Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Early Indications January 2014: The Incumbent’s Challenge (with apologies to Clayton Christensen)

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I. For all the attention paid to the secrets-of-success business book genre (see last October’s newsletter), very few U.S. companies that...
Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Early Indications December 2013: A Look Ahead

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Rather than issue predictions for the year-end letter, I am instead posing some (I hope) pertinent questions that should be at least parti...
Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Early Indications November 2013: What makes a great business book?

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I recently read Brad Stone's book on Jeff Bezos and Amazon entitled The Everything Store . It's a good job of reporting on a topic...
Friday, October 25, 2013

October 2013 Early Indications: How do companies "do" Big Data?

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1) Some of you may have seen a piece I wrote in the October 21 Wall Street Journal , on the risks of "big data" for companies tr...
Monday, September 30, 2013

Early Indications September 2013: How the Internet is Changing Business-to-Business Marketing

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My colleague Ralph Oliva has done a great job running a research center here at Penn State called the Institute for the Study of Business ...
Sunday, September 01, 2013

Early Indications August 2013: The Bicycle Issue

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Whether one looks at professional cycling, commuting, or recreational riding (including mountain biking), these are interesting days for t...
Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Early Indications May 2013 First-world problems: Too much choice

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Several smart people have written about choice as a paralyzing force in western consumer economies. A recent experience reminded me of a g...

Early Indications June 2013: What gets measured, gets . . .

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It has become a business truism that “what gets measured, gets managed” after the great Peter Drucker allegedly wrote it. (There is no citat...
Monday, April 29, 2013

April 2013 Early Indications: What are humans good at?

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"So we will be producing about 1026 to 1029 cps of nonbiological computation per year in the early 2030s. This is roughly equal to our ...
Saturday, March 30, 2013

Early Indications March 2013: Digital Heirlooms

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I've been thinking a lot lately about the invisible consequences of our smartphone/mobile/digital world. Somewhere down the road, the ...