Happy 4th of July!

I know I’ve been a bit behind in posting recently, but I want to take this opportunity to wish everyone here in the U.S. (and any Americans abroad who might find their way here) a Happy 4th!
And lest we be reminded of this one too many times (and I hope I’m not sounding jingoistic here), [...]

The Visible Experience

Experience counts. I don’t mean work experience, or the kind of wisdom that gives you insight, but the experience your customer (or prospective customer) has interacting with your company. Your customer’s Experience is the heart of your brand, and the heart of your customer’s decision to stay your customer.
Last week, I had two experiences which [...]

A Step in the Right Direction

On Friday, CNN reported that Saturn dealerships will now have Toyotas and Hondas (and, oddly, Chevys) on hand for customers to test-drive side-by-side with the Saturns they hope you will buy.
While not an uncommon tactic for technology companies (where nearly every vendor produces comparison charts that, while biased of course, compare their product to chosen [...]

Disrupting Because of…

Doc Searls defines what he calls the because effect
This is what you get when your new business isn’t just about inventing and controlling technologies and standards, but about taking advantage of the new opportunities opened up by fresh new technologies and standards. For example, making money because of blogging, or RSS, or desktop Linux, or [...]

Recursive Differentiation

In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. (Author Unknown)
The topic of competitive differentiation has been coming up in quite a few conversations lately. The context is usually a discussion on how to create “sustainable competitive advantage.” A variety of different frameworks are used to describe it, from Michael Porter’s classic to [...]

Consumer-Class

I’ve spent the last two days at Software 2007, and while enjoying the show and my fellow attendees tremendously, I noticed that there was a phrase (a very common one in the software industry, in fact) that I heard over and over: “Enterprise-Class”
Typically this is a phrase used by software companies to indicate that their [...]

Second Stage Boosters…Ready

Let me state this as a hypothesis:
new product <> disruption
Or in words, having a new product is neither necessary nor sufficient to create market disruption.
I recently had an interesting exchange with Judi Sohn at Web Worker Daily (a new favorite of mine) about GrandCentral, which gives you a single number that can reach you anywhere [...]

Being Disruptive

This is a simple idea: if you want to be disruptive - to create the kind of disruption that will allow you to re-define your market - you have to want to be disruptive.
Do you really want to change your market?
SuccessFactors (blog) has as part of their founding principles:
Increase worldwide productivity by 50%.
They want to [...]

Listen to the candidates debate

Earlier this week I heard a news report about the latest forum for the large and growing field of Democratic presidential hopefuls. The report said “…and as you would expect, the front-runners played it safe while the lesser-known hopefuls took more risks…”
Are you thinking risk doesn’t really work well in politics? Making a bold statement [...]