company that has a market for ideas -...
If Only Software Would Rust...
How many organizations are hampered by their existing technology base rendering them inflexible? I think many more than are willing to admit it. If you...
If You Stick to Your Knitting, You'll get stuck!
When I started using my new Amazon Kindle , their 10.3 ounce electronic reader, it became clear to me that Jeff Bezos is rewriting our relationship to...
If your fields could talk, what would they say?
I’ve been pondering the following quote from David Friedberg, founder and former CEO of Climate Corporation : “Our strategy is to make the probabilistic...
Innovating at Scale in a Successful Company: What Microsoft Could Learn from Lo
Large successful organizations have a hard time creating large scale innovations. When a company's on the brink of death, they entertain many radical...
Innovation and "Noble Failure": Lessons from Dave Pottruck
My dear friend Dave Pottruck was co-CEO at Charles Schwab (along with Chuck himself) when they reinvented themselves from being just a bricks and mortar...
Innovation Lessons From BP's Misery
The ongoing tragedy of BP's well disaster makes me both sad and mad at the same time, and I've been trying to think if there is anything useful to learn...
Innovation Lessons from the Battle of Normandy
Shortly after the American's and Brits landed in Normandy they found themselves caught up in a region known as the Bocage. In the Bocage, there are many,...
Innovations in Attention: The need for filters and feedback.
Howard Greenstein has a nice article on Mashable which notes why content feedback and filters are necessary in social media. We've all experienced that...
Innovations in Control: Do you have the right cost of capital for today's environment?
This post is co-author Joseph Calandro, Jr., author of Applied Value Investing (NY: McGraw-Hill, 2009). One of the most important and overlooked innovations...
Innovations in Interface: Guitar Band and Dance Central
Harmonix, the people who brought you the ever popular game Rock Band, have now created two interesting innovations in technology interface using the...
Innovations in Listening to the Market: eBay could do better...
eBay recently guided Wall Street to lower numbers. I'm always amazed that eBay can't grow faster because they have lots of information on millions and...
Innovations in Use: Is the iPad to computers as transistors were to radios?
A few days ago the iPad just passed 2,000,000 units in sales in under 60 days. Why is that? I think its because the device allows people to take their...
Inside the Huddle: Connecting Strategy with Execution
Co-authored with Chris Curran We've hit the point in the summer when football training camps are almost upon us–one of our favorite times of the year....
Intel & Vice: Innovation where hip meets bits, and the Digital Gift meets art
It always amazes me how the most creative folks often have one part of their radical plan which is very old style and conservative. In particular, Vice ,...
Interface Tips from Pablo Picasso and Google
"Good artists copy, great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso Great art always draws upon deep images which are familiar to us on a fundamental level. I'm...
iPad: The Remote Control for Everything?
At this year's cable show , Comcast CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated , the iPad as the new remote control for your for your video experience. Above is ABC's...
iPod Jumps the Shark: Why Apple Will Loose Dominance in Digital Music
Even Great Products Can't Beat an Eco-System The iPod is doomed; not this month, not this year, maybe not even the next year. But soon enough, Apple will...
Is “The Gig” The Right Way to Design Creative Knowledge Work?
Yesterday, my colleague Caroline Calkins and I were on the phone with Dr. Robert Ballard , the man who found the Titanic, and also helped find two lost...
Is Context King?
con·text (/ˈkäntekst/) n. The part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning. The circumstances in which...
Is Your Industry in Danger of Being Disrupted?
There is much talk about innovation -- and there are many approaches to creating new things, from the famous "open innovation" ideas of Henry Chesbrough to...
It's the Future, Stupid: Why most CRM systems don't deliver their potential
At the core of any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a very simple idea, you want to tailor your business system to deliver the best...
It’s Time to Reinvent Knowledge Work
Dr. Robert Ballard and his team have used robots to explore the mid-Atlantic ridge where our earth births her new "skin" by oozing out lava more than15,000...
iTunes: I hate it when I'm wrong
Well, I have to admit it. I was wrong, so wrong. As the father of five, and someone married to the same Eileen Marie Harvey for 25 and 1/2 years, you would...
Jan 15Is This Innovation Too Disruptive for My Firm?
One of the trickiest decisions in business is to assess: is this innovation too innovative for my firm? You need to decide, will the core business embrace...
JP Morgan Chase’s Risk Lessons: Are you oxymoronic enough?
Risk management is almost an oxymoron - like Jumbo Shrimp . Firms that are great at risk management are fastidious about statistically significant effects,...
M-Health and Edge Innovation: Why the stimulus package must refocus its healthcare spend
No one disagrees that we need to take doctor's records from their 17th century, paper-based, folio state into the electronic world, and the stimulus package...
