business - Adriana Lukas on Diigo

30 Nov 09

Mr Bojangles: Worshipping workshops

As usual in business, as in life, there is not a right or wrong way to tackle problems. There are just different ways. And lively, boisterous brainstorming sessions are certainly one of the tools in the kitbag for executives to use. But for introverts they can be a real pain and extroverts need to be aware of that before they go galloping off down that path, shouting yehaar and dragging their depressed looking introvert colleagues behind them.

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workshop introvert business brainstorm disruption management

05 Nov 09

Comcast: Twitter Has Changed The Culture Of Our Company

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twitter comcast culture business socialmedia disruption management

As a very unhappy Comcast customer, I’ve had a number of interactions with Comcast’s Twitter team. There’s no doubt, they are very responsive, and are trying to be helpful. The real problem Comcast has is that their product and all other forms of service are simply not up to par, to put it nicely (I often put it much less nicely on Twitter).

Still, Comcast is a great example of a large company using Twitter in a meaningful way. And don’t think for a second that Twitter doesn’t know that. Expect them to unleash their monetization idea about charging these companies sometime soon.

27 Oct 09

Social Media Legal Review - thinkdifferenthealth

excrutiating, funny and too true.

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socialmedia nalts funny legal business video healthcare

08 Oct 09

Cultivate the Creative Class Within Your Companies… or Else - WSJ @ World Business Forum - WSJ

this is really bad video full of drivel. No wonder corporate america is so ghastly.

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corporate US management company business wsj crisis strategy disruption management

02 Oct 09

Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting — HBS Working Knowledge

I think they got it wrong about goals. It's not setting goals that's
the problem, it's what level you set them at - if it's systemic, i.e.
organisational goals imposed top down on individuals with only
rudimentary or wrong understanding of their motivations then you get what the authors' of the paper are seeing. If you however let the goals set at the level of the individual and let them emerge to the systemic i.e. organisational or collective level, then you get purpose and aligned motivations, which is what moves the earth. :)

But still, interesting nevertheless and another reminder that most of the management theory and practice doesn't see the blindingly obvious - which is the individual. It's all very industrial era approach and until organisations (businesses and other institutions) get rid of that hangover, we wont see much improvement of 'management' and the way human beings are treated by systems in general. Death to hierarchy, long live... well, network? Something else? :)

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management goals business control HBR organisation hierarchy

29 Sep 09

Sprouter

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sprouter network socialnetwork application business

04 Sep 09

The Economic Incentives of the 'Store-within-a-Store' Retail Model - Knowledge@Wharton

retail geekery. Only for the truly interested.

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retail store businessmodel incentives business wharton

Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

another great list. common theme - company comes last, as it were. even less common.

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business companies mindset fredwilson

OnlyOnce: Ten Characteristics of Great Investors

very good and relevant. seems the running theme is humility and common sense. Very uncommon in these circles.

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investors VC business human

02 Sep 09

Hilarious Video Shows Perfect Office Camouflage Techniques - Camouflage - Gizmodo

brilliant!

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office business camouflage funny video

01 Sep 09

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED.com

the best thing I have seen for a long time!

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motivation psychology ted incentives interesting business businessmodels organisation human

27 Aug 09

Why corporate IT should unchain our office computers. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

amen to that.

