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Strategy & Business’ “Top-50″

IP — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Strategy and Business is the magazine/ content strategy and branding arm of Booz Allen (Booz Co. nowadays) and has been around for 15 years. Their editors chose the 50 “best” articles in this period (free registration required). Some we’ve already read and really are worth it, and most are probably interesting. Get them while you can, but just remember the old “there’s only 24 hours in a day” warning.

Race to the bottom

IP — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:50:05 +0000

Booz & Co.’s Strategy & Business has a summary of a recent paper on CEO compensation. It’s public knowledge that it has skyrocketed in the last 20 years or so, but this paper searches for a driver – and finds it in “compensation benchmarking” (fee or subscription required). You could also call it “The grass is always greener” effect. It was always intuitive to picture CEOs looking at (selected) peers earning inflated packages and hiring compensation consultants who, surprise surprise, would dial up the numbers, aided by complacent Boards (usually made up of, you guessed it, peer-company CEOs).

Nothing new, but always nice to emphasize.

Book: The Curse of The Mogul

IP — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:54:15 +0000

Strategy & Business published a review for The Curse of The Mogul, which we’ve read recently. It’s a must-read for several reasons: media, capital allocation, competitive strategy and leadership. Not that we agree with Greenwald 100% – especially when he talks about telephone/cable as dumb-pipe winners vs. the lackluster future for content generators and aggregators (there is stuff/players missing there and you could think of some counter-examples). Chapter 2, on competitive strategy, is especially interesting.

That’s because it assesses the competitive strategy framework from a specific industry’s standpoint (always better than ‘generic speeches’) and it was useful for thinking about other industries as well.

The book was generated from the course Strategic Management of Media @ Columbia.

This article shares Mr. Greenwald’s view on media. We don’t necessarily agree with his view on the future of media, but it’s good food for thought and discussion.

“Crowdsourcing” revisited

IP — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:01:26 +0000

“Crowdsourcing”/ “open collaboration”/ “business2.0″ – this trend is being analyzed more carefully. This time it’s Booz Allen offering words of caution, remembering the 1980′s and the “Quality” movement (we’d add the “Re-engineering” frenzy). Success cases exist – we wouldn’t write this blog if we didn’t believe in harnessing the right connections – but as we’ve started discussing in our Netflix post, beware survivorship bias and remember that positive cases usually make for better headlines.

The point here is, on the company side, to remember Warren Buffett’s “institutional imperative” analogy. A manager’s job is not to keep up with buzzwords, after all. Crowdsourcing is a new thing, therefore relatively untested, and it certainly has its optimal applications and its limits – which probably haven’t been found yet. It’s just another tool available and should be subject to the same rigorous analysis before the company starts using it.

Links:

The crowd is wise – when it’s focused – NY Times, July 2009 – here’s the link to a MIT paper they quote called “Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence”

Wired’s 2006 seminal article on Crowdsourcing – by Jeff Howe, who later wrote the inevitable book version.

Jeff Howe’s blog on the subject – Pretty much dead, but it has links to other Crowdsourcing stories.