Management
It was HP co-founder, David Packard, of all people, who came up with one of my favorite quotes on marketing, specifically that "marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department." This quote is often mentioned in the same breath as these famous Peter Drucker quotes:
BI
There are two sayings I like when it comes to the unicorn bubble: * "Too much money makes you stupid" * "Any idea's a good one when you've got $100M burning a hole in your pocket." Startups are supposed to be focused. Startups are
Management
This post reviews Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s new book, From Impossible to Inevitable, which is being launched at the SaaStr Conference this week. The book is a sequel of sorts to Ross’s first book, Predictable Revenue, published in 2011, and which was loaded with great ideas about
Communications
Ever hear this story? VP of Marketing: "OK, well, you know, pretty good." VP of Sales: "Why are you hemming and hawing?" VP of Marketing: "Well, I could tell they didn't love it." VP of Sales: "Do you know why? I
AR
Say you’re considering going out to dinner in a city you’ve never visited before and there are two different surveys of local restaurants that you can use to help choose a place to eat: * Survey 1, which is taken by randomly asking customers leaving restaurants about their experience.
Marketing
I think in today's world that we need to ask PR people to be not just literate, but numerate. What does that mean? * They need to do basic math correctly. Most PR people think that going from size $100K to size $700K is 700% growth. It's
Marketing
Say you've got a new product release. You’re super excited about your app’s new Feature X. It’s very innovative. Product marketing sees it as long-needed differentiator. Sales sees it as a silver bullet: “with Feature X, our competition is screwed.” Everyone’s excited. Then it
Management
I often get asked by technical founders what business / marketing / strategy books they should read. While there are many excellent relatively new books (e.g., The Lean Startup), the primary purpose of this post is to list a set of classic business books that most (older) business people have read
Marketing
Theodore Levitt At some point in every marketer's career they produce a data sheet that looks like this: Our product uses state-of-the-art technology including a MapReduce distributed backend processing engine with predictive analytics including multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machine classification, and naive Bayesean machine learning. When
Marketing
[Major revision 5/11/14 5:10 PM] * "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- Benjamin Disraeli. * "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." -- Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of communications theory and coiner of the phrase "the medium
Leadership
In business we have a sad tendency to copy success blindly. I remember the first time I read about this I didn't even understand what I was reading: "Nothing in business is so remarkable as the conflicting variety of success formulas offered by its numerous practitioners and
Grateful Dead
For a change of pace, I thought I'd do a quick post with some of my favorite quotes. * "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." -- Dwight Eisenhower * "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing
