InfoCompanions » Business

Richard St. John: “Success is a continuous journey”

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:41:38 +0000

In his typically candid style, Richard St. John reminds us that success is not a one-way street, but a constant journey. He uses the story of his business’ rise and fall to illustrate a valuable lesson — when we stop trying, we fail.

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Social Intelligence and Leadership

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:58:47 +0000

Daniel Goleman is a nationally known psychologist and author of books on emotional and social intelligence. He argues that good leaders have at least four characteristics to help them cope with the world. Two (self awareness and managing emotions) deal with the emotional intelligence of the individual leader and his or her ability to deal with the world. Two others (humor and rapport) deal with social intelligence or being in sync with others. In this engaging video, Daniel elaborates on “Social Intelligence”.

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About Daniel Goleman:
Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. Working as a science journalist, Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half; with more than 5,000,000 copies in print worldwide in 30 languages, and has been a best seller in many countries.

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Innovation at Procter & Gamble

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; significantly improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. How? A. G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO, Procter & Gamble, and his leadership team have integrated innovation into everything P&G does and created new customers and new markets. In this interview, A.G. Lafley talks about how innovation is at the core of P&G’s business strategy, and how P&G makes innovation an everyday practice in their organization.

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About A.G. Lafley:
As the CEO of Proctor and Gamble, A.G. Lafley is a world renowned leader in innovation. He began at Proctor and Gamble in 1977, and was chosen as CEO in 2000. He inherited a struggling company that was then and still is adapting to a new global business unit. He saw one of the only ways to get out of trouble was to focus on innovation in his company. A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan have co-written “The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation”.

Why Zappos Pays New Employees To Quit – And You Should Too

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Zappos, the Nevada-based online shoe and accessories retailer, has an interesting twist on new-hire bonuses. After applying and being chosen for a job, employees get a month of paid training. Then they’re offered $1,000 to leave. It’s a test of commitment, meant to see if money is what matters to workers. The amount offered has risen from an initial $100 and could grow even more. Only 1 in 10 take the offer, according to CEO Tony Hsieh, and the company now employs approximately 1,600 who passed the test.

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About William C. Taylor:
William C. Taylor is an agenda-setting thinker, writer, and entrepreneur. His new book, Mavericks at Work, has been a New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller. As cofounder of Fast Company, he launched a magazine that earned a passionate following among executives and entrepreneurs. He is an adjunct professor at Babson College and a former associate editor of Harvard Business Review.

Managing Generation Y

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:00:00 +0000

The newest generation to hit the workforce is self-assured, has high aspirations, and can get very impatient with the way business has been traditionally done. They aren’t gunning for your job, but their lack of interest in middle management means Boomers risk leaving behind a vacuum as they retire. Harvard Business blogger Tammy Erickson says we can learn from Gen Y — their focus on immediacy can help speed up the pace of business — and has some stern words of warning for overly protective parents.

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About Tamara J. Erickson:
Tamara J. Erickson (Tammy) is both a respected, McKinsey Award-winning author and popular and engaging storyteller. Her compelling views of the future are based on extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Well-grounded and academically rigorous, fundamentally optimistic, Tammy’s work discerns and describes interesting trends in our future and provides actionable counsel to help both organizations and individuals prepare today. She is a member of nGenera Inc.

Tammy has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles: “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” (March 2004), winner of the McKinsey Award, “Managing Middlescence” (March 2006), “What It Means to Work Here,” (March 2007), and “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” (November 2007), as well as the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent, published by Harvard Business School Press (2006). She has also co-authored an MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Bridging Faultlines in Diverse Teams,” (Summer 2007). She also authored one of Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Ideas for 2008, “Task, Not Time,” (February 2008).

The 5 Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:00:00 +0000

A healthy industry structure should be as much a competitive concern to strategists as their company’s own position. Defending against the competitive forces and shaping them in a company’s favor are crucial to strategy. Tom Stewart talks to Michael E. Porter about the 5 forces that can help a company understand the structure of its industry and stake out a position that is more profitable and less vulnerable to attack.

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About Michael E. Porter:
Professor Michael E. Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor, based at Harvard Business School. A University professorship is the highest professional recognition that can be awarded to a Harvard faculty member. In 2001, Harvard Business School and Harvard University jointly created the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, dedicated to furthering Professor Porter’s work.

He is a leading authority on competitive strategy, the competitiveness and economic development of nations, states, and regions, and the application of competitive principles to social problems such as health care, the environment, and corporate responsibility. He is generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field, as has been identified in a variety of rankings and surveys as the world’s most influential thinker on management and competitiveness.

