Competitiveness and Innovation
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 […]
I love numbers. I first realized this around the age of ten, when I started collecting baseball cards pretty seriously. On the back of each card was a bunch of numbers, each player’s ‘stats’, important metrics of how well he played. Hits, batting average, runs batted in (RBIs), runs scored, and so on. It later […]
I had the great pleasure recently to address the students in Guy St. Clair’s class (K4301) at Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategies (IKNS) program. These are tomorrow’s leaders in developing and managing knowledge-based strategies. My most challenging question Of course I told them about the Knowledge Value Chain, and was gratified by their positive […]
Each year when back-to-school bells ring, I recall some of the key lessons I learned there. Some of the best had little to do with course content—and a lot to do with the process of gaining knowledge. My first day of high school chemistry, for example, had little to do with chemistry — but provided […]
Knowledge is power. All of us know this slogan. Those of us in the knowledge professions use it when needed as a banner of professional pride and aspiration. It sounds reassuring, and probably had major validity when Francis Bacon coined it nearly 400 years ago during the Enlightenment. The problem is — it simply is not […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
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 […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
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 […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
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. […]
Competitiveness and Innovation
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 […]
My colleague Robert Reiss studies CEOs — especially their successes and failures — in order that others might benefit from them. His Internet show The CEO Show produces interviews from these CEOs on leadership, and how they make their organizations ‘tick’. His book (with Jeffrey J. Fox) The Transformative CEO (McGraw-Hill, 2012) gathers some of their stories, […]
‘Big data’ wants to choke your organization. Don’t let it happen. What is big data? The McKinsey Global Institute report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity (May 2011) is a relatively well-informed and hype-free description of the opportunities presented by Big Data. They define Big Data as “datasets whose size is […]
In my previous post I told the admittedly harrowing story of my near-demise in a flood caused by ‘Superstorm’ Sandy. I consider this a personal intelligence failure of epic proportions. Why would I — who sell my research and advice to companies on things related to threat, early warning, and shifting trends — publicly acknowledge […]