Jack Frizzell's Profile

in the new media age transparency is what delivers trust. He stressed that news today still has to be accurate and fair, but it is as important for the readers, listeners and viewers to see how the news is produced, where the information comes from, and how it works. The emergence of news is as important, as the delivering of the news itself.

Information is not journalism, he explained further. You get a lot of things, when you open up Twitter in the morning, but not journalism. Journalism needs discipline, analysis, explanation and context, he pointed out, and therefore for him it is still a profession. The value that gets added with journalism is judgment, analysis and explanation - and that makes the difference.

OK, enough waxing poetic about the Muse.  My point is this: We bloggers have power. And blog posts aren’t the only place we can employ that power.  That is what the email I mentioned taught me — as a writer, we can choose to write well to audiences great and small.

This may seem fairly obvious, but bear with me.  You send and receive emails every day.  But how often do you get a really well-written email, that really tells you someone sat down and spent a significant amount of effort crafting it, and then sending it only to you?

It doesn’t happen that often to me.  When I got an email like that recently, I felt, somehow, that I was in the presence of greatness.  As if a president or statesman from a time gone past, a time when fine writing was valued as much for its art as it was for its utility, had set quill to paper and hashed out a missive just for me.

I suddenly realized that this is why the electronic newsletter is still alive, and still great, despite criticism.  This is why writing a blog entry is important, no matter the size of your audience.  And this is why taking time to write an email with the same effort and thought is equally as important.

the classical way of working has been to create finished, perfect-as-possible outcomes (products, services, etc.) from opaque, unknowable, lengthy processes which outsiders, within or outside the organization, could not directly perceive, alter, or improve. As Jarvis writes of traditional work methods:

It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up

The theory

How low-end disruption occurs over time.

Christensen distinguishes between "low-end disruption" which targets customers who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high-end of the market and "new-market disruption" which targets customers who have needs that were previously unserved by existing incumbents.

"Low-end disruption" occurs when the rate at which products improve exceeds the rate at which customers can adopt the new performance. Therefore, at some point the performance of the product overshoots the needs of certain customer segments. At this point, a disruptive technology may enter the market and provide a product which has lower performance than the incumbent but which exceeds the requirements of certain segments, thereby gaining a foothold in the market.

In low-end disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market.

The roiling, seething 21^st century demands nothing less
than a new economic roadmap: new rules for new kinds of institutions.

To begin making that roadmap concrete, let's highlight the six critical mistakes
Detroit made by following yesterday's rules, to draw out some of the new rules
of 21^st century business - new rules that you can use to start
reconceiving, reinventing, and revolutionizing your own organizations.

Twitter is one of the world's most radical management innovators. It's revolutionary because it brings 21st Century DNA roaring raucously to life: it is a living expression of the new principles of organization and management we've been discussing.

Here are Twitter's ten rules for radical innovators (which have, just maybe, had a bit of influence when it comes to Twitter).

At present, 41 classrooms have been converted so far. Another 40 will be converted in the fall. And all of the district's 300 classrooms should be finished within five years.

According to McGuire, the entire project is being funded through savings from the district's open source project, estimated at about $150,000 to $200,000 per year. All of the savings are being reinvested back into the school, said McGuire.

Bezos also had some good advice for company founders and entrepreneurs: “Be stubborn on the big things and be flexible on the details.”

On failure, he pointed out that only rarely is the cost of failure more than the cost of not trying anything at all:

One of the reasons companies are so non-experimental is that they over-dramatize how expensive failure is going to be.

Failure is not that expensive. You almost never hear a company criticized for failing to try something

As long as it is not a bet-the-company kind of failure, most companies can survive. Amazon has tried and failed at auctions and search, for example. But its bets on Web services and the Kindle are paying off. The winners pay for the losers. That is important to remember.