Year: 2014
-
Usability Trumps Persuasion
So the Dots conference, hosted admirably by Antony Mayfield and the smart folk at Brilliant Noise on Wednesday was rather good. Antony kindly asked me to curate it for them so I'm somewhat biased, but it seems like lots of other people think so too, which is nice. Adam (the best live blogger I know)…
-
Performance Firestarters 6: The Profit-Driven Marketer
For the sixth in our series of Google Firestarters events focusing specifically on issues around performance marketing we've picked a theme that must be close to the heart of just about any marketer – how to align marketing activity more directly with the bottom line. Taking marketing as a profit (rather than a cost) centre…
-
Purpose, Vision and Innovation
'That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.' Peter F. Drucker It made me laugh when I read in Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life that Enron had a 'Vision and Values' statement centred around four key values: Respect,…
-
This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here's my favourite links, curated by Fraggl: The 2014 Gartner Hype Cycle is out – notable how Internet of Things is right at the top of the hype curve, wearable UIs and 3D printing on their way down… The Napa earthquake woke up 93% of locals and more than half of San Francisco according to Jawbone The 5 core skills of disruptive,…
-
Emergent and Deliberate Strategy
Christensen defines organisational strategy as being the right combination of that which is fixed and ‘deliberate’, and that which is more flexible, or emergent. Strategy, he says, is ‘not a discrete analytical event’ or something decided using best known numbers at the time in a meeting of senior managers. Instead, it is a ‘continuous, diverse,…
-
Planting Saplings
As a (kind of) addendum to yesterday's post on marginal thinking, I really liked this analogy Christensen had for the all-too-frequent slow organisational response to the need for innovation: 'If a company has ignored investing in new businesses until it needs those new sources of revenue and profits, it’s already too late. It’s like…
-
Marginal Thinking
'The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.' C. S. Lewis I've been reading some Clay Christensen stuff recently. Revisiting some old stuff, digesting some new things. One of the latter was How Will You Measure Your Life, a very personal take on…
-
Consider Facebook
'Consider Facebook. It wasn’t preordained that Facebook was to be created by a student in his dorm room. When I ask audiences who could have created Facebook, they typically respond with technology companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or Yahoo! These are valid answers. But I push the audience members by asking them why people use…
-
Predicting the Box Office Revenues of Films
I'm rather fascinated by the potential of smart use of data for prediction (notwithstanding some of the issues that need to be ironed out with so-called big data) and particularly when applied to something as tricky to forecast as the box office takings of big budget movies. Data is already being used fairly extensively in realtion…
-
Location Tracking
I've come across two examples in the past few days of how real-time location tracking is beginning to be embedded in the technologies we use and every day experiences. Reading up about the new Foursquare redesign led me to this piece about how the app now tracks users even when the app is closed (Facebook…