Thanks TK
Life and Awesomeness of Steve Jobs Check out 1984 Super Bowl Ad
Playboy Interview Tidbits Check out Video of iMac Intro
Is Steve Jobs worthy of such tribute? Why?
From Fast Company
An interesting read User-Lead Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs
It could be “harmful” to listen to users. Apple and Ikea agree. From our class, we could also say Toyota agrees.
From the article ” The user is king. It’s a phrase that’s repeated over and over again as a mantra: Companies must become user-centric. But there’s a problem: It doesn’t work. Here’s the truth: Great brands lead users, not the other way around.”
What do you think?
Thank you Lane.
From Forbes Blog
From the blog “Global leadership is not a birthright. Despite what many Americans believe, our nation does not possess an innate knack for greatness. Greatness must be worked for and won by each new generation. Right now that is not happening. But we still have time. If we place the emphasis we should on education, research and innovation we can lead the world in the decades to come. But the only way to ensure we remain great tomorrow is to increase our investment in science and engineering today.”
The original “outbreak” had folks thinking that Iran’s nukes were under attack had people thinking what COULD happen if our industrial infrastructure was attacked like our computing infrastructure often is. Now, we have an update that says the attacks could be much more far reaching.
From the article “The complex code is not only able to infiltrate and take over systems that control manufacturing and other critical operations, but it has even more sophisticated abilities to silently steal sensitive intellectual property data, experts said.”
Where do you think this could go? Are you concerned?
“The effective executive builds on strengths – their own strengths, the strengths of superiors, colleagues, subordinates and the strengths of the situation.”
Peter Drucker, 1966 ”The Effective Executive” — A Classic, must read.
From Baseline Briefing
I found a real message in this article. Often, CIOs do not “get” websites. However, CIOs plus marketing professionals (and other line of business managers) will add significant business value. Alone, either management professional may not. I believe that the same is true for all “information technology” used for business. We NEED to have line of business managers and subject matter experts working WITH technical (IT) professionals to yield strategic business value. One of the key outputs of the collaboration of CIO and CMO will be an “enterprise architecture” that works for the entire firm or organization.
From the article “Businesses need CIOs to lead—with marketing—and devise mature 21st century information management strategies and tactics to support the corporate Web presence so it will send the right message but also be technically sound. These Web solutions involve library services, information and application architecture, metadata management, Web records retention, Web content management systems, portal software, search engine implementation and optimization, and more.
Without the expertise of the CIO’s office, marketing teams frequently take a superficial approach to application development, understanding only the service results, but not the underlying architectural concerns. In many instances, we’ve seen application waste—multiple Web content management systems and unnecessarily redundant e-commerce applications.”
What do you think?
From Fast Company.com
“How TED became the New Harvard”
The article contains a video about the seven steps to give a TED Talk. (Worth Watching)
This article talks about how ”TED Talks” are videos to watch or the links to share for “great ideas and the connections they create”.
Why follow TED? Because it a source of learning and thinking fodder. It is becoming a university of sorts.
From the article….. ”Still, if you were starting a top university today, what would it look like? You would start by gathering the very best minds from around the world, from every discipline. Since we’re living in an age of abundant, not scarce, information, you’d curate the lectures carefully, with a focus on the new and original, rather than offer a course on every possible topic. You’d create a sustainable economic model by focusing on technological rather than physical infrastructure, and by getting people of means to pay for a specialized experience. You’d also construct a robust network so people could access resources whenever and from wherever they like, and you’d give them the tools to collaborate beyond the lecture hall. Why not fulfill the university’s millennium-old mission by sharing ideas as freely and as widely as possible?”
According to PC World, disruptive technologies occur in combinations, partnerships or pairings. The linked article presents ten sets of technologies that they classify as “disruptive technologies”. Christensen ( Disruptive Technologies ) talks about disruptive business models as modified in a lecture after being prompted by Andy Grove of Intel.
The 10 Most Disruptive Technologies
Which one do you “like” the best? Why? Can you think of other combinations? What do you think of the idea of the need to have a combination? Does this concept augment Christensen’s idea and make it even more useful as we think about technology strategy or new product innovation?
