Tim Wood Powell     The value of knowledge

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 […]

When I first moved to New York in the mid-70s, I was working downtown for New York State’s Emergency Financial Control Board.  Yes, Virginia, we’ve had financial crises before, and that was a pretty bad one.  My job was conducting ‘financial intelligence’ about the city subway system. A guy I worked with shared my interest […]

Stop me if you’d heard this one. “[COMPANY] is in the final stages of preparing a bankruptcy filing, clinching a long fall for a company with humble beginnings that helped change the way Americans buy [PRODUCT], but failed to keep pace with the [CHANGE] rocking every corner of the [INDUSTRY] landscape.” Today (February 12, Wall […]

“I love you, you’re perfect…now CHANGE.”  That’s what the market in effect continually tells high-achieving companies—because the world always changes around them. Companies tend to do best today what they did best yesterday…not what they’ll need to do best tomorrow. In working with companies of various sizes, in various industries, I’ve noticed that the most […]

I recently had a conversation with the publisher of a start-up niche business-to-business magazine.  We had pointed out several things that we felt were opportunities for him.  For one, our view—confirmed with some informal research—that the “look and feel” of his product was not what it could be, and that with a small investment, he […]

I speak often with Eric Garland, a leading futurist, thinker, and blogger.  We typically have a free-ranging and—to us, at least—entertaining and enlightening conversation. This time he recorded it.  Here are some of the notes we hit: Businesses have always wanted and needed to know about each other’s activities.  Until the 20th century, this was […]

In a recent post Surfing the value waves I mentioned having purchased an iPad. Here’s the value calculation that drove me to buy it.  Of course it’s cool and fun—but does it make economic sense? It first occurred to me in discussions with my wife—who wants a big, flat, thin TV like all our friends […]

Picture in your mind your organization’s typical customer or client.  Now picture the moment that customer purchases your product (or service).  Each transaction with that customer is preceded by some calculation—whether rigorous or informal— that your product is “worth it” compared to alternative solutions.  This worth-it-ness is called your product’s value proposition. The sum of […]

We’re obviously proud of our KVC model.   We think it helps explain a lot of the mystery surrounding “how to compete in the knowledge economy.” But the KVC is more than just a theoretical framework.  At TKA, we use it every week as a tool to solve live client problems.  In our offices, we have […]

Still more ideas from the SCIP annual conference in Chicago… When I work with internal corporate practitioners of intelligence or research, one of my first recommendations is to run their operation as if it were a stand-alone business.  That is, with clients (managerial decision-makers), suppliers (databases, contractors, etc.), and possibly even rivals of their own-both […]

Last week I went on vacation with my “lifemate” Ellen and the rest of my immediate family.  We were on Cape Cod, MA, which is a pretty sophisticated area as far as vacation spots go, so I had assumed that there would be good Internet connections. Wrong.  No Wi-Fi signals, only one bar (at best) […]

More ideas from the SCIP09 conference in Chicago… I’ve worked a lot during my career with business-to-business publishing and information services clients—and consider myself in that business as well.  There are basically two business models for this kind of information—customized and syndicated. Customized information is that which is developed—often at great effort and expense—and which […]