Tim Wood Powell     The value of knowledge

One of the more timely parts of my upcoming book The Value of Knowledge is Section 7.7, Value Dynamics. This includes the idea of value entropy, which essentially means that once you get your value proposition finely tuned to user needs, if left unchanged it then slowly begins to leave perfect alignment with those needs. This happens […]

I’ve been studying the differences between Information and Knowledge and the mechanisms by which the former is transformed into the latter — a core challenge of managing knowledge for value. In working with clients to develop ways to optimize this transformation, it occurs to me that this is what theories of education are concerned with. Or […]

I read the following headline recently in the Wall Street Journal:  “Consumers crave [PRODUCT], but [PRODUCERS] enjoying their best profits ever are reluctant to switch.”  (The words I’ve bolded here were specified in the article, but I’ll get to that in a minute.) Headlines reminiscent of this have been written many times in business history. […]

I recently had the experience of intensively studying an industry as a consultant — then subsequently (and unrelatedly) becoming a client of that industry. The industry, as you probably have guessed, is health care.  There are things you learn when you are a patient that you never see when you’re not. (I’ve heard doctors report […]

The holiday break provides us an ideal time to calibrate and refocus our efforts and build for the year ahead.  Given the dynamic nature of the business environment, I recommend you consider these two simple questions:  If I were starting my enterprise today, what would I be doing different from what I am doing now?  […]

I used to read a lot of management books.  Or rather, buy a lot of them, then take a quick look — and promise myself to get around to reading them someday.  When (and if) I finally did, I’d often find the information dated and the advice stale. Not so with most of Peter Drucker’s […]

One broad goal for US health care that most of us can agree on is the need to rationalize and reduce overall costs. As a society, we can meet this goal — but only if we ensure that the health care industry remains competitive in each of its component sectors. Competition update Unfortunately, in key sectors this goal […]

I’m a lucky guy.  Nearly every day I walk between home and office along the Hudson River, just north of where it widens out into New York Harbor.  As an amateur photographer, I have begun to pay closer attention to — and often photograph — the scene (as below). Each day the sky as the […]

Back in the 20th century, it became fashionable in business strategy circles to speak of ‘first mover advantage’.  This idea — that if you got there first and staked out a market, it would forever remain yours to dominate — was used to justify funding business plans that would have otherwise seemed, at best, sketchy. […]

The late Ted Levitt, professor at Harvard Business School, used to tell this apocryphal story:  The CEO of a tool manufacturer gathers his executives into a meeting and says, “People, I have bad news.  I’ve discovered our customers don’t want quarter-inch drill bits — they want quarter-inch holes.” What we sell vs. what they buy […]