www.slate.com/...all - Preview

IT corporate technology business stupidity

25 Aug 09

How a Little 'Friction' Can Change a Competitive Landscape - Knowledge@Wharton

interesting, if slightly counter-intuitive research. but it does make sense

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm - Preview

friction business competition analysis businessmodel transactions

Known as "industry analysis," the framework's "five forces" of the market -- rivalry, barriers to entry, the existence of substitute products, buyer power and supplier power -- have formed the hub of classic business strategy research
Known as "firm-level analysis" or the "resource-based view," this analytical framework assumes that a business is successful because it possesses some type of competitive advantage -- a patent, a unique way of doing business, a rare knowledge or talent, a special product -- that other companies in the industry lack.
9 more annotations...
- "frictions." The word describes any forces that make it difficult for buyers and sellers to connect. For example, a poor location could be a source of friction for a retailer, because customers will have to go out of their way to visit the store. A poorly designed web site could create friction for an online business if potential customers are unable to find what they are looking for easily.
- "A market with a lot of frictions is a market where it is hard to shop around," Chatain says. That means buyers and sellers in some markets may never match up.
- in regard to frictions, the researchers discovered an inverted U-shaped curve: A company's profits would suffer whenever frictions in the market were extremely high or low, but at moderate levels, a company's profits could increase. So there is an optimal level of friction in the marketplace, the researchers concluded. "Even if you're the best firm around, you still want some friction, and this is somewhat counterintuitive," Chatain says. "When you reduce friction, one would usually think it must be good for the strong firm. But it's not always the case. We found that stronger firms want to have less friction than weaker firms, but they don't want to [entirely] eliminate frictions."
- That's because the less friction there is, the more firms have to compete directly with each other -- in industry-level parlance, rivalry increases. To win customers, the strong firm will have to cut prices. Eventually price-cutting shaves profit margins to the point that winning over new customers isn't worth it. Having a small amount of friction in the industry allows a company to keep prices at an optimal level.
- Traditionally, firm-level analysis assumed that if a company did not innovate to become more like its rival, it was because the firm was weak in some way -- slow to adapt a new technology, unable to duplicate a competitor's way of doing business, or simply less efficient -- or because there were barriers to imitation. "The thinking up to now was mostly that they did not [innovate] because it was hard to imitate," Chatain states. "Our conclusion is that, to some extent, one additional possible reason why firms stay different... is that because of the level of frictions, they don't have the incentive to invest to become better."
- So, weaker firms benefit from high levels of friction because it allows them to capture customers in small niche markets. A firm that is considerably weaker than a competitor might be able to survive because of friction, but would have little incentive to improve, because improvement would not earn it significant market share.
- "As a producer, what this paper suggests is that it's a good idea to understand against whom you are competing," according to Chatain. "You have to understand what share of your customer base is really making you compete against the other suppliers, and who the suppliers are."
- In other words, frictions split the hardware stores' customers into different segments. Some customers will always go to the chain store, others will always go to the local hardware store, and a portion will go to both. This is much more complicated than the theoretical world of perfect competition, where every customer has equal access to every supplier. "In the perfect competition model, you never think of the cost of finding alternatives," says Chatain. At the chain store "you might find a cheaper hammer, but it's going to be a very small savings."
  - surely, the internet has changed that somewhat, though there is a long way to go before it's easy to find good alternatives in retail - on 2009-08-25
  Add Sticky Note
- From a strategic standpoint, this means the two hardware stores are only competing head-to-head for a portion of their customers. If the local hardware store wants to increase its business, it should focus on the portion of its customers who are actually putting it in competition with the chain store, not the die-hard chain store devotees that it will never win. It may never be able to modernize enough to win over the customers who like the chain store better. But if it invests in the right way, it might be able to capture more business from customers it already has. And, depending on the local hardware store's market share, the best change could be no change at all.
  
  "It makes sense for them not to try to be like the other one," Chatain notes. "They are better off concentrating on the small customer segment that doesn't bring them into competition with the other firm... If you realize that some of your potential customers are not really in play, you can focus on them to be more loyal."

10 Aug 09

Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road - O'Reilly Radar

that's about right, i think stronger language would have been appropriate but Jeff Jarvis already has been doing that. :)

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media business disruption management trends newspaper o'reilly

04 Aug 09

Thinkers and Doers : What’s in a Name? What’s in Your Cup? How Starbucks’ Signage Sneakery is a Sign of the Times

interesting

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starbucks business experiment branding interesting

31 Jul 09

SpinVox - Blog

good response. seems some people don't understand why disclosing the % of human processes voicemails is sensitive information.

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spinvox technology human PR communications business

29 Jul 09

Changing organizational structure to increase productivity - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Strategic Organization

enterprise as a provider, not enabler. until such time when formal networks are superceded by 'personal' or informal network, i.e. driven by employees, not the organisation or processes, there is no hope for enterprise 2.0 or some such. the whole point of web 2.0 and social software is that it is not a provider but enabler, it's not user-centric but ultimately user-driven.

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enterprise2.0 business organisation hierarchy socialmedia socialsoftware mckinsey

