Victor
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Marketing Experimentation
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1 min read
Last year I hacked away at an article about the need for a greater degree of experimentation in marketing organizations, but it never really seemed to gel quite right, and eventually I abandoned it. I’m happy to see that Joseph Jaffe completed the task in Manifesto for Experimentation. Successful executives I’ve seen already embrace this…
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Feedback Leads to Expert Performance
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1 min read
Of course we know feedback in human and product performance is important, but this study from K. Anders Ericsson is still interesting. He spent 25 years interviewing and analyzing high-flying professionals and is the coeditor of the recent 918-page book Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. You have to seek out situations where you…
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Reviving How We Used to Think and Write
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1 min read
Richard Powers, winner of the 2006 National Book Award, reports how his speech recognition software has altered his experience of writing to be more like that of traditional oral culture… …I can write lying down. I can forget the machine is even there. I can live above the level of the phrase, thinking in full…
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Wilson on Change
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1 min read
It was recently the birthday of former American president [[Woodrow Wilson]], someone who knew about trying to be innovative and bringing about change. He pushed major legislation through Congress, entered World War I, and sought to establish the League of Nations. He said, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.“
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Old School Scrappy Innovator: William Norris
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1 min read
Thomas J. Watson Jr., the head of I.B.M., which was famed for its militaristic corporate culture, was incredulous over Norris’s operation. So lean, so ragtag, so bafflingly humane. In a 1963 memo, Watson wondered how Control Data achieved with just a few dozen people what he had not with several thousand. Control Data later went…
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Jews-With-Trees
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1 min read
A fun story of one couple embracing the secular side of Christmas… So as I browsed past velvet monogrammed stockings and quilted tree skirts and pine wreaths and silver-plated picture frames that doubled as stocking holders (genius!), I said to myself, as much as to my husband: “This is why I sometimes wish I celebrated…
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Louis Uchitelle asks that excellent question in the NY Times. My reaction is no: in a world of artful making, inventing without making would be difficult. “Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory,†said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. “In…
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Customer-Focus When the Customer Doesn’t Even Pay
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1 min read
Diego pointed to this article for its uncommon attention to aesthetics, I point to it for its uncommon attention to the customer: Mr. Ennes… might be the best soup kitchen chef in New York City. On Thanksgiving, when most of the cooks at the city’s other 470-some soup kitchens simply roasted turkey, he prepared “turkey…
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What is a human life worth?
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1 min read
A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Zell Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year…
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Americans Online
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1 min read
The NY Times covers the new census figures… Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.
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Goodbye Leslie
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1 min read
I just learned Leslie Harpold past away. She and I didn’t know each other well; we shared some mailing lists and traded some emails. But we didn’t know each other well for a while — I can vividly remember reading her circa 1999. In my mind she is one of that small group of passionate…
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Get Real For Free
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1 min read
The [[37Signals]] Getting Real book is now available free online as well as in PDF and paperback formats. With a focus on building web apps, it’s a great perspective on using an agile/craft way of working. It’s also a clever publishing strategy, analogous to the traditional hardcover/paperback progression: Test and then build crazy excitement around…
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Maybe Don’t Call Research “Research”
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1 min read
Here’s a small but important lesson about getting field research done in a corporate environment. If you propose research, folks may hear that word and think R&D, and that’s not capitalizable, i.e. the cost can’t be allocated against a particular product/service. That means the cost can’t be delayed and counted against future revenues (delaying costs…
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Do Customer Communities Pay Off?
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1 min read
In HBR this month is a rare, methodical (and free) look at the financial effect of online communities via a study of eBay Germany… Over the course of a year, we compared the behavior of community enthusiasts and lurkers with that of the control group. The differences were astonishing. Lurkers and community enthusiasts bid twice…
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Shoot Your Polling Place (U.S. only)
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1 min read
The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.