Archive for the ‘Wall Street Journal’ Category

« Older Entries

Don’t try to fail, just try

Monday, July 7th, 2008

It’s been worrying me a bit, with all my emphasis on learning from mistakes and removing the stigma from making mistakes, that I might be encouraging people to try to make mistakes.

Although making a deliberate mistake can be a very useful exercise and lead a company to discover insights it couldn’t find out otherwise, it shouldn’t be the focus of your approach.

The point is to try to succeed lots of different ways, make small bets, try “safe-fail” experiments. Follow those that appear to lead somewhere. Ditch the remainder quickly.

More and more people are thinking this way. My evidence? Today’s Wall Street Journal Business Insight section, which talks about experimentation and learning from failure throughout. One example is “In Search of Growth Leaders,” by Sean Carr, Jeanne Liedtka and others which asserts that managers who can foster growth have different mindsets than those who can’t. [A nice graphic in the article compares people who see life as a journey of learning--i.e., potential growth leaders--to those who see it as a test--similar to the work of Carol Dweck referenced by Amy Edmondson in HBR, and discussed in a recent Mistake Bank post.]

There’s also “Oops! Accidents lead to more innovations. So how do you create more accidents?” by Robert Austin, Lee Devin and Erin Sullivan–which says to “explore lots of approaches” and “make accidents cheaper” which is safe-fail by other words.

And “Follow the Leaders,” by Craig Pearce, which encourages allowing team leadership to shift from member to member based on the needs of a particular part of a project, echoing ideas from the recent HBR article on management lessons from multiplayer online games.

If you do make a mistake, don’t throw it away. Learn from it, and put it in the Mistake Bank. The public one, or one of your own.

Related posts:
Multiplayer games demonstrate a new model for leadership
Amy Edmondson in July/Aug HBR
To progress in complex environments, experiment
Make some mistakes, and profit from it

Tags:

, , , , , , , ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, errors, experimentation, failure, innovation, leadership, learning, mistake bank, mistakes | Comments

Good news: The WSJ is back to being a great business paper (for now)

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

I wasn’t alone in complaining about the Wall Street Journal’s decline in the quality and quantity of its business news articles. Thankfully, as Slate’s Jack Shafer points out, the Journal has improved markedly in this area recently.

I’d point to this article on Dell’s embrace of web2.0, this one on new business gurus (but no women) and this on municipal broadband as recent standouts. Each of which has reconfirmed why I like the paper. I’ve also noticed that the wonderfully silly page-1 articles (I still remember the 30-year-old one on Meat Loaf) have returned.

Related post:
Wall Street Journal is discarding its identity as a business newspaper

Tags:
, , , ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, management, media, newspapers, strategy | Comments

Dell’s web2.0 efforts pay off

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Dell has taken a beating in the marketplace (both the commercial marketplace and the reputation marketplace) over the past few years. When founder Michael Dell took the reins again, you had to wonder whether his presence back in the CEO chair would really mean something, or would Dell slip into permanent stall mode like so many PC makers of the past (remember Gateway?).

So it’s notable that Dell has distinguished itself among consumer electronics companies for embracing the capabilities of web 2.0 to engage with customers and influencers. According to the excellent new book “Groundswell,” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Dell used a PR crisis created by a blogger to jump-start its participation in social media, by 2006 was monitoring blog posts on the company, proactively seeking out problems and responding to posts, if necessary reaching out to users with technical support.

That effort has expanded to include sensing problems by monitoring Twitter (as well as using Twitter to communicate with end-users and others).

Today’s Wall Street Journal points out that Dell has mastered the art of energizing the “groundswell” to build publicity for its products:

Dell Inc. hit a viral-PR home run last week when photos of a not-yet-released computer — a candy-red miniature laptop — swept across the Internet, creating excitement in advance of the release.

The buzz wasn’t an accident: It was the payoff from a year-long effort by Dell to engage more directly with bloggers and others who write about the company online….

