Monthly Archives: June 2011

Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, writing in HBR (December, 2006 and January-February, 2011), advance the idea of creating shared value by developing strategies and policies that enhance the competitiveness of the company while advancing social and economic conditions of the … Continue reading →

Flying on a clear day, a pilot can see everything out of the cockpit: the visual cues match the instrument readings so there is no ambiguity about what the plane is doing. But piloting at night is completely different: you … Continue reading →

Featured Guest: Morten Hansen, professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results. Download this podcast

The other week, I was in Beijing facilitating a company offsite. The company had absolutely no operations in Beijing, and no plans to start operations there. It is a disciplined operator, so this wasn’t a junket either. So, what was … Continue reading →

When outraged Vancouverites turned to blogs and Facebook to identify participants in the Stanley Cup riots, many celebrated sites like Vancouver 2011 Riot Pics and Vancouver 2011 Criminal List as examples of putting social media to concrete and constructive use. … Continue reading →

In this age of consumer analytics and customer-centricity, most companies don’t develop products and services before talking to customers, identifying latent needs and wants, and studying behaviors. However, while coming to grips with myriad customer segments and mountains of data, … Continue reading →

Last week I wrote about how eating less meat was the best way to reduce your food’s carbon footprint. But what do you do if you want to be a responsible corporate citizen and you sell fast food? Well, I … Continue reading →

What makes you effective at work? Perhaps you’d say it is your excellent communication skills, your deep background in your field, or perhaps your ability to think on your feet. Chances are, you wouldn’t focus much on your habits. Yet … Continue reading →

Faced with an eroding core business, most companies seem to do…nothing. In the media and entertainment industry, look at Blockbuster’s lackluster embrace of mail delivery and video streaming, newspapers’ mainly tepid moves into digital publishing, and television networks’ doubling-down on … Continue reading →

An interesting battle is looming over Apple’s newspaper and magazines subscription pricing for iOS devices (notably the iPad). Apple’s offer to publishers is simple. They can offer an app that allows consumers to buy individual issues of their content or … Continue reading →