Marketing
I've spent my career competing, for the most part successfully, against companies from 10 to 1,000 times bigger than my own. Thus, over the years, I've developed some rules that can help maximize your odds of success when competing against giants. * Concentrate force. The easiest
Management
The conventional Silicon Valley / venture capital (VC) wisdom is that startups should not bet on first-time managers in just about any position, but particularly at the executive team level. It's best captured by the statement: a high-growth startup is not the place to learn how to
Adam Smith's invisible hand never rests. Just five years ago, the database market looked like a static, three-player $10B/year oligopoly where the primary forces were inertia and profit-taking. Today, we have two major forces disrupting the comfortable stasis that has developed over the past 30
I'm happy to report that Kellblog was featured prominently in a story yesterday on Business Insider entitled How To Make An Awesome Corporate Blog. I provided the first tip: throw "corporate" out the window. That's because,definitionally, I don't think there are
As I have discussed a few times in the past, I want to rename the Mark Logic CEO Blog in order to accomplish a few goals: * Get a shorter, pithier name that will be easier for people to write and talk about * Get a more normal, blog-like name that
In creating my presentation for this past December's Mark Logic 2010 Digital Publishing Summit, I had a "creative moment" when I made a slide that made me think: wow, perhaps I'm onto something here. The slide was a list of six things that publishers
Marketing
On the face of it, Benihana is a pretty simple restaurant which ought to mean just one thing in the mind of its customers: teppanyaki, the form of tableside cooking/entertainment for which they are famous. I like the notion of businesses owning one word in the mind of the
Marketing
As previously covered, email archiving vendor ZL Technologies of San Jose, California sued leading IT market researcher Gartner for $132M earlier this year for its treatment in one of Gartner's vaunted magic quadrants. On November 4th, the case was dismissed, but have no worries. Armed with a seemingly
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