Marketing Remix (with Antony Paoni)
It has been reported that Wal-Mart, which represents almost two percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States, is "afraid" of Google because...
Media is the New Ingredient for Every Product or Service
Television is not dead - it has simply morphed to a innovative mode where new talent, stories, and content is bubbling up from the more fertile primordial...
Members vs Customers: How the Obama and Clinton Online Campaigns Differ
On Tuesday, January 8, the giants of the presidential battle will knock heads in the always important New Hampshire primary, and far beneath the froth of...
MyHealthspace: Forget dating, we're dying here!
Many years ago, there were a few influential academic articles that predicted that the coming web of information technology would cause more activities to...
Night of the Living Dead Productions: Culture remix in the age of interactivity
When it comes to content, the internet collapses time. "Now", "then", and in some cases even the "future", is a click away. This means that every piece of...
Open Wireless Dawns at Last: Or why the 700MHz auction matters to everyone
Your cellular service - phone or BlackBerry - is one of the last "closed" technologies and this month that combination of device and network is finally on...
People or Machines & Transparency: Twin innovations in service
Esurance.com 's current advertising campaign emphasizes the fact that their customers can interact with technology when they don't want to talk with people...
Policing Google and Other Fun Topics: Ben Edelman
I met a very bright young man today by the name of Ben Edelman , an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, who is involved in a number of...
Power to the Edge
The four fundamental principles of the agile, "edge-based" organization are situational awareness, skills, values, and decision rights. For instance,...
Radical Continuity: What any retailer can learn from Nordstrom
I'm coming to believe every good is a convenience good. A recent New York Times article reported that Nordstrom has integrated their in-store inventory with...
Real Time Brand Management
On March 13, a Virgin America flight from Los Angeles to New York was diverted from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Stewart airport in Newburgh,...
Sales Reinvention: Why the iPad is a person to person innovation
Nothing happens until somebody sells something. -- Anonymous I admit it. I love salespeople. There are few things more precious to an enterprise than...
Science and Ideology (Not scientology!)
A few weeks ago I was presenting an approach to management that was at its core a "scientific" approach; not in the narrow Frederick Taylor sense of time...
Seeing Around the Corner: Can you know what innovations are coming?
I was talking with my friend Chris Curran today, our CTO, and he said, "you ought to write a post about 'seeing around the corner'". (Chris also mentioned...
Should Google Vertically Integrate?
Today, Google announced that it will move into the travel space with its $700 million acquisition of ITA, a flight information software company. If I were...
Simplicity is Really Complicated with Paul D'Alessandro (Also posted at HBR)
Intuit just bought Mint.com for $170,000,000. Mint is a simple, web and phone based tool with a great design interface that helps people manage their...
Social Killer Apps and the Humanization of the Marketspace
Today's New York Times article joins new stories about Zynga (formally Zynga Game Network ), the maker of FarmVille, MafiaWars and other popular games on...
Sometimes It's Just Genius
Well, the more I stare at this poster by Milton Glazer, created to announce his own work, the more I think of the phrase: the eternal lightness of being...
Speed Selling & Innovation: Lessons from the master
I want to post some additional thoughts about Gordon Bell's comments on my previous post on speed selling and innovation. For those of use who know Gordon,...
Spending Into the Skid: Don't overcut IT in a downturn or you will regret it later...
When we learned to drive many years ago, back in the age of rear wheel drive, we were both taught to "turn into the skid" because our natural instincts to...
Starbucks Crowdsources Two Obvious Apps That Every Retailer Should Have!
Starbucks has announced that they are fielding two applications, in test, that help users find their stores, explore the menu and nutritional information....
Taming the Torrent of Data... For competitive advantage...
I recently had the good fortune of leading our Diamond Exchange, where we discussed how companies could create competitive advantage through better use of...
Ten Propositions for the Virtual Age...
Back in 1993, Jeffrey Rayport and I were trying to understand the implications of the exploding information world. It was about a year before the first...
The "New" Control Revolution: Or why the current analytics trend is not a fad...
One of my favorite business books of all times is The Control Revolution by James Beniger. It has been some time since I read it, but as I remember the...
The Achilles Heel of Customer Information
Almost every firm can compete better if they just mastered speed and accuracy of customer data. It is that simple. You can have an advantage over a...
The Battle for the World's Attention: Facebook's social graph versus Google's page link
Google's recently reported $100-200 million investment in the company Zynga , the very popular online game company, is their latest attempt to finally get...
The Best Companies Use the Best Ideas
As someone who has been around organizations for a long time and working with them to create and implement new ideas, I observe that many firms have a...
The CIO: The duck billed platypus of the C-suite
This post is co-authored with Chris Curran Information technology is the only part of the business which is both a line and a staff function. IT not only...
