Who says the tech world has no soul?
With a tip of the hat to Omar Gallaga at NPR's AllTech blog, check out these three very short videos. The first is of 1000 Vodafone cell phones playing Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture in response to orchestrated text messages, and the others are the "making of", parts one and two.
Definition of Strategy
There is general confusion about the difference between an organization's vision, mission, long term goals, long term plans, strategy and even tactics. My approach is to acknowledge that different people use these terms in different ways but, in any given specific planning process, to require that we agree to arbitrary but shared definitions. I have, for many years, used a great working definition of strategy as "the decisions about how we will apply resources to objectives".
A strategic planning process starts with (or generates) a vision and mission, agrees on long term objectives, and identifies the resources available. It then makes decisions about how to apply resources to the objectives.
This is never as clean a process as it sounds, but working with explicit (if forced) definitions about each of these elements, really helps.
However, I now want to revise my definition, perhaps only subtly, having seen the TED Talk by Bjorn Lomborg, on setting global priorities.
In this talk he suggests that before you decide where to spend resources, you should know the cost-benefit ratio for the possible solutions. He notes that if there are a dozen key global problems, the decisions on where to spend the money should first be informed by the cost-effectiveness of the solutions, and not the size or even "importance" of the problem alone. This requires some agreement on a standardized notion of costs and, especially, benefits. In Lomborg's case he is looking at lives saved, or possibly QALYs. For a corporation, the costs and benefits are likely entirely financial, but at any given time one metric (e.g., revenue growth) may be more or less important than any other (e.g., profitability, or return on net assets). Ideally all the benefits of achieving each objective can be measured uniformly (for easy comparison) so you can show a dollar cost figure per unit of objective-achieving benefit.
Lomborg's examples are very clear (whether or not they are fashionable), and it makes sense to me to add this to my thinking about strategy ... considering the proposed approaches to achieving the objectives being considered, and the cost-benefit ratios of each - before deciding on resource allocation.
A strategic planning process starts with (or generates) a vision and mission, agrees on long term objectives, and identifies the resources available. It then makes decisions about how to apply resources to the objectives.
This is never as clean a process as it sounds, but working with explicit (if forced) definitions about each of these elements, really helps.
However, I now want to revise my definition, perhaps only subtly, having seen the TED Talk by Bjorn Lomborg, on setting global priorities.
In this talk he suggests that before you decide where to spend resources, you should know the cost-benefit ratio for the possible solutions. He notes that if there are a dozen key global problems, the decisions on where to spend the money should first be informed by the cost-effectiveness of the solutions, and not the size or even "importance" of the problem alone. This requires some agreement on a standardized notion of costs and, especially, benefits. In Lomborg's case he is looking at lives saved, or possibly QALYs. For a corporation, the costs and benefits are likely entirely financial, but at any given time one metric (e.g., revenue growth) may be more or less important than any other (e.g., profitability, or return on net assets). Ideally all the benefits of achieving each objective can be measured uniformly (for easy comparison) so you can show a dollar cost figure per unit of objective-achieving benefit.
Lomborg's examples are very clear (whether or not they are fashionable), and it makes sense to me to add this to my thinking about strategy ... considering the proposed approaches to achieving the objectives being considered, and the cost-benefit ratios of each - before deciding on resource allocation.
From fad to monopoly
The telephone, mainframe computers, microprocessor chips, and PC software industries have all spawned companies displaying enough monopolistic behavior to warrant penalties from the trust busters.In England, the competition regulator used to be called the Monopolies Commission and one of my favorite comedic lines (attributed here to Nigel Rees) is "why is there only one Monopolies Commission?" Now we see the US and EU anti-trust authorities fighting over these issues, we wonder why there isn't just one!
For reasons about to become clear let me share this chart from a March '09 Fortune Magazine article which shows the adoption rate of new technology. (As Raif Barbaros pointed out, the Facebook comparison itself is misleading: Facebook is free, you have to pay for the others.)
Resolving the chain of reasoning connecting these two topics... I would love to see a chart showing the number of years from the introduction of a technology to the first investigation by competition regulators. I leave that as an exercise for the reader!
And, what, you might be asking, is the proximate cause for juxtaposing these thoughts? Just a few months after I noted cloud computing (Feb '09) as a new trend in our industry, the Economist newspaper has an editorial and feature article on the competition authorities starting to poke around the clouds. I bet this is a record!
Y chromosome genetics
With a tip of my hat to my wife and her colleague who brought this to my attention, and to the several websites who use the diagram, I bring you the latest knowledge about the genetic pre-dispositions encoded in the Y-chromosome (which we all remember is the male determining chromosome).
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