Better, Faster, Cheaper Is Not Innovation: Kodak and Microsoft
Inertia is a force far greater than momentum. By Adam Hartung, Contributor There is a big cry for innovation these days.Unfortunately, despite spending a lot of money on it, most innovation simply isn’t. And that’s why companies don’t grow. The giant consulting firm Booz & Co. just completed its most recent survey on innovation. Like most analysts, they tried using R&D spending as yardstick for measuring innovation. Unfortunately, as a lot of us already knew, there is no correlation: “There is no statistically significant relationship between financial performance and...
read moreWhat’s Your Question?
Good piece by Polly LaBarre. Some fifteen years ago, in the early days of starting up Fast Company magazine, co-founder Alan Webber, shared one of his rules of thumb with me: “a good question beats a good answer.” That pithy wisdom sunk in and took hold immediately. In the course of hundreds of reporting journeys and thousands of conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and doers of all stripes, I’ve tuned into the questions people ask. The first thing you notice when you have your ears pricked for questions is that most people (especially businesspeople) are...
read moreAll Brands Are Publishers, Learn How to Be a Good One
Yes. Brands are about voice, value & points of view. Five Years after Golden Rules of Conversational Media, an Addendum By John Battelle It’s illuminating to remember that five years ago, Twitter was three months old, and Facebook had just opened to non-students. Neither company had a business model. Oh, and Digg was considered the pre-eminent social news service. Over the next half-decade, of course, Twitter and Facebook have become huge forces, driving the rise of what I then called “conversational media” as opposed to “packaged-goods media,” where...
read moreData is the new .com
Activation and action are key. By Roger Ehrenberg Roger Ehrenberg is the founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures. Throughout my business career, I’ve observed that people love to label current fashions. “Web 2.0,” “Cloud” and “Social” are three which are currently in vogue. In my lifetime likely none was bigger than “.com,” describing a business and its recognition of the importance of the Internet. Remember when long-established businesses would change their names by adding a .com extension, only to receive a salutary stock market reaction? This was an equity market...
read moreInfographic: Who Is Occupy Wall Street?
Visualizing the results of 5,006 completed surveys at occupywallst.org, data shared exclusively with Fast...
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