Management
A former colleague hit an old nerve the other day, sending me the following message about budgets and budgeting. A question for you — I just saw a typical idiotic internal email about budgets yesterday, and to my recollection [at our last company], you tried to make the system less dysfunctional,
Marketing
I have a new pet peeve: sales and marketing people who use the word "very" as a condiment, sprinkling it heavily and indiscriminately -- like salt -- into any product or company claim. Let's look at some examples, which I'll number for subsequent reference: 1. ... can
Management
The older, grumpier, and less patient I get, the more I realize that keeping up with the conversation is probably the key skill for career success and executive development. I wonder why it's taken me so long to realize this because, like the discovery of the non-existence
(Revised: confirmed that the source, MS&L, is ZL's PR firm.) While I don't have official verification of this, I did learn the following this afternoon, regarding the lawsuit filed against Gartner by ZL Technologies over its treatment in their magic quadrants about which I
I found this story today, entitled Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Goes to Court, about ZL Technologies who, citing damages of $132M, has decided to sue Gartner over its Magic Quadrants. From ZL’s web page on the suit: The complaint alleges: defamation; trade libel; false advertising; unfair competition; and negligent
Databases
Dear CIO, What’s wrong this picture? * At 50%+, Oracle’s operating margins have never been higher * The differentiation of Oracle’s database technology, however, has never been lower and the number of both core and specialized alternatives has never been greater. So what’s going on? You, kind Sir
Marketing
In 1988, Listen To Your Heart was the third single issued in the USA by the Swedish pop duo Roxette. In this post, I'll use the song as fun example of flanking marketing strategy. First, the original song/video. (Sorry, but EMI disallows embedding, so you'll
You won't be surprised to know that I use a series of Google Alerts to help me track events relevant to Mark Logic. I often have two problems with them: * Old content is mis-identified as new. You can ask any Mark Logician about the number of times
About six months ago, I blogged my notes from a speech given to the Alliance of Chief Executives by Tom Siebel, entitled From IT to ET (from information technology to energy technology). While I enjoyed the speech, I had a few problems with it: * It struck me as unduly and
Culture
The blogosphere is lit up with discussion of this 128-slide internal presentation on culture at Netflix, dug up by the Hacking Netflix blog and discussed in this TechCrunch story. I'm a big believer in the importance of corporate culture as a competitive advantage and often use colorful
Just picked this joke up via a (warning: expletive) cartoon a friend mailed me. To spare those who want to avoid the expletive, here's the text. Bob: So, how do I query the database? IT guy: It's not a database. It's a key-value
I've been off filling my brain at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the past two weeks, so I haven't been able to post much. I have nevertheless managed to keep my Tweetstream going so, if you're not already following me on Twitter,
