Business thinkers may want to skip the second part of "The Big Switch." It's learned and interesting, but not very much about business -- at least, in the short term. In the long term, his speculative logic changes everything about society. The Universal Computer that will emerge from...
Despite my misgivings about the examples he chose to introduce the concept of Big Think ideas, Bernd Schmitt does in fact seem to have created useful templates for organizations to come up with ideas that could be big. He details five tools for creating big ideas: ...
Business will soon change in ways as electrifying as electrification itself. So argues Nicholas Carr in his new book "The Big Switch." Carr, who rose to prominence on the strength of his 2003 article "IT Doesn't Matter" later a book of the same name,...
I'm reading Big Think Strategy by Bernd H. Schmitt, a professor at Columbia Business School. Schmitt's subtitle is "how to leverage bold ideas and leave small thinking behind." He claims to have come up with a systematic way for companies to think big thoughts, like the Trojan...
Change This recently posted The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage. It's a semi-excerpt of Michael Stallard's book "Fired Up or Burned Out," reviewed on Big Think in October 2007 as The Importance of Connecting with Colleagues. It also has posts by Richard Florida and...
BNET columnist Jessica Stillman penned an intriguing post last week calling a new Stanford study noting the dubious claims of shareholder advisory services that they can predict future performance of companies. The report, issued by the Rock Center for Corporate Governance, run jointly by Stanford law and graduate business schools,...
There was a new link to Big Think this a.m., and I followed it and found a new review of 10 Ways to Make It Great by Phil Gerbyshak, who also writes a couple of blogs (on Slacker Manager this morning, the message is welcome to February -- have you...
Sparks, the 1970s synth-based pop duo (remember "This town ain't big enough for the both of us"?) have been performing a series of London concerts where they play a different album from their back catalogue, each night, in full. I was reading the set-list in a magazine review of...
Okay, I'm being puckish -- anyone in business knows that customers constantly argue for a better deal. But in at least some contexts, like buying wine, people feel better about what they buy if it costs more. That's the gist of what's called the price-placebo effect, reported...
I've started Stopwatch Marketing, a look at how to get the attention of consumers when they're actually in the market to buy something. The book is timely, because the combination of tight credit and recession or fear of such should dampen buying here, so catching consumers in those reduced windows...
China and India portend an economic future tipped in their direction, not ours. This seems to be the year of writers showing us that future. Earlier I reviewed Silicon Dragon, which showed us the somewhat halting steps of high-tech entrepreneurs in China, and also A World Without Poverty, which showed...
In "Billions of Entrepreneurs," author Tarun Khanna gives us a tour of modern-day India and China, filled with historical asides and vivid pictures of life in these countries. Khanna at his best evokes John Gunther's landmark "Inside" series from the 1940s, giving us an intimacy with the places and their...
What the Technology Future Holds: The View From McKinseyMissing Link?Is it me or is the link to the article missing? I'd like to check it out.RE: What the Technology Future Holds: The View From McKinseymade me laugh!here's my review of this document!http://desicritics.org/2008/01/08/101719.phpno actual storyEither print the story or don't...
The boss is coming! Look busy. Here is the City offers some tips on "how to look busy" even if you're not... But don't let yourself become too busy, lest it drive you to an early grave. Apparently, a senior car engineer at Toyota in Japan was clocking up an...
Perhaps because everyone knows there's no place like home, I was skeptical of Who's Your City? see The Future According to Richard Florida. Having now read it, I am impressed by author Richard Florida's ability to take massive amounts of...
Harvard Business School Press sent me its Spring 2008 catalog. Tell me what you'd like to see reviewed. Books on the way include: Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures -- and Yours, by Tarun Khanna ...
I'm interested in how people come up with ideas. That's one reason why I reviewed Bernd Schmidt's book "Big Think" (see How To Build Bernd Schmitt's Trojan Horse). So I was eager to read The Road To Eureka! subscription required, a piece in Science News on...
The third part of Stopwatch Marketing offers nuts, bolts and widgets, to businesses large and small. This is the section for acolytes of Rosen and Turano's concept of stopwatch marketing, and for marketing specialists to decide whether the idea is really any different from "occasion-based segmentation," as the...
Dan Roam has written a book about show-and-tell, and why it's all you need to solve pretty much any business problem. Don't be fooled -- it is not the business version of "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." His key point: visual thinking makes the complex...
Tarun Khanna closes out his book on China and India with a tantalizing section called "The Future." Who doesn't want to know what's going to happen with these two countries? Unfortunately, we don't really find out much about the future that he hasn't already suggested. ...