Institutions vs. Collaboration

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody”, shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning. With many organizations trying to harness the power of communities and collaboration, Clay suggests that the key to effective collaboration is to embed it into the infrastructure. Doing so will enable taking the “problem” to the “problem solvers”, rather than taking the “problem solver” to the “problem”.

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About Tom Davenport:
Clay Shirky is the author of “Here Comes Everybody”. His consulting focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.” His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC. Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches course named “Social Weather.”

Yes, You Can Innovate Like Google

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 06:00:00 +0000

The words “Google” and “Innovation” have been used numerous times in the last few years… and all of us undoubtedly admire “The Google Way”, their talent acquisition, management and retention strategies etc. However, we usually shy away from adoting a subset of those ideas, with the usual answer - “we’re different”. In this video, Tom Davenport describes how Google uses chaos to quickly move from prototype to finished product, tolerates a high failure rate in order to ensure bigger success, and gets the most from knowledge workers. He also asserts that more companies can, and should, borrow elements of Google’s innovative approach to business.

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About Tom Davenport:
Tom Davenport holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, where he also leads the Process Management and Working Knowledge Research Centers. His books and articles on business process reengineering, knowledge management, attention management, knowledge worker productivity, and analytical competition helped to establish each of those business ideas. His website is tomdavenport.com.

Green City

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:00:00 +0000

San Francisco has made great progress towards becoming a “Green City”. Voluntary programs like “Green Business” that encourage businesses to take proactive actions that are good for their bottomline and the environment, is just another example of the city’s innovative approaches towards greening. Mayor Gavin Newsom talks with Dana Goodyear on what it means to be green in politics and in the world.

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About Gavin Newsom:
Gavin Newsom was born October 10, 1967 to the Honorable Judge William Newsom and Tessa Newsom. He grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from Santa Clara University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. In 2005, Newsom earned an honorable mention as one of Time Magazine’s Best Big City Mayors and was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders.

As San Francisco’s youngest mayor in 100 years, Gavin Newsom has brought fresh ideas and renewed energy to the City and County. He has earned a reputation as an innovator on issues ranging from homelessness to the environment, healthcare to education.

Standardized Tests & Talent Mismatch

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Do you remember that “whiz-kid” in your grad/undergrad class who was expected to be the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffet? And do you remember that “invisible” guy who was just happy to score a “B” and was destined to flip burgers for the rest of his life? And do you know where there are today? Be prepared to be surprised. Malcolm Gladwell talks about how standardized tests go horribly wrong when uncovering the most promising talent for the job – what he calls the “Mismatch Problem”. And as the complexity of workplace grows in the future, hiring the “Best Talent” will need new measures.

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About Malcolm Gladwell:
Malcolm Gladwell specializes in surprises — counterintuitive truths discovered by clever researchers, obscure historians, and ordinary people observing the world. In his first year as a staff writer at the “New Yorker in 1996, he captivated readers with an article titled “The Tipping Point,” which grappled with a mysterious sudden drop in New York City crime, by applying the principles of epidemiology to policing. “The Tipping Point” ultimately became a book and has remained on the New York Times best-seller lists for years.

Meanwhile, Gladwell has gone on to explore similar mismatches — mammography and fighter jets (it’s all about seeing), pit bulls and racial profiling, Wayne Gretsky and Yo-Yo Ma — writing cross-disciplinary articles that illuminate hidden facts about group behavior, business and individual selves. Gladwell began 2007 with a controversial look at the Enron case, distinct from all the reportage that’s come before.

Dangers of Blogging… for Men

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 18 May 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Investor and prankster Yossi Vardi delivers a careful lecture on the dangers of blogging. Specifically, for men.

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About Yossi Vardi:
Joseph “Yossi” Vardi has helped more than 40 startups see the light of day, among them Mirabilis (makers of ICQ) and the video companies Scopus and BrightCove. He’s a strategic advisor to Amazon and AOL, and a venture partner of Pitango, one of Israel’s largest VC funds.

He’s a lively presence in the world of tech startups, with an absurd sense of humor and a refreshing set of values (restated in a much-commented-on TechCrunch post in October) that drive his approach to new investments. The takeaways: Judge the individual over the business plan; and don’t shy away from an entrepreneur who has failed before: “It makes them want to win even more,” he said.

