Working Wider

When did “new and improved” become innovation? A search of annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows companies mentioned some form of the word “innovation” 33,528 times last year – a 64% increase from five years before that.  More than 250 books with “innovation” in the title have been published Read more

Facebook Gets a Taste of the Social Consequences of an IPO I go nuts when I click on a friend’s Facebook posting that takes me to yet another Facebook app that wants access to my friends and other personnel data.  Facebook is forever pushing me to go public in a big way. As they say, Read more

What made Apple the most valuable company on earth?  Their relentless focus on creating extraordinary customer experience unveils opportunities others miss.   They attack them using proprietary hardware and software embedded into elegant consumer products that ultimately disrupt long standing business models. Because Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson that he’d finally “cracked TV” many Read more

This piece  offers a proven approach that will dramatically cut the deficit without cutting spending or raising taxes.  Interested? Run the government as a business but not any old business. Certainly we wouldn’t want to run it like the airlines.  Who’s going to advocate that Wall Street take over the remaining parts of government they Read more

Digitization has dramatically changed our world.  From Apple’s retina display which packs 326 pixels in a square inch to encoded keys that let us into offices, breaking the world into finer and finer granules of 1’s and 0’s has changed our lives. But for these devices to work they need a power source, logic software Read more

I begin most mornings reading national newspapers online.  What looked like just another story about crowdsourcing on the Internet turned out to be one of the most creative and humanly compelling change strategies I’ve ever seen. Ironically, I’ve been working on a piece on the importance of individual heroics in our flat and networked world.  Read more

A firm’s business strategy reflects its leaders.  Under Steve Jobs, Apple differentiated itself through elegantly simple design.  This piece explores Apple’s business strategy in the first full year of Tim Cook’s leadership. Already, we can see Tim Cook is changing Apple.  In contrast to Jobs’ rare appearance before the press and analysts, Cook took the Read more

Steve Jobs was not a quiet presence.  In Walter Isaacson’s biography, colleagues described how one could go from exalted hero to useless zero overnight.  Love him or hate him, Jobs inserted himself relentlessly – with one notable exception. Pixar’s John Lasseter stands out as the one person who Jobs consistently granted far more space. To Read more

Have you ever written a piece that was for internal consumption and mistakenly posted it publicly? Ouch! That’s essentially what Google’s Steve Yegge did last week on Google+ when he inadvertently published “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant” to the world.  As you’d imagine, it went viral pretty quickly.  And it elicited the expected public apology from Read more

Mark my words, Amazon has just introduced the world’s second successful tablet. Here’s why: Point of View (POV): Amazon designed the product based on what they do best rather than mimicking Apple.  Yes it uses Android and will run Android apps but it’s not an Android trying to be an Apple. Price, price and price: Read more