If you’ve got the feeling that something is afoot out there in your marketplace, but haven’t quite been able to put words to it yet, I highly recommend carving our 30 minutes to listen to John Hagel’s keynote (mp4 video) at the recent FastForward conference. I’ve been reading Hagel and John Seely Brown’s The Only […]
Eight Things: I’ve Been “Me”med
Reluctant blogger Maddie Grant has tagged me with the task of divulging eight things about myself here in plain sight on the web. So, here goes: In spite of the fact that I have made my living from sales, business development, and leading start-up companies over most of the past decade, I am a hardcore […]
Are You Stagnant? (And Does It Matter?)
Presidential campaigns (see previous posting) always make for interesting and intense case studies in organizational strategy. After all, they are essentially start-up businesses that must figure out very quickly, in a very competitive environment, how to achieve much higher adoption rates for their “product” (the candidate) than most businesses ever have to achieve. They have […]
Experiment (But Strategically)
“Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it.” As Stephen Downes noted, this showed up quite a few places yesterday, though I came across it first on Kottke.org. Kottke and others quote from a LinuxWorld posting that suggests knowing when to kill something—in this case, GooglePages—can be as important as trying it in […]
Internet Oysters and Other Thoughts from Great Ideas 2007
“Just Because You Have Always Done It That Way Doesn’t Mean You Should” —That was the title of one of the best sessions I attended at the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) Great Ideas Conference in Orlando. In this posting and the next handful after it I plan to highlight thoughts prompted by this […]
Is Your Tagline Pulling Its Weight? See What the Survey Says.
Several years back I started and ran an online learning company with the branding line “Learning to Change the World.” I’m not sure if we really managed to change the world much, but the linguist in me always liked that line. That “learning” is a gerund , a word that has characteristics of both noun […]