Engaging with blogs isn’t just a defensive move. It has also changed the way the company promotes its products. Chief Executive Michael Dell brought the buzz-generating candy-red computer to The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference with the goal of showing it off to some of the bloggers in attendance.

A writer from Gizmodo, a popular gadget blog, saw the new computer and snapped a few pictures, which he posted on the Internet. The company then posted some official pictures on its own blog, and the story took on a life of its own. Dell’s blog post says Gizmodo “caught” Michael Dell with the new computer.

I own a Dell computer, a beige minitower from the old days. It’s a nice, boring computer. Dell’s efforts in web 2.0, however, are the opposite of boring.

Related posts:
Is your marketing department confused about web 2.0? (”Groundswell”)
Twitter and “Every Minute Accounted For”
Companies stall because they don’t listen to customers

Tags:
, , , , , ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, blogging, communication, information technology, marketing, social media, web2.0 | Comments

Dell’s web2.0 efforts pay off

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Dell has taken a beating in the marketplace (both the commercial marketplace and the reputation marketplace) over the past few years. When founder Michael Dell took the reins again, you had to wonder whether his presence back in the CEO chair would really mean something, or would Dell slip into permanent stall mode like so many PC makers of the past (remember Gateway?).

So it’s notable that Dell has distinguished itself among consumer electronics companies for embracing the capabilities of web 2.0 to engage with customers and influencers. According to the excellent new book “Groundswell,” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Dell used a PR crisis created by a blogger to jump-start its participation in social media, by 2006 was monitoring blog posts on the company, proactively seeking out problems and responding to posts, if necessary reaching out to users with technical support.

That effort has expanded to include sensing problems by monitoring Twitter (as well as using Twitter to communicate with end-users and others).

Today’s Wall Street Journal points out that Dell has mastered the art of energizing the “groundswell” to build publicity for its products:

Dell Inc. hit a viral-PR home run last week when photos of a not-yet-released computer — a candy-red miniature laptop — swept across the Internet, creating excitement in advance of the release.

The buzz wasn’t an accident: It was the payoff from a year-long effort by Dell to engage more directly with bloggers and others who write about the company online….

Engaging with blogs isn’t just a defensive move. It has also changed the way the company promotes its products. Chief Executive Michael Dell brought the buzz-generating candy-red computer to The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference with the goal of showing it off to some of the bloggers in attendance.

A writer from Gizmodo, a popular gadget blog, saw the new computer and snapped a few pictures, which he posted on the Internet. The company then posted some official pictures on its own blog, and the story took on a life of its own. Dell’s blog post says Gizmodo “caught” Michael Dell with the new computer.

I own a Dell computer, a beige minitower from the old days. It’s a nice, boring computer. Dell’s efforts in web 2.0, however, are the opposite of boring.

Related posts:
Is your marketing department confused about web 2.0? (”Groundswell”)
Twitter and “Every Minute Accounted For”
Companies stall because they don’t listen to customers

Tags:
, , , , , ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, blogging, communication, information technology, marketing, social media, web2.0 | Comments

US third broadband option an elusive goal

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Earthlink’s withdrawal from the municipal WiFi business, leaving the future of networks in Philadelphia and other cities uncertain at best, and similar news from MetroFi, has closed a chapter in the search for alternatives to the phone company and the cable company for a third broadband competitor.

Third-tier cities and rural areas are most affected. When the cables and telcos are offering higher-speed services (like Verizon’s FiOS), they are doing so in the major metro areas. So it’s not surprising that cities themselves are getting, perhaps reluctantly, into the broadband business. The efforts of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to build out a municipal fiber network, are profiled in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

While covering US broadband problems profiled before in this blog, like lower coverage, high prices and relatively low speeds compared to other countries, the WSJ article usefully shows the impact on customers, especially business customers, of poor broadband availability and performance:

In a converted saddle factory here, Jonathan Bragdon, 38 years old, runs a 40-person company that he says couldn’t exist without a lot of affordable Internet bandwidth. Seven of his employees live and work in other cities, including New York and Leeds, England. His business, called Tricycle Inc., transmits high-resolution 3-D simulations of carpeting to interior designers.

