It’s pretty common for people (and Dilbert) to poke fun at Marketing. The jokes typically come in three flavors: 1. Product Marketing and Public Relations often have amusing conversations as we try to describe products in colorful, but believable, ways. 2. Marketing sometimes has to use a little artistic license to get people interested in…
At last week’s meeting of the CMO Community, a representative of the executive search consulting firm Spencer Stuart mentioned that the average tenure for Chief Marketing Officers at U.S. companies is 28 months, up five months from 2006. Great news, I thought, given my current role. However, remembering the earlier confusion on CFO tenure, I decided to do some fact…
On the heels of writing about prioritizing by what’s urgent rather than important, an article in Management-Issues reminds me we also have to worry about prioritization based on who yells the loudest. The article quotes a U.C. Berkeley study which showed outspoken people were judged as possessing higher levels of general intelligence, regardless of their…
Long-time readers know I recommend creating an alignment-focused organization as the fundamental way to improve performance. As I’ve said in many publications (BPM Magazine, Information Management, CxO magazine), To do so, organizations must motivate their employees with integrated and cascaded objectives, manage priorities based on impacts rather than perceived urgency, monitor progress towards outcomes, and…
One part writer’s block and two parts schedule overload means I don’t have time to write an original post. Speedlinking to the rescue: Over at ‘I Help You Blog’, Philip suggests 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle. My personal favorite is #101: Create a post with a 101 ideas. In a relatively…
Since the title of this blog is manage by walking around, kudos to Haruka Nishimatsu, the president and CEO of Japan Air. According to a CBS News article, he practices management by walking flying around: “If management is distant, up in the clouds, people just wait for orders,” Nishimatsu told CBS News through a translator….
The word transparency is everywhere. The demands for increased accountability from statutory compliance and shareholder activists have forced organizations to become more transparent. Political ideology aside, Barack Obama ran a successful campaign championing the need for transparency in response to the government secrecy of the previous two terms. Unfortunately, transparency is fast becoming a buzzword:…
In the Harvard Business Review article Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?, David Collis and Michael Rukstad claim most executives cannot summarize their company’s strategy. Of course, if executives can’t, no one else in the organization will be able to. And those organizations that don’t understand their strategy are unlikely to execute them successfully. In their words:…
I generated the above word cloud using wordle on my ten most popular posts. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of word clouds, the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. While most of the larger words make sense, I’m surprised by the relative…
According to D.J. Power‘s “A Brief History of Decision Support Systems“, the first use of the term Decision Support System (DSS) was in a 1971 Sloan Management Review article. Gorry and Scott-Morton argued that existing management information systems focused on structured decisions and recommended that systems for semi-structured and unstructured decisions should be called decision…