Blog Yes & Know

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 …

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 …

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.

No, No, Rupert

In newspaper publishing, Rupert Murdoch is cutting a wide swath through the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post –even shrinking the physical size of both newspapers to cut costs.
New channels–Craigslist, Yahoo, Google AdWords and others–have pulled classified and other types of ads away from newspapers. The New York Times, in an attempt to increase its online readership, is working on an API that aims to make the entire newspaper “programmable,” says Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb.

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, …