The following video has an easy to understand explanation of the e-Discovery Process.
What do you think? Easy enough? Make sense? What are YOU doing about meeting the potential “sink hole” called e-Discovery?
From Business Management Daily
This article gives 5 reasons why introverts make great leaders.
Do you agree?
From The New York Times
We have a number of users of this blog that like to comment on PowerPoint
From the article: ““PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.”
We have Met The Enemy and He is PowerPoint
What do you think? What do you think of “The Slide”?
From Business Week : Debra Benton
This article written by a CEO Coach describes the qualities of a CEO. Are you ready? By the way, she contends that you can learn the qualities and I say, hopefully, say practice them.
Get Yourself some Executive Charisma
Do you agree that these qualities can be learned? What would you ADD to the set? Any you disagree with?
From Business Week
The article lists and briefly describes ten business management practices to get rid of. Some of which I agree with, some I do not. I still like #8, however some of what Liz Ryan says, I can agree with.
What should go, what should stay?
From Inc. Magazine Online Inc.com
How to Become a Servant Leader
Since being exposed to the concepts of Servant Leadership, I aspire to become a Servant Leader. This article helps us what actions make us a Servant Leader, and which do not.
What do you think of these ideas?
Reposted from the Greenleaf Newsletter
“THIS IS MY THESIS: caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built. Whereas, until recently, caring was largely person to person, now most of it is mediated through institutions – often large, complex, powerful, impersonal; not always competent; sometimes corrupt. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them.”
Servant Leadership as a way of leading.
What do you think?
From PDMA Visions
This study, once again points out how poorly we manage our NPD Projects. We do not seem to think of the collection of projects as a portfolio and do not manage them as such. If we are to achieve our strategic goals for NPD as well as our objectives for each of the projects we have in process, we need to manage them as a portfolio.
Too many projects and poor decision making is at the root cause of poor success rates for both strategic and tactics objectives.
This research connects to a previous post regarding an article by Robert Cooper Cooper Article
What do you think? Am I overly concerned?
From Harvard Business Review
Article Abstract — Customer-centered Brand Management
This article says that companies are focusing on the lifetime value of their customers. Really. I agree that they should be, however, I wonder how many actually are managing the Lifetime Value of their customers. The article promo states “Yet, few companies have come to terms with the implications of that idea for their marketing management.” The idea implications of course is that Lifetime Value Matters.
The article promo also goes on to suggest that managers are focused on brand equity rather than customer value. The article authors suggest some things that managers should be doing such as ” replacing traditional brand managers with a new position–the customer segment manager; targeting brands to as narrow an audience as possible; developing the capability and the mind-set to hand off customers from one brand to another within the company; and changing the way brand equity is measured by basing calculations on individual, rather than average, customer data.”
I will be grabbing my hard copy of HBR and reading this one. Most likely, it will be discussed in an upcoming class.
Comments?
From Baseline Magazine
Slideshow makes a series of observations “What’s Wrong with Microsoft”
Do you agree?
From an Article in Chief Learning Officer
Agile Learning: Thriving in the New Normal
From the article
“Organizational learning agility is an enterprise capability that requires deliberate and systematic design, including essential cultural, structural, process and technology-support elements. Based on studies from TRClark, a research, consulting and training company, there are five primary factors that interact to promote or hinder learning agility within organizations:
1. Intelligence function: The capacity of an organization to survey and interpret its entire business ecosystem, including both internal and external competitive environments. The intelligence function interprets information for the strategy function, which feeds the learning function.
2. Learning mindset: The prevailing assumptions, beliefs and dispositions relating to the way people learn.
3. Leadership behavior: The dominant patterns of leadership within an organization.
4. Organizational support: The processes, systems, structures and other forms of support that organizations provide to help employees in their formal and informal learning and execution activities.
5. Learning technology: The forms of technology employed to enable learning at both individual and organizational levels.”
This article presents a number of important ideas about what organizations need to do to compete.
The article goes on to explain each of the five factors.
What do you think?
From Baseline Magazine
Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
Like, create Twitter Friendly headlines, plan in Analog.
Seems like a good approach, seems to work. 