3 Stories from the life of Steve Jobs

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:00:00 +0000

In his Commencement address, Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs urged Stanford graduates to follow their hearts. A pancreatic cancer survivor, he adds, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

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About Steve Jobs:
Steve Jobs is the CEO, chairman and co-founder of Apple Inc., and is the founder of Pixar Animation Studios and was its CEO until it was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2006. Jobs is currently the Walt Disney Company’s largest individual shareholder and a member of its Board of Directors. He is considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries. Steve Jobs is listed as Fortune Magazine’s most powerful Businessman of 2007 out of twenty-five other top businessmen.

Cars off the road, data into the skies

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Robin Chase rose to fame by founding Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business, but that was one of her smaller ideas. In this presentation she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a no-fee mesh network as sprawling as the United States Interstate highway system. But how could you build a free wireless system that vast and pervasive? Chase finds the answer in a few short lines from The Graduate. And it has nothing to do with plastic.

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About Robin Chase:
If she weren’t a proven start-up entrepreneur, you might imagine Robin Chase as a transportation geek, some dedicated civil servant, endlessly refining computer models of freeway traffic. Or if she weren’t such a green-conscious problem-solver, you might take her for a businesswoman only. Ultimately, the best way to understand Chase is simply as a remarkable innovator.

Case in point: In 2000, Chase focused her MIT business training on founding Zipcar, now the largest car-sharing business in the world. Using a wireless key system and Internet billing, members pick up Zipcars at myriad locations anytime they want one. The idea is at once ordinary and highly sophisticated, with powerful technologies applied to tasks as prosaic as grocery shopping. But the result couldn’t be more straightforward: fewer cars, less carbon.

Since its founding, Zipcar has doubled in size every year, making Chase’s biggest ideas and her latest company, GoLoco, look mighty promising.

Why can’t we “grow” new energy?

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Juan Enriquez offers a glimpse of some ground-breaking research to explore the potential of bioenergy. Our current energy sources — coal, oil, gas — are ultimately derived from ancient plants — they’re “concentrated sunlight.” He asks, Can we learn from that process and accelerate it? Can we get to the point where we grow our own energy as efficiently as we grow wheat? (Less than a month after this talk, his company announced a process to do just that.).

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About Juan Enriquez:
A broad thinker who studies the intersection of science, business and society, Juan Enriquez has a talent for bridging disciplines to build a coherent look ahead. The founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, Enriquez has published widely on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), and was a member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter’s marine-based team to collect genetic data from the world’s oceans.

Formerly CEO of Mexico City’s Urban Development Corporation and chief of staff for Mexico’s secretary of state, Enriquez played a role in reforming Mexico’s domestic policy and helped negotiate a cease-fire with Zapatista rebels. He is chair and CEO of Biotechonomy, a research and investment firm helping to fund new genomics firms. The Untied States of America, his latest book, looks at the forces threatening America’s future as a unified country.

Role of Power in Talent Management

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 07:00:00 +0000

James Surowiecki talks about the evolving role of power in a time when change comes fast and furious and technology-enabled, bottom-up innovation competes with our inherent desire to obey authority.

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About James Surowiecki:
James Surowiecki is the foremost authority on how to harness the collective wisdom of your organization for competitive advantage. He has written a well-received book on the theory and practice of “The Wisdom of Crowds—Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few And How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies And Nations”.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, Jim describes systematic ways to organize and aggregate the intelligence available in your organization in order to arrive at superior decisions—often better than those that individuals would make, even if they are ‘experts’.

The book and Jim’s presentations based on the book are full of insights into how groups operate that are invaluable to business leaders. He also offers practical methods, tailored to his audience, for leveraging people and technology to learn what you need to know and make decisions that really serve the organization’s goals.

Jim writes a twice-monthly financial column for The New Yorker that is typically pegged to current events and incorporates the kind of insights from economics, sociology, and business history that make The Wisdom of Crowds so valuable.

He has written for a broad range of other publications on a wide variety of topics. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal and other major publications. He wrote “The Bottom Line” column for New York magazine, and was a contributing editor at Fortune.

Sliced Bread-Marketing Delights

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 07:00:00 +0000

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. And early adopters, not the mainstream’s bell curve, are the new sweet spot of the market.

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About Seth Godin:
“Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age,” Mary Kuntz wrote in Business Week nearly a decade ago. “Instead of widgets or car parts, he specializes in ideas — usually, but not always, his own.” In fact, he’s as focused on spreading ideas as he is on the ideas themselves.

After working as a software brand manager in the mid-1980s, Godin started Yoyodyne, one of the first Internet-based direct-marketing firms, with the notion that companies needed to rethink how they reached customers. His efforts caught the attention of Yahoo!, which bought the company in 1998 and kept Godin on as a vice president of permission marketing. Godin has produced several critically acclaimed and attention-grabbing books, including Permission Marketing, All Marketers Are Liars, and Purple Cow (which was distributed in a milk carton). In 2005, Godin founded Squidoo.com, a Web site where users can share links and information about an idea or topic important to them.

