Strategy
One thing they drill into your head in business school is how to make everything a quadrant. While I don't know for sure if it started with the famous BCG matrix -- which groups business into dogs, cash cows, stars, and question-marks -- I'd bet that the
Management
There was a great column in the 12/10 Harvard Business Review entitled Good Decisions, Bad Outcomes by Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke and author of the excellent book Predictably Irrational. In the column, he hits on one of my favorite topics, the loose coupling of decisions
Marketing
In a age where some 30% of the US adult population is technically obese, if you're like most people, then you're probably trying to keep an eye on your weight, and therefore on your daily food intake as measured by things like number of calories, grams
Culture
I wrote this short note on culture a while back for the MarkLogic website, but since it wasn't terribly "poppy copy," the marketing and recruiting folks buried it behind this, relegating me here. I'm OK with that because I think their copy sells better,
I saw this piece of creative the other day for a tradeshow ad and loved it. Remember, Ted Codd invented the relational database in 1970 with his paper "A Relational Model for Shared Data Banks." This PDF of the classic looks about as old as the ad. (Do
Management
I had lunch last week with a senior executive at a major software vendor. I asked him how one of my former (non-MarkLogic) colleagues was doing. His reply: And defending weak people is the beginning of the death cycle The last sentence caught my attention because it's
Marketing
One of my colleagues forwarded me this deck, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, which I thought I'd share. It's based on this book (of the same name) written by BusinessWeek reporter Carmine Gallo. My favorite points: * Introduce the antagonist * Use the rule of threes * Sell
One of the advantages of children is that they keep you plugged into pop music. Hence, I've had the lyrics of Travie McCoy's song Billionaire drilled into my head over the past several weeks. I wanna be a billionaire, so freaking bad Buy all of the
Strategy
I've always loved emergent strategies for many reasons: * They're practical. You invest in what works as opposed to what leadership wants to work. * I've seen too many strategy offsite white-board, created-in-a-vacuum strategies fail. * The premise that genius is not in
Management
Sunday's New York Times had a fascinating article about (American) football entitled Coaches Take More Risks, But Perhaps Not Enough. I've always believed that business managers are too conservative for two reasons: * They are rewarded for plan performance, not absolute performance. (See Beyond Budgeting for more
Management
If I had a dollar for every time a venture capitalist said "world-class," I could start my own venture fund. But rather than dismissing world-class as a tired cliché, in this post I'll spend a few minutes trying to understand what VCs mean when
Management
I found this post by Stanford evidence-based management professor Robert Sutton and tweeted about it earlier today. But since it's so good, I decided to do a post about it along with some commentary. First, here are the twelve things: 1. I have a flawed and incomplete
