Why are some resources (in the US, at least) managed by government, while others are managed by the private sector (that is, business)? Simply put, some resources are public by nature—roads, for example, and the armed services—and are therefore managed collectively. Other resources—manufacturing, for example—are best run by private enterprise. Intelligence is conducted both in […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
The late Theodore Levitt, professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, was a champion of customer benefits as the benchmark for value in marketing. As he memorably put it, customers don’t really want a drill—they want a hole. That single insight fundamentally changes the way you develop and position products. The same could be said […]
I didn’t start out to become a business researcher (though, in hindsight, that was the first professional role I was paid for). I started out to become a physician, and completed the four year-long courses needed to enter medical school—inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, and biology. This took much of my time, energy, and waking […]
I’ve been doing research for business clients for forty years. That’s a lot of research. (It also means I’ve made just about every mistake possible—at least once!) When I started, each project looked very different-the details seemed to loom large. I struggled with how to develop a unique approach for each one. Several hundreds of […]
The age of modern management began with Frederick Winslow Taylor. He worked in the early years of the 20th century studying production processes in a steel factory. Taylor argued that by understanding a process “scientifically”, we could make significant improvements upon it. These improvements could be used to increase productivity, pay better wages, and generally […]
It was a weekday morning in the early 1990s. I stepped out of my office at FIND/SVP onto what the floor of what at that time was arguably the largest independent business information center in the world (and probably still is, though now it’s called Guideline). It covered the better part of a large city […]