The Dual Nature of Knowledge Work Productivity
When we think about knowledge work productivity, it is a very tricky subject. The reason it is tricky is because at one extreme we can routinize knowledge...
The Economics of Cognitive Work: Some initial ideas
I have been long fascinated by the economics of cognitive work and I plan to explore this topic across a number of blog entries. I use the term cognitive...
The Fifth Wave: Why social media is here to stay
I believe that we are in the fifth wave of information technology adoption in society and organizations. The first was centralized mainframe computing,...
The Google Doodle Logic
On August 14, 2009, Google put the "doodle" above on their homepage to remind the world that it was the birthday of Hans Christian Ørsted – the father of...
The Importance of The Sales Cycle in Getting an Innovation Off the Ground
Time hurts all deals. -- Anonymous A key reason innovations fail is that inventors neglect to correctly assess how long it takes to sell something truly...
The Integration of Marketplace & Marketspace: The killer app for healthcare?
In our recent Diamond Digital IQ study, we found that only 3% of healthcare companies were focused on innovation as their primary strategic emphasis. You...
The Madness of Crowds...
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, got flack recently because he took special interest in a page about somone he was dating. The Wikipedia community...
The Netflix Prize: Designing a market for ideas... (Also posted at HBR)
There are a couple of key lessons every business can glean from the Netflix Prize. The first is that if you have a data driven problem it is possible to tap...
The Physicality of Information
Today's Boston Globe reports on some work at MIT's Media Lab. One of the projects is Proverbial Wallets -- which creates a wallet that vibrates when there...
The Power of Collective Risk Absorption
Every time there is an innovation in risk absorption the economy flourishes. The invention of the shared stock company by the Dutch and the English allowed...
The Rise of the Networked Economy: Or, why Williamson and Ostrom Won the 2009 Nobel in Economics
I believe that the reason Oliver Williamson , whose work builds on the seminal work of Ronald Coase on transaction costs and Elinor Ostrom , who worries...
The Web is Dead? or Just in the Modularity Cycle?
Wired magazine recently announced on its cover that the Web is Dead . I confess I really like the magazine despite some of the hyperbolic rants that Chris...
The Zagat's Guide to Doctors: Reputation management in the digital age
A recent New York Times article mentioned that the very famous Nina Zagat was entering the Doctor rating business for insurance company Wellpoint. The...
Thinking About the Thinking Class: Outsource low leverage thinking work, offshore high leverage thinking work
If something is digitizable, and can be well described and monitored, it will be traded. Services are more and more tradable every day. The best way to...
Thought Experiment: What if Facebook, Skype and PayPal Merged?
Many people don't know that Bostonian William Crapo (Billy) Durant founded General Motors, and if you ever go to the old General Motors Building in Detroit,...
Thoughts on 9/11: How can we design resiliency?
I am enough of a utilitarian that when I think of tragedy -- like the sorrowful events of eight years ago -- I always ask: Did we learn anything from the...
Trading Bits to Move Iron: How industrial after markets influence profits
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a story about how Boeing purchased Aviall , one of the largest parts distributors and a host of an electronic...
Turning Data Into Dollars: Wal-Mart Said What?
The front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal reported how Tesco in the UK is beating up on Wal-Mart's Asda chain by using Clubcard data to analyze...
Understanding Iconic Value
I love Ike Perlmutter . He understood that Iron Man, The Hulk, Spiderman and 4,997 other characters had tremendous long term value. He took hold of Marvel...
Used = Green: Environmentally friendly demand creation
One way to effectively market while being friendly to the environment is to facilitate the market in used goods. When I was a kid my father used to make me...
Vannevar Bush: I forgot he predicted Google and Wikipedia!
Did you ever have the experience of rereading something that you read a long time ago and say to yourself, "Wow -- this is so much better than I realized!"?...
Waiting on Genius: Musing on why business design is so hard...
In his brilliant book, Notes on the Synthesis of Form , Christopher Alexander asks, why can an illiterate builder create a dwelling that is cool in the...
What Any Leader Can Learn from Microsoft's $44.6 Billion Yahoo Tender
All great strategy is a combination of the obvious and the subtle; of offensive boldness and defensive genius. Steve Ballmer is making just such a move with...
What do Movies and Junkyards Have in Common?
Strangely, the media businesses and industrial companies are both facing a similar challenge -- the dead hand of the past is influencing today's...
What Would Darwin Do?: Musings on his 200th Birthday
Reading the above title you might think that I'm going to advocate a laissez-faire approach to management in which the Chief Executive encourages ruthless...
What Would Disney Do to Market You? (aka What Would Disney Do [WWDD] Installment #2)
Walt Disney was equal parts technological genius and ancient story teller. He drew upon stories that reverberated with our humanity and told them in...
