Month: October 2014

Reading Time: < 1 minute The management practices of successful companies are often touted as ground breaking. Some like Zappos claim to have abandoned traditional management structures altogether in favor of “holacracy”.   Yahoo at one time allowed large numbers of employees to work from home (although the latest CEO Marissa Mayer quickly put an end

Reading Time: < 1 minute In his best-selling book “Moneyball :The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”,  author Michael Lewis profiles Billy Beane, who was named manager of the Oakland A’s and given a mandate to cut team payroll.  Using  a form of analytics known as sabermetrics  he was able to find and field a competitive roster that

Reading Time: < 1 minute Technology and demand for content are disrupting the entertainment business and making life tougher for other content creators and the middlemen.   Maybe you can learn how to change your own business model before time and circumstance make if a matter of life and death by absorbing the lessons of those who

Reading Time: < 1 minute  “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend of his faults. If you are angry with a man, or hate him, it is not hard to go to him and stab him with words; but so to love a man that you cannot bear to

Reading Time: < 1 minute The great innovations that have become part of the fabric of our lives were once extraordinarily disruptive.  Check out this short article that summarizes remarks made by Malcolm Gladwell this week at the World Business Forum on the “preconditions” for  effective disruption; the first consisting of being somewhat  “disagreeable.”

Reading Time: < 1 minute Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella garnered some unwelcome publicity this week when he suggested that women in tech should be patient and  wait for “karma” to bring their salaries in line with those of their male counterparts.  Social media quickly excoriated Nadella for his remarks and he has spent the past few days

Reading Time: < 1 minute Many companies are getting ready for their annual planning retreats and wondering how to create a winning strategy.  If one person can be associated with the development of strategy as a discipline in the past thirty years it’s Michael Porter whose book “Competitive Strategy” is the final word on understanding

Reading Time: < 1 minute The past 150 years has seen more innovation and invention since people started, well,  innovating and inventing.   But what made all this possible?   If you’re curious about how the world you live in came to be, check out this two page executive summary of a wonderful new book  “How We Got

Reading Time: < 1 minute The price we pay for technology is that certain art forms go by the wayside.   Email and telephones virtually wiped out letter writing; keyboards made the cursive writing most of us learned a thing of the past. Former assistant director of the CIA looks at another lost art:  political leadership.   In a

Reading Time: < 1 minute We’re almost to the last quarter of the year and many organizations will begin their annual strategic planning ritual.  Before you launch whatever strategy planning process you use, check out this short article in Forbes that offers some cautionary tales about the things that usually take the planning process off the