
Occasional posts on business books, their authors and publishers, tidbits from my book and article research, quotes from interviews with experts and executives, and hopefully, not too much self-promotional bushwa.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Publisher taps into wisdom of crowds

Friday, May 18, 2007
Of widgets and whatchamacallits
George Eastman's dry-emulsion film simplified and popularized the art of photography. In 1888, he registered the trademark Kodak to identify his film and the cameras that used it, and began advertising their ease of use: "You press the button, we do the rest." By dint of his prodigious brand-building genius, the Eastman Co. soon laid claim to the leading position in a field of more than fifty competitors. Today, the film that created a corporate giant is tottering toward buggy-whip status, but the name Eastman chose still has legs. In 2006, even in the midst of the turmoil caused by the digital revolution, the Kodak brand ranked seventieth in the world in value, with an estimated worth of $4.4 billion, according to the annual Interbrand Corp./BusinessWeek brand survey. Not a bad return on a manufactured word...(read more)
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
The core curriculum of business, PGA style
Normally, I'd ignore this bit of fluff, but then, I read that Templin is the co-creator of the PGA's Golf: For Business and Life program that is taught at fifty universities. Nice work on the PGA's part to get golf on the business curriculum. (The hockey, foosball and curling leagues should take note.) Here's before and after photos of a student who took the course:

Saturday, May 12, 2007
Why can't publishers predict bestsellers?
Anyway, Shira Boss, the author of the article, rightly points out that unlike most other businesses, publishing houses have simply never bothered to try to figure out what their customers want. Which means that we'll all be reading essentially the same article next year and the year after and so on...until some smart publisher, who is sick of single digit returns on capital, steps up and says, "Wait a minute, we can map the human genome, why can't we figure out whether people will buy a book" and transforms the business of publishing with some market research data and analytics. Now, that'll be worth a story.
A business historian to remember

"Strategy and Structure" (1962) which examined four U.S. industrial giants -- General Motors, DuPont, Exxon, and Sears, Roebuck & Company -- from the 1900s to the 1940s and concluded that "strategy precedes structure.
"The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business" which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1977 and traced the rise of management as the "most powerful institution in the American economy."
Friday, May 11, 2007
Getting smart about cases

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Dell's memo says get your resume together

The NYT thinks this means that Dell is "rethinking direct sales," but it sounds more like double talk for major lay-offs to me. Of course, Dell repeatedly promises that "we're gonna do better in the future," but I don't see any hard details. If I was a Dell manager and I got this memo, I'd be looking for a better future somewhere else.Fix our Core Business to be competitive.
The Direct Model has been a revolution, but is not a religion. We will continue to improve our business model, and go beyond it, to give our customers what they need. We will simplify our organization to make it easier to hear customers and respond to them. We've already streamlined our executive leadership structure. We need to streamline our management structure to speed decisions and remove bureaucracy. We're making improvements in pricing, product development and fulfillment, and customer experience. We reorganized the product group to more effectively listen to our customers and develop end-to-end customer solutions. We are now revisiting our entire design process to improve our speed-to-market and focus on what customers truly value. Our new Global Operations organization, led by Mike Cannon, is working to take our supply chain and manufacturing to the next level of efficiency and quality. This group is also partnering with the regions and the product group to pursue new manufacturing and distribution models to address the unique needs of our customers in all markets. More broadly, we plan to eliminate overlaps in our organization and activities to enable us to deliver even more value to our customers. We also need to improve sales productivity. These won't be merely exercises in cost-cutting. We will re-invest those resources in the customer solutions that will build Dell for the future.