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Posts tagged ‘Business Strategy’

Jul 29

Babe-Ruth-at-bat
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Don’t Be Bashful

The larger the company the less agile they are. This is a basic truism of business. In fact, companies often spend millions of dollars trying to improve processes, streamline workflows, and reduce unnecessary staff – all with the aim of becoming more agile, more competitive. Smaller companies can react more quickly to market changes. What is the tipping point though? There are plenty of large companies doing very well. Some companies are reporting earnings completely off the charts. These sorts of earnings can evoke disgusted reactions from even the greediest of greedy. So, what is the secret?
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Dec 17

Businesspeople with their hands together as symbol of their part

Unspoken Business Rules

I was going to write about some recent consulting experiences, but remembered that I’ve already written about this. I think these rules may be timeless. Like viruses that have been on the earth since the beginning of time, these rules (and many others) have infected business since the industrial revolution. Here is a roundup of the 5 unspoken business rules:

I said 5, right? Rule 5: No project (especially IT) is ever completed. Until I get around to writing a 5th rule, here’s another old, eternal truism: Are Consultants Evil?

Sep 4

Fall / Winter 2009 Reading List

Here is what I’ve been reading. I’ve finished some of these already but I’ll go ahead and list them…

  • NurtureShock by Po Bronson
  • Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders
  • The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales by Nelson Mandela
  • Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  • FREE: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
  • Welcome to Your Brain by Sandra Aamodt
  • Yes! by Noah J. Goldstein
  • The Five Most Important Questions by Peter F. Drucker
  • The 360-Degree Leader by John C. Maxwell
  • How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
  • The Motley Fool Million Dollar Portfolio by David Gardner
  • Rule #1 by Phil Town

Jun 6

Executive Psychopaths

This is an excerpt of an article by Gardiner Morse in the Harvard Business Review. You may expect an article like this to appear only in psychology journals but it’s becoming clear that psychology is taking a prominent role in the workplace:

Chances are good there’s a psychopath on your management team. Seriously. I’m not talking about the “psycho” boss that employees like to carp about the hard-driving supervisor who sometimes loses it. He’s just difficult. Nor am I referring to the sort of homicidal “psychopath” Hollywood likes to serve up Freddy Krueger, say, or Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. Neither is, clinically speaking, a psychopath.
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Apr 4

Lousy Managers Are Next Outsourcing Trend

A classic from 2004: The move to outsource white-collar jobs is moving up the company hierarchy to the incompetent manager level. Many US companies are discovering they can find management talent abroad that is just as clueless as the homegrown variety. India has proven to be adept at producing managers who are skilled at not adding any value whatsoever.

“I thought I was too much of a jerk to ever be replaced,” said Joe Morphy, an unemployed manager. “I figured they could never find anybody who combined my total indifference to employees” well-being with my astonishingly high level of dishonesty. But they found some guy in Asia willing to be a bigger asshole than me for one-tenth of my salary.”

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Feb 21

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Asking the Stupid Questions

I worked at McDonald’s when I was a sophomore in high school. I had to get up at like 4:30 every Saturday morning to work the breakfast shift. It was right next to a mall and was slammed every morning. There was this manager – he was the one that put together all of the orders – that would yell things out to rest of the employees to tell them what things to make. He would yell things like, “pull 11, pull 32, and run a b,d,c,d”. I never knew what he was talking about and figured someone must have understood this secret code.

One day when it was a little slower, I asked another manager what all those codes meant that he would yell out on Saturday mornings. She said that no one had a clue why he did that nor what he was talking about. Even as a 16 year old, I was a little shocked. One morning, during the middle of the rush, I asked him what he was saying. He told me he was telling the staff what to make, in order to stay ahead. I told him that no one knew what he was talking about. He looked at me quizzically like he already knew that. I went back to my station at the to-go window.
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Jan 26

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The Silly Simplicity of Future ECM

My interest in ECM (enterprise content management) is purely based on the value it can deliver to the business. I think much progress has been made, but the focus is still very much on technology. I would start with your users and ask them what would make their lives easier – that would be my feature set. Some of the things business users often ask for seems impossible, but the basic theme I usually get is this: they want the system to handle the difficult, time consuming stuff and shift the complexity away from the human and put it onto the machine. To most users, this was the point of buying the system in the first place.
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Dec 22

Web Standards Circa 1995

I guess it’s true that things do come around again. If you’re as old as me, you may remember the very early days of the web. The web was built around individual webmasters with single HTML pages with massive amounts of information on an endless page that scrolled on forever. There was usually a long list of links on the side that linked to the author’s favorite websites. To go along with this was usually a cool background image. This was all done away with in favor of more compact and usable web designs. Or, was it?

I recently read an article by François Briatte at phnk.com. It’s an in depth analysis of the current state of web design with some amazing insights into sociological and organizational motivations of web design. Her conclusions were as surprising as they were obvious – Briatte concludes that web design is driven by some of the very same market forces that drive design in other mediums such as fashion and print media.

I found myself thinking about her article over the last couple of weeks trying to make sense of it. I guess for some reason I thought that this medium was somehow immune to the influence of single individuals – no matter how charismatic. Of course this doesn’t explain the return to web standards circa 1995. The only thing I can figure is that we’ve returned to the basics or design while adopting a more aesthetic approach that just wasn’t available before CSS.

In the final analysis, web design and accessibility is much better today. Designers are finally taking note that simple design trumps cool any day. Now, if we could just teach the charismatic leaders how to practice what they preach.

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