More important than download speed for such work is upload speed. Yet, on most connections it often takes longer to upload files to the Internet than it does to download them from the Internet. With Comcast, Mr. Bragdon was getting a download speed of eight megabits a second, but an upload speed of only one megabit a second.

About two years ago, Tricycle switched to the EPB’s fiber network. Mr. Bragdon says that lowered his costs several-fold and gave him the flexibility to upgrade to speeds as fast as 100 megabits a second. “With the rivers and the mountains, young people want to live here,” says Mr. Bragdon. “But you need good bandwidth to work here.”

Let’s hope businesspeople like Mr. Bragdon can get the bandwidth they need, from whatever provider. And if the cables or the telcos won’t provide it everywhere it’s needed, perhaps the municipalities will have to.

Related Posts:
US broadband prices vs. the rest of the world: nothing has changed
US consumers need a third broadband option

Tags:
, , ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, broadband, pricing, technology | Comments

No female business gurus? Try this list

Monday, May 5th, 2008

There was a fun article today in the Wall Street Journal that ranked the top business gurus by citation, Google hits and media mentions. Familiar names, like Gary Hamel, Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman are in the top 5.

This paragraph, though, struck me:


One notable absence from the top 20: women. The 2003 list included one woman, Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter, among its top 20, but she fell in the new ranking. “I would love to hear more female speakers,” says Kristi Wetherington, CEO of Capital Institutional Services Inc., a Dallas independent institutional brokerage firm.

So who would be on my list of top female gurus? How about these:

1. Herminia Ibarra, INSEAD. Powerful thinking on career management and networking.

2. Deborah Ancona, MIT. Authority on teamwork (her book “X-Teams” was one of my favorite books of 2007).

3. Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School. Organizational behavior, including the value of candor and dissent in the workplace.

4. Rita Gunther McGrath, Columbia University. Practical yet profound ideas on leadership and innovation.

5. Traci Fenton, WorldBlu. A tireless advocate and thinker on workplace democracy.

And of course Ms. Kanter.

Related posts:

“Personal Networks: useful anywhere” (Ibarra)

“Blame it on the I-Team” (Ancona)

“Great innovation requires great teams…” (Edmondson)

“A more realistic way to profit from innovation” (McGrath)

“WorldBlu 2008 List of Democratic Workplaces released” (Fenton)

Kanter’s Innovation Pyramid“

Tags:
, ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, gurus, thinkers | Comments

Move to Intel chips helped Mac hit the jackpot

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

When the Mac’s move to Intel chips was announced almost three years ago, it seemed like a good, practical move. The PowerPC chip was falling behind Intel, performance-wise, and Apple wanted to leverage Intel’s much larger investment in performance and capability. Intel, for its part, wanted the sexiness of being associated with a cooler brand than Dell, Lenovo, etc.

But the full impact of the processor swap is only now becoming apparent. Yesterday Apple stated that its latest quarterly earnings rose 36% over the same period last year, powered by a 51% increase in Mac sales. The Wall Street Journal buried this telling passage into its article on Apple’s earnings release:

Apple’s computers now also easily run Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system, which has helped Apple in a long-running campaign to persuade Windows users to switch to Macs.

Precisely. The Intel processor was a Trojan Horse hiding Windows compatibility–the real value of the switch from PowerPC. Eons ago, people in companies used Macs all the time (it was on my desktop in 1989). Then Windows 3.1 swept through the business world, and Macs retreated to schools, graphic designers and filmmakers.

Now, people who require some Windows programs (because of work or other reasons) can retain that compatibility and get the benefits of OS X and all the interesting applications that run on it.

One of those people is me. The Mac returned to my desktop in August 2007 after a 12-year hiatus. It’s good to be back.

,, , ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, apple, personal computers, strategy, technology | Comments

Wall Street Journal is discarding its identity as the business newspaper

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

I’ve frequently talked in this blog about things I first read in the Wall Street Journal. [I've subscribed to the Journal since I got a discounted subscription in grad school, twenty years ago or so.] But over the past several months, there has been a noticeable falloff in articles I find useful. It occurred to me last week that I very rarely see anything in the first section of the paper that is interesting to me as a general business reader. There’s lots of politics, a fair amount of finance, international affairs… and that’s it.

And then, earlier this week, I noticed that they’ve taken another page out of section one to devote to opinion. This may make some subscribers happy, but to me it’s another page to turn past.

The Marketplace section feels unchanged, but that’s small comfort. Now there are maybe eight to ten interesting pages in a typical issue of the Journal. And that’s not enough.

Finally, the reasons for this are clear. New owner Rupert Murdoch is imprinting his stamp on the paper. Yesterday’s news that the managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, was stepping down, was credited to Murdoch wanting his own people making the editing decisions. “Now that the ownership transition has taken place, I have come to believe the new owners should have a managing editor of their choosing,” wrote Brauchli to the newspaper staff. [Which begs the question, whatever happened to the "hands-off" agreement that the Bancrofts supposedly negotiated?]

Murdoch apparently wants to build a general-interest newspaper to compete with the New York Times (with political views he likes better). He may reach that goal, but at the cost of losing what was distinctive about the Journal–a high-quality, daily look at business.

In which case, he’ll lose at least one long-term subscriber.

,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, management | Comments

Innovative Irish company gets the red out

Friday, March 28th, 2008

Traditionally, photography has been an edit-after-the-fact art form. In the film era, this meant taking lots and lots of pictures and discarding the ones that didn’t come out right. Early digital photography has used editing programs like Photoshop to eliminate red-eye or improve lighting after photos have been downloaded to a PC.

An innovative Irish company, FotoNation, has developed technology that allows photo improvement to occur before the picture is actually taken. As profiled in today’s Wall Street Journal, the company has developed a compact software program that eliminates red-eye in flash photographs before images are written to disk, among other innovations. Nikon and Kodak are building FotoNation’s technology into their digital cameras.

Another interesting point about FotoNation: despite being founded in Galway, Ireland, the founder is Israeli and the chief engineer is Romanian–another example of the growing heterogenizing of Ireland’s technology sector.

, , , ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, innovation, photography, software, technology | Comments

Better e-commerce another way: invite related sites

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Building on yesterday’s post on e-commerce and making sites more effective, today’s Wall Street Journal profiles Etsy.com, a selling site for handmade goods, and its embrace of independent related sites that connect users and allow them to share information (link to article – $$).

The article, by Raymund Flandez, puts a particular focus on We Love Etsy, a small social network of Etsy sellers. Through We Love Etsy, sellers share insights on how to use Etsy.com more effectively, highlight products they like, etc. The community helps otherwise lone sellers connect–a bit like an online Chamber of Commerce.

There’s additional stickiness as well: if someone is a member of Etsy.com and We Love Etsy, she has that much more invested in the Etsy platform, and she’ll be less likely to defect if another e-commerce site comes calling.

Etsy.com, for its part, approves of these independent sites (though they have begun to ask sites to request permission to use logos and trademarks). Rob Kalin, Etsy’s founder, is quoted saying this:

“What it means for us is that we don’t have to spend anywhere as much money on marketing because there are all of these avenues for people to spread the word and talk about what we do.”

If there’s a downside to these user-created sites, it’s that their independence makes it difficult for Etsy to control their message. But by supporting a free exchange of information, Etsy retains a channel to the candid feelings of their sellers, and underscores its own authenticity.

Anyway, haven’t we come to realize that controlling messages is at best twentieth-century marketing practice?

, , ,

Posted in Wall Street Journal, ecommerce, marketing, websites | Comments

« Older Entries