What Would Disney Do?
I often wonder what Walt Disney would be doing if he were alive today (e.g. WWDD). My guess is that he would be pioneering internet content, for more than...
What Would Henry Ford Do? (WWHFD?)
The easiest way to increase productivity of your knowledge workers is to simply increase the amount of "screen estate" they have. I recently suggested that...
What You Can Learn from Yahoo!’s Fumble
Technorati Tags: strategy,design,competition As far as I can tell Yahoo! did a lease/sale deal with Microsoft, thereby exiting the growing online search...
What's Your Mind-Diet? Clay Shirky versus Nick Carr
There has been a wonderful debate going on in the pages of the Wall Street Journal between Clay Shirky and Nick Carr . Carr became famous for his IT Doesn't...
When Zombies Mate: A thought experiment about the merger of GM and Sirius XM
There is something ironic about the fact that a company that sells navigation information inside the car is three times as valuable as the company that...
Where's Your Wiki?
There was a recent NYTimes article citing a study by the magazine Nature which compared Wikipedia, and Encyclopedia Britannica for accuracy. It turns out...
Why Amazon Will Innovate Past Kindle and Microsoft's Bing Will Never Win
When I bought my iPad it was very easy to download my new Kindle application to read all my books I bought on Amazon, and I'm sure that Jeff Bezos knows...
Why Doesn’t Microsoft Turn Outlook Into the World’s Social Operating System
The ironic thing is that Microsoft's Outlook is the world's "Rolodex", but they have not figured out how to link up all the latent connections that sit...
Why Every Firm Can Learn From Facebook's Stumble
When you share information on a social site: Who owns the content? Who controls it? This is a very complex and interesting question at the core of...
Why Google Should Buy OfferPal
Offerpal reports itself to be the leading platform for the monetization of social networks. Their key service is the ability to give points to people who...
Why Innovation Struggles: The triumph of explication over imagination
The ancient Oxford College All Souls, founded in 1438, has since 1932 been giving a one word exam as part of a two day battery of admissions tests. Imagine...
Why RFID Won't Fly for a While
How to Save RFID Initiatives for the Department of Defense and Wal-Mart When Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense (DoD) both push a new initiative it gets...
Why the Apple iPhone 4 May Change Communication
All true breakthroughs in an art form come when there is a change in perspective. Some say that Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio (1401-1428)...
Why the Internet is As Important to Our Recovery As the Stimulus Package
I am optimistic that we will have the most innovative decade that this country has ever seen, and it is largely due to the fact that the internet has...
Why the Internet Makes Me Closer to My Kids: Or how Jimmy Hendrix moved me toward the more utopian vision…
I think I'm an optimistic dystopian, because I have a much greater affinity for dystopian writers than utopian ones - but I believe we'll muddle through no...
Why Twitter is the Duct Tape of Marketing and Why Every Firm Needs to Know How to Use It
Chris Curran & John Sviokla Duct tape is universally useful because it is incredibly simple, almost infinitely flexible, easily available, and cheap....
wikiCalc: The next killer app?
Following on yesterday's blog, I wanted to reflect on a more specific Wiki innovation. My dear friend, and software genius, and wonderful human being, Dan...
Will Knowledge Work Ever Escape the Grip of Frederick Taylor?
I think the most underrated thinker of the 20th century may be Frederick Taylor. Ironically, Taylor's influence on people's day to day existence is wider...
Will the CIO Lose the C?
Co-authored with Chris Curran There is some disturbing new data for the role of the CIO. Thomas Wailgum of CIO.com says , "Given the... warning signs, it's...
Wolframalpha vs. Google = Power vs. Simplicity?
Google tapped into an existing set of mental relationships to make their model work. Think of Andy Warhol; Andy worked with Campbell Soup Cans and Marilyn...
Yahoo’s Reorganization: Moving deck chairs on the Titanic?
I get worried when a person who grew up in a slower software world (e.g. Autodesk) gets to be CEO of a firm like Yahoo! which sits in the hyper fast moving...
You Get What You Don't Pay For: The key to knowledge management
My friend Dan Ariely , a Professor at MIT's Media Lab and Sloan School , and his colleague James Heyman wrote a wonderful little paper called Effort for...
You Robot: An innovation in conversations?
I have been a big believer in the idea that we need to reinvent the meeting. Seth Godin wrote an interesting post about how to use the iPad to improve...
Your Innovation is Hard? Lessons from the Brooklyn Bridge
Yesterday was the 127th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge , and I confess I love her. To me The Brooklyn Bridge is the pinnacle of practical...
YouTube & The 48th Anniversary of the Visual Global Village
On July 10, 1962, Telstar I was launched, the first communications satellite to transmit live television across the Atlantic. The term Global Village was...