Open Source
As a marketer, I'm a fan of open source software. After all, if you can't dislodge Microsoft from mid-range server operating systems, Microsoft Office from desktop productivity suites, or Oracle from relational databases -- and doing so through traditional means is a virtual impossibility -- then
Management
I've always found business to have a fair amount of accidental, built-in hubris, largely resulting from the strategy formulation process. I remember one time at Business Objects we had a strategy offsite where, in our infinite wisdom and with a fair bit of groupthink, we came up with
Strategy
Let's say you're not feeling well, so you visit the Doctor. You walk into her office and she says, "Hi, it's great to see you again. I'm going to start you on 125 mcg of Synthroid." You say, "What?
Strategy
HP today announced that they will acquire data warehouse and analytics platform provider Vertica of Billerica, MA. Cowen and Company estimated the price at 5x revenues, estimating that Vertica did $40M in 2010 revenues, suggesting a valuation of $200M which I find low. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised
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
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 crafting a particular strategy,
Strategy
As I sit here at Palantir's Govcon 5 conference at the lavish Ritz Carlton in Tyson's Corner (Virgina), I can't help but think about the recent "fit or fat" startup debate that hit the blogosphere a few weeks back. The debate started
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
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
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
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
Strategy
I found this great post and Venn diagram on the What Consumes Me blog via O'Reilly Radar. It's very simple, very pragmatic, and coincidentally is quite similar to my career planning for individuals: intersect what you're good at with what you like doing with
