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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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: 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 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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...