These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.
Productive professionals make big enterprises competitive, yet these employees now increasingly find their work obstructed. Creating and exchanging knowledge and intangibles through interaction with their professional peers is the very heart of what they do. Yet most of them squander endless hours searching for the knowledge they need—even if it resides in their own companies—and coordinating their work with others.
10 more annotations...
- Today's big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals. In fact, their vertically oriented organizational structures, retrofitted with ad hoc and matrix overlays, nearly always make professional work more complex and inefficient. These vertical structures—relics of the industrial age—are singularly ill suited to the professional work process. Professionals cooperate horizontally with one another throughout a company, yet vertical structures force such men and women to search across poorly connected organizational silos to find knowledge and collaborators and to gain their cooperation once they have been found.
- Professionals seeking to collaborate thus need to go up the organization before they can go across it. Effective collaboration often takes place only when the would-be collaborators enlist hierarchical line managers to resolve conflicts between competing organizational silos. Much time is lost reconciling divergent agendas and finding common solutions.
- The result is endless meetings, phone calls, and e-mail exchanges as talented professionals—line managers or members of shared utilities—waste valuable time grappling with the complexity of a deeply flawed organizational structure.
- To raise the productivity of professionals, big corporations must change their organizational structures dramatically, retaining the best of the traditional hierarchy while acknowledging the heightened value of the people who hatch ideas, innovate, and collaborate with peers to generate revenues and create value through intangible assets such as brands and networks. Companies can achieve these goals by modifying their vertical structures to let different groups of professionals focus on clearly defined tasks—line managers on earnings, for instance, and off-line teams on longer-term growth initiatives—with clear accountability. Then these companies should create new, overlaid networks and marketplaces that make it easier for professionals to interact collaboratively and to find the knowledge they need.
- Finally, to promote the creation of enterprise-wide formal networks, parallel structures and parallel roles should be established across the whole extent of the company. Defining the role of the comptroller or the country manager consistently throughout it, for example, helps the people in those roles to interact and collaborate.
- Because these market and network overlays help professionals to interact horizontally across the organization without having to go up or down the vertical chain of command, they boost rather than hinder productivity. Companies that establish such overlays are making investments not only to minimize the search and coordination costs of professionals who exchange knowledge and other valuable intangibles among themselves but also to maximize the opportunities for all sorts of cost-effective, productive interactions among them.
- As we have argued, to promote the exchange of knowledge, companies must remove structural barriers to the interaction of their professionals. These companies must also learn how to encourage people who may not know each other—after all, big corporations usually have large numbers of professionals—to work together for their mutual self-interest.
- The solution, for a company, is to boost the value of the network by investing in it and formalizing its role within the organization.
- The final set of ideas rounding out this new organizational model involves relinquishing some level of supervisory control and letting people direct themselves, guided by performance metrics, protocols, standards, values, and consequence-management systems.
- A new organizational model for today's big corporations will not emerge spontaneously from the obsolete legacy structures of the industrial age. Rather, companies must design a new model holistically, using new principles that take into account the way professionals create value. Big companies that follow these principles will get more value, at less cost, from the managers and the professionals they employ. In the process, they can become fundamentally better at overcoming the challenges—and capturing the opportunities—of today's economy.

20 Jul 09

Out of business, Clear may sell customer data - Network World

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data business customer FAIL

Customers had to provide personal information, including credit card numbers, fingerprints and iris scans in order to participate
in the program. After Clear abruptly shut its doors -- it has not yet declared bankruptcy -- some worried that this data could
fall into the wrong hands.

When Information is NOT the Answer : Andrew McAfee’s Blog

Zara's decision making processes start at the shop floor, best place if you ask me! Also, finally someone from business theory space says that sometimes data and analytics is not the best input for decision making.

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retail analytics supply information IT data business

But Zara, operating in an intensely turbulent environment, does something totally different. The company doesn’t really generate a store-level sales forecast at all. Instead, it relies on its store managers to tell headquarters what they think they could sell immediately at their locations. Headquarters then gets as many of these clothes as possible to the stores as quickly as possible.

What’s more, the store managers are given very few quantitative or analytical tools to help them make their short-term predictions. They rely largely on intuition and experience, on walking the floor and talking to customers and employees.
IT is used heavily to support execution, in short, but not at all to assist with data-based analysis or decision making about getting the right clothes into stores at the right time.
1 more annotations...
- Zara is obsessed with making good decisions about what clothes to stock, but has configured itself so that people making these decisions operate in what looks like a ‘data vacuum’ – a lack of aggregated, filtered, and massaged information from throughout the corporation. This is because the good information that Zara’s business model requires is not the kind that’s easy to digitally encode, transmit, aggregate, and analyze. Instead, it’s information that comes from watching, talking, and listening, then using the computer between our ears to pattern match, draw conclusions, and peer just a little bit into the future.

17 Jul 09

United Breaks Guitars - A Marketing Case Study In The Making

a classic market RIOT move - a customer makes a song about how airline broke his guitar. Hope this goes on and on and on....

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airline business marketRIOT marketing PR music

Adriana Lukas's Library tagged business → View Popular

Mr Bojangles: Worshipping workshops

Comcast: Twitter Has Changed The Culture Of Our Company

Social Media Legal Review - thinkdifferenthealth

Cultivate the Creative Class Within Your Companies… or Else - WSJ @ World Business Forum - WSJ

Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting — HBS Working Knowledge

Sprouter

The Economic Incentives of the 'Store-within-a-Store' Retail Model - Knowledge@Wharton

Ten Characteristics of Great Companies

OnlyOnce: Ten Characteristics of Great Investors

Hilarious Video Shows Perfect Office Camouflage Techniques - Camouflage - Gizmodo

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED.com

Why corporate IT should unchain our office computers. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

How a Little 'Friction' Can Change a Competitive Landscape - Knowledge@Wharton

Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road - O'Reilly Radar

Thinkers and Doers : What’s in a Name? What’s in Your Cup? How Starbucks’ Signage Sneakery is a Sign of the Times

SpinVox - Blog

Changing organizational structure to increase productivity - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Strategic Organization

Out of business, Clear may sell customer data - Network World

When Information is NOT the Answer : Andrew McAfee’s Blog

United Breaks Guitars - A Marketing Case Study In The Making

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