How often do you go to a meeting and check-out? Do you ever tune-out people you don’t agree with? Make the decision today to engage and be truly present. Instead of judging, participate. Embrace whatever you find. I call it ‘sitting forward’ – it’s what we do when we’re eager and interested and it helps [...]
Tag Archives | Business Strategies
What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t
Too often, we don’t recognize the power of platforms – even in Silicon Valley. The piece below by Umair Haque, draws an interesting difference between the way Apple and Facebook are both conducting their businesses. Some would argue against viewing Apple as ‘open,’ given the proprietary nature of the iPod and iTunes. Either way, it’s [...]
Strategy vs. Truth
What happens inside an employee when strategy doesn’t jive with what they know to be truth? In a millisecond, a string of questions unwinds. Questions like: Do they expect me to say something? Will I get in trouble if I say something? Will I get in trouble later if I don’t say something? Is talking [...]
Strategy has 5 Structural Elements: People
Strategy has 5 Structural Elements – power distribution, decision-making, idea generation, ideas, process and people. If you miss tuning one, you’ll fail. Add items that don’t blend and you’ll fail. People In an organization of any size, people bring their domain knowledge, talents and perspectives to strategy creation. Often people are viewed as the first [...]
Don’t Miss the Middle When Formulating Strategy
What purpose does middle management serve in strategy development? Misunderstandings between the C-suite and middle management lead to bad decisions, loss of time and loss of money. Many organizations have flattened management structures. Those that haven’t are working on it. When operational leaders don’t understand what the C-suite wants, the challenge of aligning the many [...]
Who Owns Strategy? We All Do.
A couple weeks back, I was teaching a course at Santa Clara University for their high tech marketing program, when a bright young product manager asked me a question. In a room filled with engineers and a handful of product marketers and product managers, he stood up and asked, “Shouldn’t product management own strategy?” His [...]
Making Money During Disruption
While failure for the high-tech entrepreneur is less likely to result in death, the parallels between the Gold Rush and the current Web-based economy are many. In both cases, participants must to adapt to a new way of life, with new rules. Or rather, no pre-existing, fixed rules.
Silicon Valley’s famous tolerance of entrepreneurial failure has its roots more than 150 years ago in the Gold Rush when more than 90,000 people made their way to California in the two years following John Marshall’s discovery of gold near Sacramento in January, 1848. By 1854, more than 300,000–representing more than one percent of the total population of the United States at the time–had come west in search of fortune.
Influencer Marketing Matters
A Rubicon Sparkler at the beginning of the season saw CEO Nilofer Merchant presenting a discussion on influencer marketing with Nick Hayes, co-author of Influencer Marketing: Who Really Influences Your Customers.
VARs adapt to new realities
Technology businesses come and go, but as a category VARs are the survivors of the technology world. A couple of years ago an editor asked me if SaaS was going to kill the channel. At the time, it was too early to tell exactly what was going to happen, but I expressed confidence that VARs would survive as an important channel, even if they had to evolve in significant ways.
Ballmer to Yang: I Just Can’t Quit You
Two NYT journalists see Microsoft ‘needing a franchise’ as the software giant puts the moves on Yahoo all over again. Two weeks after walking away from takeover talks with Yahoo, Microsoft made clear on Sunday that it still needed to create an Internet powerhouse that could rival Google — and that its interest in Yahoo [...]