One of the advantages of working as a consultant is that you get to look at the big picture across corporations. You can see trends and common themes that might not be obvious to somebody working in a single company.
One of the themes that’s become very clear lately is our industry’s difficulty telling the difference between “how” and “what” when designing products.
Tag Archives | Business Strategies
Reaching Good Decisions
I spent a walk last week with a friend who is struggling to make a good decision. It’s more a personal decision rather than a professional one. And yet I think the decision process he’s facing is the one all of us who are making consequential decisions struggle with. My friend is focusing on the [...]
Dinosaur Defense Strategy / Consumer Software Companies
A colleague who works within one of my company’s clients writes this email to me about a month ago: “I still find myself scratching my head at how to apply this line of advice (referring to a white paper I sent on permeable markets) to a large highly profitable business. In the last session [Spark [...]
2 Parts Enlightenment, 1 Part Truth, and a Smidge of Creation
A colleague (on the client side) is preparing a Microsoft defense strategy, and talked to my team recently about what to do to prepare. We helped him in terms of process steps: the need to build a common data set, do some role playing that will break traditional roles people already serve in the organization, [...]
When in Doubt, Pilot
Ever heard this? Let’s go 180 degrees in a different direction, at full speed, with everyone on board, and expect our current business to do great while we turn everything in a new direction. Yippee. Sound like a good idea to you? I worked with a client over the last few weeks that had done [...]
Top 10 Trends for 2007
Top 10 Trends for 2007 High-Tech Markets: 1. The OS matters. With open source, mashups and mobile players all creating different and incompatible platforms, we believe the software platforms of the future may be layers that run across all those competing operating systems, with Adobe’s Apollo and Microsoft WPF/E both key players, coming to market [...]
Technorati: Measuring Volume not Value
Technorati recently published a state of the blogosphere about 2 weeks ago. And I’ve wanted to write on it ever since as an example of being clear on what you are intending to measure and what you are actually measuring. The slide I’m referencing is this one: In it, Technorati, is defining “authority” ratings of [...]
Top 10 Ideas from Web 2.0 Summit
My top 10 ideas or reflections from Web 2.0 conference this week in San Francisco. #1 There’s a real Heirarchy in Value Creation Apps beat features. Online applications beat packaged applications. “Open” applications beat online applications (meaning those you can build on or get your data out of). Platforms beat any application. Customer experience beats [...]
Two types of Advisors: those that Critique and those that Create
Have you ever had the feeling that the people around you are there to tell you how something won’t work? Those are called critiques. Having a critique around as an advisor would be like being in the middle of the country and lost trying to get to NYC let’s say, and having someone come by to say, “this freeway won’t take you to there”. Okay, fair enough. But don’t just leave me there, dude. Tell me which one does!
Dash used Stealth just Right
Is there ever a good reason to not tell everything to everybody? Yes, there is. Surprise you that I would say that? In relationships, power is not the key to connection. So, don’t deceive or cajole in personal relationships, where trust and connection are key. Yet in business, where revealing intentions can be revealing your [...]