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Review: The Core Trilogy by Chris Zook
You are a witness to strategy playing out all around you. When the local newspaper runs its yearly story about which restaurants have closed, it is really reporting on failed strategies. Every one of...
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Insights Are Better Than Ideas
DDB Worldwide recently published a “yellow paper” titled Insights that Incite (hat tip:PSFK). The gist of their “brochure” is that it is hard to break through all the clutter and you need to find...
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The 11 Problems That Kill Organizations
Or The Eleven Focus Areas for Consultants to Sell Services. This list is from Alan Weiss’ Million Dollar Consulting. The fourth edition of the book was released in July and about half way through the...
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Free Friday
In the U.S. today, we see the incredible power of price on consumer behavior as millions of people storm retail stores around the country in search of bargain. One price point being used frequently is...
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Book Review – What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
In 1995, Robert Spector wrote a book about a Northwest upscale department store chain that embraced the idea of customer service. Spector popularized the famous story of a customer returning a set of...
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Book Review – Trade-off by Kevin Maney
Tucked in Neal Stephenson’s wonderful book Snow Crash is this comparison in a fictional future where all highways are owned by corporations: CSV-5 has better throughput, but Cal-12 has better...
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The Convenience of Good Enough
Robert Capps wrote a great piece for Wired in September called The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine. He uses the Flip Camera, the MQ-1 Predator, and micro health clinics as...
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Idea Arena Podcast – Priceless Interview with William Poundstone
In this interview, I talk with Bill Poundstone, author of Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It). Poundstone says he started researching a book about Daniel Kahneman and...
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Cool Tools Reviews The 100 Best
Cool Tools is an awesome site for finding things to help get jobs done, whether silicone spatulas, a map of world history, or the lightest items for backpacking. Today site founder Kevin Kelly reviewed...
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Too Much Can Be Good
I want you to watch this episode of Wine Library TV. Gary V. talks with the guys from Three Thieves. The 20 minutes or so is not about tasting wine, but rather how these three built their business....
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The Questions Haven’t Changed
Any businessman who can answer certain basic questions better than his competitors has a major strategic advantage. Most of these questions are asked constantly., in one form or another, in virtually...
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Idea Arena Podcast – The Power of Pull Interview with John Hagel
In this interview, I talk with John Hagel about The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, a book he co-authored with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Hagel and...
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Book Review – Seizing the White Space by Mark Johnson
Not much gets written about business models. I don’t know if it isn’t sexy enough or it somehow gets bucketed into the sleepfest of most strategy books. The only book I can think of, in recent years,...
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Idea Arena Podcast – Practically Radical by William Taylor
In this interview, I talk with Bill Taylor, author of Practically Radical: Not So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, And Challenge Yourself. Taylor is always on the lookout...
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Pricing Pictures
Today is the one year anniversary of Fixed to Flexible. There have been almost 17,000 reads of the ebook and I have been contacted by people all over the world who were helped. I launch a new project...
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What’s In a Name?
Chipotle Mexican Grill had their IPO last week and the WSJ ran a short piece on the titles that company leaders use. The customer service manager goes by “Manager of Duct Tape and Plungers”. The guy...
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SXSW – James Surowiecki
I am listening to James Surowiecki’s talk on The Wisdom of Crowds. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Experts correct 66% of the time Crowd correct 91% of the time. Examples of tapping into collective...
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Remember When?
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, made a surprise appearance at Web 2.0 a few weeks ago. The part of internet lore that I had forgotten (or quite possibly never knew) was how little economic value...
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Disruption from Two Directions
The book I have been recommending most over the last year is Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. This is not a new book as the original hardcover came out in 1997. The media has also been...
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Profit Share, Not Market Share
The big news this week was a report from Strategy Analytics on the worldwide smartphone market. In the report, analyst Alexander Spektor estimates that Apple generated $1.6 billion dollars in...
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