Category: Management

WSJ writes:

Motorola’s travails illustrate the risks for a company that rides high with a big consumer hit. Amid its success with the Razr, it fell behind on developing a phone with the next generation of technology. Missing a beat is especially hazardous in cellphones, where it can take two to three years to develop a new line.

Meanwhile, Motorola faced corporate infighting during the transition to a new CEO from outside the industry, which interrupted new-product development. Mr. Zander has also struggled to bring his Silicon Valley ways, developed from years in the computer business, to the cellphone world.

Guy Kawasaki interviews Seth Godin about his new book “The Dip.”

Its time to quit when you secretly realize youve been settling for mediocrity all along. Its time to quit when the things youre measuring arent improving, and you cant find anything better to measure.

Smart quitters understand the idea of opportunity cost. The work youre doing on project X right now is keeping you from pushing through the Dip on project Y. If you fire your worst clients, if you quit your deadest tactics, if you stop working with the people who return the least, then you free up an astounding number of resources. Direct those resources at a Dip worth conquering and your odds of success go way up.

Whats the worst time to quit? When the pain is the greatest. Decisions made during great pain are rarely good decisions.

Tom Asacker simplifies marketing: “”Marketing is any attempt to influence a current, and/or future, exchange.”

The challenge for every marketer today [is]: How to uniquely orchestrate a bundle or continuum of “value,” infusing it into the product, service, packaging, store front, delivery truck, sales process, blog, shopping experience, advertising, et al, such that customers feel good about their decision to choose you.

And I am not talking about a singular “value proposition,” e.g. “Quality is Job One.” Those simplistic, advertising-as-brainwashing days died soon after Emerson. I’m referring to meaningful value, which actually has a chance at influencing a decision; e.g. entertainment, learning, connection, identity, purpose, etc.

Guy Kawasaki writes about ideas from a new book by John Jantsch:

Narrow the market focus. Create a picture of the ideal client: what they look like, how they think, what they value, and where you can find them. Start saying no to non-ideal clients.

Differentiate. Strip everything you know about your product or service down to the simplest core idea. Make sure that the core idea allows you stand out.

Think about strategy first. Take everything youve done in steps one and two and create a strategy to own a word or two in the mind of your ideal client and prospect.

Create information that educates. You are in the information business, so think of your marketing materials, web sites, white papers, marketing kits as information products, not “sales” propoganda.

Chris Gill writes: “Like the tree falling in a forest that no-one hears, if you launch your product on an unsuspecting market and no-one notices, the question is not just has it made any noise, its probably more along the lines of do you have a viable business?
Considering the amount of time, energy, sweat and money startups spend on new product development, Im often amazed at how little thought they put into the product launch In my experience build it and they will come is a recipe for a lot of hanging about, waiting for a customer to come calling, and is unlikely to deliver the meteoric growth required for an acquisition at YouTube levels or timescales.”

Fortune writes:

There are 250,000 installations of this product around the world, for each of which customers typically pay $1,500 a month. On the floors of large financial institutions, there will usually be seas of Bloombergs, used for trading, research, investment banking, arbitrage, you name it. But they can turn up anywhere: on the desks of attorneys, in the homes of private investors, in the offices.
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The Dow Jones vs. Bloomberg saga is a stunner. In 1982, when Bloomberg the company entered the scene as a gnat, Dow Jones was America’s uncontested and proud king of financial information. It had the Journal and the Dow Jones ticker and also a glimmer that the future was technology. So in the late 1980s, Dow Jones bought a leading electronic product, Telerate, for about $1.6 billion. But Telerate simply supplied financial information to its customers – period. As they say at Bloomberg, “Telerate didn’t do anything with the data,” never providing the software that would magnify the usefulness of its information. And in 1998, struggling with both Telerate operating losses and shareholders furious about them, Dow Jones sold the company to Bridge Information Systems for $510 million, more than $1 billion less than it paid.

WSJ has a fascinating story on how one company prices its product:

In early 2001, shortly after Donald Washkewicz took over as chief executive of Parker Hannifin Corp., he came to an unnerving conclusion. The big industrial-parts maker’s pricing scheme was crazy.
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While touring the company’s 225 facilities in 2001, Mr. Washkewicz had an epiphany: Parker had to stop thinking like a widget maker and start thinking like a retailer, determining prices by what a customer is willing to pay rather than what a product costs to make. Such “strategic” pricing schemes are used by many different industries. Airlines know they can get away charging more for a seat to Florida in January than in August. Sports teams raise ticket prices if they’re playing a well-known opponent. Why shouldn’t Parker do the same, Mr. Washkewicz reasoned.

Yuvaraj pointed to a December 2002 in The Observer:

Creativity is mainly learnt. And while there is an element of nature involved, it predominantly comes down to nurture – a way of thinking that is picked up from parents or the people around you. Timely encouragement, of course plays, its part, along with finding an area of interest that really gets under your skin.

Creative people do, however, intuitively know the value of alternating the rhythms of work: when to let the mind wander, when to get down to hard work and when to put a problem on the back burner and leave the subconscious to mull it over. This is a crucial flexibility of mind demonstrated by the way creative people, even during periods of intense activity, manage to create little holes for themselves where they will instinctively take the mini breaks they need to let ideas come to them.

Time out feeds the quietness of mind that is essential to creativity.

The Economist writes:

So far this year Indian firms have announced 34 foreign takeovers worth more than $10.7 billion in all, according to Dealogic, a market-research outfit. Last year’s total was $23 billion, more than five times the previous record and more than the investments made by foreigners in Indian companies. For local industrialists, among the proudest Indians, the buying binge indicates a renaissance, and not only in business. There’s a new India emerging, says Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, a big conglomerate. This shows the new-found respect that India commands in the global arena.
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the tide of foreign acquisitions by Indian companies will continue to rise, with more and bigger deals. How successful they will be is less certain. No big foreign acquisition has failed so fareven though, according to consultants at McKinsey, that is the fate of 60-70% of cross-border takeovers. It’s important for companies to look at the economic rationale, and not get taken to extremes by emotion and ego, says Ranbaxy’s Mr Singh.

Wired writes:

Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups – and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right – and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he’s accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak. In February, after JetBlue trapped passengers for hours in its storm-grounded planes and canceled 1,100 flights, CEO David Neeleman tried to deflect the blast of bad publicity by using YouTube to air his own blunt mea culpa. Microsoft, once a paragon of buttoned-down control, now posts uncensored internal videos – and encourages its engineers to blog freely about their projects (see page 140). The very process of developing ideas, products, and messages is changing – from musing about it in a room with your top people to throwing it out on the Web and asking the global smartmob for a little help.