Victor
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10 years of influential business ideas
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1 min read
To celebrate s+b’s 10th anniversary, they looked back at the conceptual breakthroughs that appeared in the magazine — and invited readers to vote on which were most likely to last. Execution The Learning Organization Corporate Values Customer Relationship Management Disruptive Technology Leadership Development Organizational DNA Strategy-Based Transformation Complexity Theory Lean Thinking
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The opposite of bad PR
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1 min read
If the huge oil profits caused PR and political problems for energy companies recently, it’s only logical that taking the reverse action could have the reverse effect, which is what Citgo (U.S. arm of Venezuelan oil) did, and is getting big media attention here this morning… Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez added New York City to…
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Old school look at innovation
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2 min read
There’s a flurry of innovation talk from the old school business guard lately. Reading through it, it seems like those concerned with innovation are repeating ourselves, possibly because we’re not aware of what other work has been done and because we’re using discovery tools that aren’t revealing anything new. Jaruzelski, Dehoff, and Bordia from Booz…
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SarbOx flawed, but fixable
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1 min read
James Surowiecki’s Sarboxed In?… The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was a political knee-jerk even the Republicans couldn’t avoid, in reaction to Enron, Worldcom, etc. The complexity of the new rules went too far, requiring six figure enforcement costs, and possibly hindering small companies from going public. There are now talks of easing enforcement or modifying the Act.…
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Improvements in products, process, and culture can reinforce each other over time. Great products can have a revitilizing effect on a company’s culture. But companies with poor cultures have trouble making great products. Developing great products relies on an effective process. Cultures that acknowledge the need for process will make better products. But we’re not…
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Katzenbach and Smith’s team guidelines
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1 min read
Since I’ve been working on how to structure teams to do innovation work, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the basics in the form of The Wisdom of Teams by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith. One point they make is to differentiate between “performing teams” structured in a mindful way and…
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Tools for Thought
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2 min read
I just discovered Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought is online. It’s usefulness should be obvious from his introduction… Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC…
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Share a home-cooked meal
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1 min read
Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software created a documentary DVD of the summer interns’ experience creating an actual software product. Notice how they cook and share a meal together. I’m a big fan of establishing a relationship over home-cooked meals. Last winter I met the guys from Zago Design for the first time in one of…
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Artful Making
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2 min read
I watched State and Main recently. It’s a movie about making a movie, and hints at how that industry must blend the pure creativity of writing stories, the pure business of running a studio, and the combined creative/business endeavor of bringing together stories and studio to create a movie. I started to wonder if the…
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Labor and love
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1 min read
“There’s a simple doctrine. Outside of a person’s love the most sacred thing they can give is their labor. Labor is a very precious thing you have and any time you can combine labor and love you’ve really made a match.” — James Carville
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We’re trying to underdo the competition…
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1 min read
…No one can really beat us on the low end. It’s just what you need, and nothing you don’t. You’re always going to have more people on the low end who just need a few things.” I love that Jason Fried quote, he’s proving out the worse if better argument. One benefit he didn’t cite…
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A bakeoff of product innovation methods
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2 min read
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bakeoff is now online, in which the food R&D firm Mattson tries to create the perfect cookie. Project Delta created three teams: one traditional in-house team, an “XP” (extreme programming) team of two people, and an “open source” dream team of the industry’s best working remotely. For anyone thinking about how to…
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MITD blog
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1 min read
The mysteriously authored MITD blog is harvesting a lot of interesting business+design links.
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Designing organic milk
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1 min read
Kim Severson’s article on organic milk production and sales answered a few questions I had, namely It’s the low supply, not the production costs, that are keeping the price high. I bet some qualitative research could influence this growth curve. For example, suppose it’s more educated parents who buy organic milk for their kids. Increase…
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When is marketing not marketing?
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2 min read
For Sarah McLachlan’s World On Fire video, they spent almost the whole production budget solving the problems she’s writing about rather than producing the video. When Boots pharmacy customers weren’t taking advantage of a service that transfers prescriptions directly from the doctor, Marketing firm Naked Communications stepped in: “Boots discontinued its TV spots and had…