Alexandria, VA – On an entirely snowed in street outside our client’s offices, I found the single open, available spot, thus saving a tiny amount of money by not having to pay for parking… Hans would be proud.
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Photo A Day: 17 February 2010
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Photo A Day: 15 February 2010
Monday, February 15th, 2010Cambridge, MA – Zoey was a non-participating, non-charging member of all my conference calls today…
Some things have changed a bit…
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010I’m working on an article and came across this, from the book “Skunk Works” by Ben Rich, talking about how they handled security while building the stealth bomber:
“Only five of us were cleared for top secret and above, and over the years we had worked on tremendously sensitive projects without ever suffering a leak or any known losses to espionage. In fact, Kelly evolved his own unorthodox security methods, which worked beautifully in the early days of the 1950s. We never stamped a security classification on any paperwork. That way, nobody was curious to read it. We just made damned sure that all sensitive papers stayed inside the Skunk Works.” (Rich 1994, 42-43)
I’d love to see someone try that in this day and age…
S+B Best Business Books 2009
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009IT’s that time of the year again, when business publications and pundits break out their “Best of…” lists. strategy + business has just published their “Best Business Books 2009” list. Included:
“In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernake’s War on the Great Panic” by David Wessel
“The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream amidst Global Financial Chaos” by Kenneth Hopper and William Hopper
“The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property” by Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt
“The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World Is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China” by Ben Simpfendorfer
“The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath” by Geoff Colvin
“The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How to Avoid It” by John Gerzema and Ed Lebar
“Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters” by Scott Rosenberg
“John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand” by Richard Reeves
The Use and Abuse of Scenarios
Monday, November 16th, 2009McKinsey Quarterly notes that, “Although it is surprisingly hard to create good ones, they help you ask the right questions and prepare for the unexpected. That is hugely valuable.”
Scenarios are a powerful tool in the strategist’s armory. They are particularly useful in developing strategies to navigate the kinds of extreme events we have recently seen in the world economy. Scenarios enable the strategist to steer a course between the false certainty of a single forecast and the confused paralysis that often strike in troubled times. When well executed, scenarios boast a range of advantages—but they can also set traps for the unwary.
There is a significant amount of literature on scenarios: their origins in war games, their pioneering use by Shell, how to construct them, how to move from scenarios to decisions, and so on. Rather than attempt anything encyclopedic, which would require a book rather than a short article, I have put forward my personal convictions, based on experience in building scenarios over the past 25 years, about both the power and the dangers of scenarios, and how to sidestep those dangers. I close with some rules of thumb that help me—and will, I hope, help you—get the best out of scenarios.
A Global Surve in Tiny Loans Spurs Credit Bubble in a Slum
Friday, August 14th, 2009The Wall Street Journal reports that “a credit crisis is brewing in microfinance, the business of making the tiniest loans in the world.”
Microlending fights poverty by helping poor people finance small businesses — snack stalls, fruit trees, milk-producing buffaloes — in slums and other places where it’s tough to get a normal loan. But what began as a social experiment to aid the world’s poorest has also shown it can turn a profit.
That has attracted private-equity funds and other foreign investors, who’ve poured billions of dollars over the past few years into microfinance world-wide. [...]
“We fear a bubble,” says Jacques Grivel of the Luxembourg-based Finethic, a $100 million investment fund that focuses on Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia, though it has no exposure to India. “Too much money is chasing too few good candidates.”
Pendulum is Swinging Back on "Scenario Planning"
Sunday, July 26th, 2009The WSJ has a nice little piece today looking at scenario planning, offering a bit of historical context on the practice, and wrapping it around the story of JDS Uniphase:
Each spring, executives at JDS Uniphase Corp. plan for three potential sales scenarios for the coming fiscal year, which begins in July. Last year, rattled by financial-market turmoil, they included an extremely pessimistic sales outlook and outlined potential cost cuts. The planning proved useful when the economy stalled and customers began delaying orders later in the year. “We knew what levers to go pull,” says Dave Vellequette, chief financial officer at the Milpitas, Calif., maker of fiber-optic telecommunications equipment.
The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer
Thursday, June 18th, 2009From the Harvard Business Review blogs, “The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer“:
1. Do you see opportunities the competition doesn’t see?
2. Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas?
3. Are you the most of anything?
4. If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would miss you and why?
5. Have you figured out how your organization’s history can help to shape its future?
6. Can your customers live without you?
7. Do you treat different customers differently?
8. Are you getting the best contributions from the most people?
9. Are you consistent in your commitment to change?
10. Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?
A New Twist on "Using a Hammer to Kill a Mosquito"
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Amazingly, it’s not a joke:
Towards the end of the cold war Ronald Reagan announced plans to use powerful lasers to shoot down any incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles that the Soviet Union aimed at America. The lasers were real but the plan was fanciful. Scientists now propose a more modest system, aimed at insects rather than nuclear warheads. They think lasers could be used to zap the mosquitoes that carry malaria, a disease which kills more than a million people each year, most of them children, and debilitates hundreds of millions more.
Here’s the full article in the Economist. The company behind it is Intellectual Ventures, an interesting R&D shop run by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold.