Category: Management

AlwaysOn has an interview with Michael Raynor about his book “The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (and What To Do About It).”

The same strategies that have the highest probability of extreme success also have the highest probability of extreme failure. In other words, everything we know about the linkage between strategy and success is true, but dangerously incomplete. Vision, commitment, focus…these are all in fact the defining elements of successful strategies, but they are also systematically connected with some of the greatest strategic disasters.

For example, Apples strategy sometimes works great, and sometimes fails miserably. Its not that Apple sometimes forgets what makes for greatness. Its that what makes for greatness also exposes you to catastrophe. The same goes for Sony.

Slow Leadership writes: “Todays standard responses business issues are limited and uninspiring, even as we stand in serious need of a steady flow of creative ideas and fresh innovations just to keep our high-tech, high-earning, and high-expenditure lifestyles in placelet alone to add still greater prosperity for more people. Cost cutting, increasing working hours, and driving employees harder and harder are all based on doing what you do today more cheaply and efficiently. But what if doing what youre doing now, only better, isnt enough? What is you need to offer the world something altogether new? No one ever stimulated creativity by staying longer at the office, cutting benefits, or driving people to the edge of exhaustion and beyond. If the audit mentality takes over, the future will be bleak.”

Doc Searls writes:

Transaction still matters, of course. So does conversation. But the biggest wedge in the social pie of the public marketplace is relationship. Prices less set than found, and the context for finding prices is both conversation and relationship. In many cases, relationship is the primary concern, not price. The bottom line is not everything.

Transaction rules the Industrialized world. Here prices are set by those who control the manufacturing, distribution and retail systems. Customers do have an influence on prices, but only in the form of aggregate demand. The rates at which they buy or don’t buy something determines what price the “market” will bear in a system where “market” means aggregated demand, manifested in prices paid and quantities sold. Here the whole economic system is viewed mostly through the prism of price, which is seen as the outcome of tug between supply and demand.

[via Yuvaraj] Bob Sutton writes:

1 Producing smart individuals is the first step; teaching them to collaborate is the second step.

2 Teach people how to fight as if they are right and listen as if they are wrong.

3. Teach experts to seek out novices, and novices to seek out experts.

4. Teach people to treat innovation as an import-export business.

5. Teaching people how to succeed isnt enough; teach them how to fail too.

[via Thejo] Here. For 2007. Among them:

1. The Accidental Influentials: In his best seller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that social epidemics are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals. The idea seems intuitively rightwe think we see it happening all the time. Nevertheless, this isnt actually how ideas spread. Its better to focus on getting enough plain, ordinary people to sign on.

15. Act Globally, Think Locally: Companies are usually told to think globally and act locally. But thanks to their own global information systems and the Internet, knowledge from faraway places can be acquired relatively easily and cheaply. This means that firms have to discover and quickly incorporate good ideas from these diverse sources before their rivals do.

Here.

Union Square Ventures writes about what they look for in investee companies:

First and foremost, we look for people who we will enjoy working with. Weve been investing in early stage technology businesses for over 20 years and weve backed people we like and weve backed people we ended up having great difficulty with. Weve made the decision that no matter how attractive an investment opportunity may be, we will not get involved if we do not think there is a high likelihood of a very positive working experience. That is partially a recognition that the entrepreneur/VC relationship is critical to the success of the company. But it also a recognition that if we enjoy working with a person or a group of people, it is more likely that others will as well.

We also seek to back entrepreneurs and managers that weve worked with successfully before. We realize that this sets up a club relationship where its hard to break in. And we also realize that some of the best entrepreneurs will be first time entrepreneurs. So we have a process to make sure we back first time entrepreneurs, but the hurdles are simply higher.

Techdirt writes: “There are plenty of things that go into being able to innovate and build a successful product — and simply copying someone else’s technology is often a small part of that (and usually not a particularly good strategy). Patent protection only protects that aspect of copying (business model patents are another issue completely), but if they’re supposed to encourage innovation, and the technology is only a small part of innovation, then the incentives are mis-aligned. The market can reward innovation without needing government monopolies and protectionist policies. The trick is to continually innovate, not just in the technology, but in the quality, the service and the brand as well.”

Nicholas Carr compares the two:

It was interesting to contrast Jobs’s presentation with the one Bill Gates gave at CES a day earlier. Thematically, Gates’s was a replay of his keynote at last year’s CES. He’s still pitching a “digital lifestyle” that nobody wants.
…
Gates wants to sell platforms. Jobs just wants to make tools.

Jobs, in fact, couldn’t possibly be more out of touch with today’s Web 2.0 ethos, which is all about grand platforms, open systems, egalitarianism, and the erasing of the boundary between producer and consumer. Like the iPod, the iPhone is a little fortress ruled over by King Steve. It’s as self-contained as a hammer…In Jobs’s world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet.

The New York Times writes:

Marketers used to try their hardest to reach people at home, when they were watching TV or reading newspapers or magazines. But consumers viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn.

We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere, said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency. Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.