Archive | 2009

First Mover Advantage

During the holidays, I had the chance to re-read one of my favorite marketing books: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Ries and Trout. While many people seem to think that the book is no longer relevant, I was more than a little surprised by how of much of the book I remembered and…

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The Upside of the Downturn

In the Upside of the Downturn, Geoff Colvin suggests death rates go down in a recession. Regardless of the accuracy of the claim, it’s worth remembering the recession provides new opportunities for companies willing to take risks. To emphasize this point, Colvin subtitled his book “Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath.”…

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Poking fun at Marketing, redux

After poking fun at Marketing, several people forwarded me this classic joke about the communication issues between Marketing and Engineering: A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces his altitude and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts, “Excuse me. Can you…

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MBWA

MBWA Origins and Spinoffs

After last week’s post, Scrum By Walking Around, a reader emailed to ask if I knew the the origins of the phrase management by walking around (MBWA). Rather than replying immediately based on what I believed, I spent a fair amount of time doing Web research but the results were inconclusive. Most sources credit the Hewlett-Packard culture for…

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Scrum By Walking Around

If you’re not in software development, you may not be familiar with an agile software development framework called scrum. Scrum is an alternative to the traditional waterfall approach and attempts to simplify complex projects by structuring them in short cycles of work called sprints. Each sprint is based on prioritized customer requirements such that the highest value features…

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Less Is More

On a recent transcontinental flight, I found myself writing the phrase “less is more” in response to a 60 page PowerPoint I had been asked to review.   Although the origin is unclear, the phrase “less is more” is often associated with Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, one of the founders of modern architecture and a proponent…

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