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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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 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 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....
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...
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...
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 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 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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
Power to the Edge
The four fundamental principles of the agile, "edge-based" organization are situational awareness, skills, values, and decision rights. For instance,...
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,...
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...
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...
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 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 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 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 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...
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...
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...
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 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 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....
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...