Technology’s Long Tail

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Chris Anderson, the editor of WIRED, explores the four key stages of any viable technology: setting the right price, gaining market share, displacing an established technology and, finally, becoming ubiquitous. To demonstrate this trajectory, Anderson explores the evolution of the DVD player as it passes through each of these four tipping points, then offers specific examples of current trends in technology — ranging from DNA sequencing to the hybrid — to illustrate each stage of the game.

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About Chris Anderson:
Before Chris Anderson took over as editor of WIRED, he spent seven years at The Economist, where he worked as editor of both the technology and business sections. Anderson holds a degree in physics and has conducted research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and has done stints at the leading journals Nature and Science.

He’s perhaps most famous for coining the term “the long tail,” a whiteboard favorite that describes the business strategy of pursuing many little fish (versus a few big fish), as typified by both Amazon and Netflix. Anderson first introduced the term in an article written for WIRED in 2004; the book-length version, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, became a bestseller. He maintains a blog, The Long Tail, which he updates with impressive regularly.

There’s Innovation Ahead

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 13 May 2007 07:00:00 +0000

The dot-com boom-and-bust is often compared to the 1849 Gold Rush, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos offers historical evidence showing how similar they were: from the riches made by pioneers to the media hype that attracted luckless speculators. But a better analogy can be found in the early days of the electric industry, he says. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was first wired to support lightbulbs; the following century saw a long procession of new appliances, life-changing advances, and of course some amusing failures. His conclusion in 2003: “I believe there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us.”

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About Jeff Bezos:
Jeff Bezos didn’t invent online shopping, but he almost single-handedly turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. His Amazon.com began as a bookstore in 1994, and quickly expanded into dozens of product categories, forcing the world’s biggest retailers to rethink their business models, and ultimately changing the way people shop.

But Amazon.com isn’t just an internet success story. It’s the standard by which all web businesses are now judged — if not by their shareholders, then by their customers. Amazon set a high bar for reliability and customer service, and also introduced a wide range of online retail conventions — from user reviews and one-click shopping to the tab interface and shopping cart icon — so commonplace we no longer think of them as once having been innovations.

When the Internet bubble burst, Amazon.com took a hit with the other e-commerce pioneers, but the fundamentally sound company hung tough. It now sells more than $8 billion a year of goods, profitably, and its technology will influence the changes to business and media that will come next. Bezos, meanwhile, is one of the few early Web CEOs who still run the companies they founded. Outside of his work with Amazon, he recently founded Blue Origin, a space-flight startup.

Rise of Amateur Professional

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 06 May 2007 07:00:00 +0000

In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn’t just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can’t. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs (“Pro-Ams,” as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.

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About Charles Leadbeater:
A researcher at the London think tank Demos, Charles Leadbeater was early to notice the rise of “amateur innovation” — great ideas from outside the traditional walls, from people who suddenly have the tools to collaborate, innovate and make their expertise known.

Charles Leadbeater’s theories on innovation have compelled some of the world’s largest organizations to rethink their strategies. A financial journalist turned innovation consultant (for clients ranging from the British government to Microsoft), Leadbeater noticed the rise of “pro-ams” — passionate amateurs who act like professionals, making breakthrough discoveries in many fields, from software to astronomy to kite-surfing. His 2004 essay “The Pro-Am Revolution” — which The New York Times called one of the year’s biggest global ideas — highlighted the rise of this new breed of amateur.

Prominent examples range from the mountain bike to the open-source operating system Linux, from Wikipedia to the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which helped persuade Western nations to cancel more than $30 billion in third-world debt. In his upcoming book, We-Think, Leadbeater explores how this emerging culture of mass creativity and participation could reshape companies and governments. A business reporter by training, he was previously an editor for the Financial Times, and later, The Independent (where, with Helen Fielding, he developed the “Bridget Jones’ Diary” column).

Competing on Analytics

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 07:00:00 +0000

What do market leaders such as Netflix, Capital One and the New England Patriots football team have in common? They use analytics to out-think and out-execute the competition. At a time when many companies offer similar products and use comparable technology, many of the previous bases for competition are no longer viable. What remains are execution and smart decision making powered by analytical insight. By competing on analytics, companies can win in the rapidly evolving global market.

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More and more organizations have discovered the power of analytics to out-think and out-execute the competition. In this video, Jeanne G. Harris, executive senior research fellow and director of research at the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business, explains how top firms are basing their strategies on analytics.