Strategy/Analysis Archives - Page 32 of 48

Scott Karp deserves your attenion.

July 17, 2006 by Liz

Wondering What’s Changed?

You can argue ideology, but I’ve said for a while that American companies are going to hurt when they realize they no longer have the only access to the largest market in the world. It’s not a hard concept — it’s about quality now, not quanity. Scott Karp says it beautifully in just a few words. Don’t let the big words throw you. Click the title and go read.

Thanks, Scott. I agree completely.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
[via Manage to Change]
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Critical Skill 6B: 5+1 Ways to a Best-Fit Niche for YOU & the Market

July 17, 2006 by Liz

Finding that Ellusive Niche

Everyone talks about finding their niche, but I haven’t heard much about how to do it. How do you do a niche that fits? Finding a niche is Critical Skill 6 in what I call The 10 Skills Most Critical to Your Future. Once you can find hidden assumptions, you’re on your way to finding hidden niches.

Finding a niche that fits you and the market takes involvement, patience, and self-awareness — you need to know all points of view to get the perfect fit, and nothing less will do.

That best-fit niche is a tiny space where you’ll live, work, and relate to people. You’re going to have to like it there, but so are folks who don’t even know you. How do you find the niche that works for you and attracts an audience? [Read more…]

Critical Skill 6A: Five Tools for Finding Faulty Assumptions

July 15, 2006 by Liz

What Is the Premise Behind your Thinking?

At the time I was an Executive Editor. The project was simple. Build a binder of about 300 pages. I’d probably built four times that many books already. For a rush job, this one should be a piece of cake.

We made the bookmap. We went through the usual steps. We got the pages. Got the binders. Got everything ready for assembly. That’s when we faced our hidden assumption.

We’d assumed that Binders go together exactly like books do.

They do except in one important way. Books don’t have those tab dividers. Our tiny assumption caused a major, stressful, and immediate problem. The first divider belonged between pages 23 and 24. So? [Read more…]

Organizational Development 2.0 Style

July 10, 2006 by Liz

Organizational Development — What Is It?

If you went to business school, you probably learned about organizational development, but the world is changing and organizations are changing with it — at least the ones that have hopes of lasting. Listen in on this post by Gautam Ghosh.

The goals of OD in the the last century were to make workplaces more open transparent and honest. The focus was on generating authentic and non-threatening conversations. About creating workplaces where people were not merely ‘resources’ or ‘talent’.

Sounds a bit like blogging doesn’t it?

Yet, Gautam goes onto say that

However, the overall culture of organizational life never let these concepts come to fruition. Most organizations were and still are, places where your goals are set by others, your performance is judged by others, and your rewards are measured by others.

That’s where today’s enterprise loses the entrepreneurial spirit.

Gautuam goes on to make some great points about what today’s organizations are facing. You can check out his post by clicking the title.

Thanks Guatam, for this analsis.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

AT&T & ME w/o DSL — Why AT&T Won’t Fix Problems

June 22, 2006 by Liz

The Problem

5:30a.m. Up and to the kitchen. Turn on the coffee. To the office. Turn on the computer. Take a shower.

5:45a.m. Get coffee. Get to work. OR NOT!

Wait a minute. What’s wrong here? Walk to the router. I have no DSL. I have things to do. It’s still DARK OUT.

6:00a.m. Consider options. Start to execute. Then envision images of screwed system. Recall pact that I will die first, because I’ll never be able to figure out how this home network is configured.

6;30a.m Wake up IT husband. Tell him we have no DSL.
He gets coffee, looks at router, see light off, and confirms it.

6:45a.m. Call AT&T. Listen to recording. Punch in numbers. Answer questions. Find out that we need to call another number.

7:00a.m. Call AT&T Number 2. Listen to recording. Punch in same numbers. Answer same questions. Finally get a person on the line. Start by saying the following.

ME: Hi, before we begin, could I just say that we have a sophisticated system here, that it was working at midnight, that everything is correctly connected, and that I’ve turned things off and on again.

AT&T SHE: Can I call you by your first name? [Read more…]

17% of Everyone’s Time — 18-50++ Got Model?

June 13, 2006 by Liz

Not Just a Survey

When Ball State University Center for Media Design did a new study on how we use media, they didn’t want to take a survey. Surveys have that problem of people self-reporting their behavior — sometimes folks aren’t, well, accurate. Hoping to avoid that issue the Center for Media Design took a slightly different approach. They followed subjects for an entire day to observe behaviors as they happened.

In his BusinessWeek|online article “How We Use the Web Today,” Carlos Bergfeld reports on the study.

The study, they say, gives one of the clearest glimpses of the Internet’s media influence, especially during the working day. More than 60% of participants use the Web during the day, vs. 40% for newspapers, and about 30% for magazines, according to the study, commissioned by the Online Publishers Assn., of which BusinessWeek.com is a member. And at work, the Web dominates media consumption, the researchers say.

People are spending a lot more time during the day on the Web, too — on average about 120 minutes. That’s less than they listen to the radio, but much longer than the roughly half hour they read newspapers or magazines. (TV is still the media king, gobbling more than 240 minutes of a viewer’s day.) A decade ago, people were spending less than an hour on the Web, the study says.

Two important facts that came out of the study were that [Read more…]