Uncategorized
When it comes to positioning terminology, I sometimes get questions like "what is the difference between a brand mantra and a brand essence?" or "is a point of difference the same thing as a key differentiator?" My answer? Don't get hung up on the
Uncategorized
Of all of the people talking or writing about the future of business right now, no one has more street cred than Gary Hamel. I've written about him many times before, and his book The Future of Management is one of the most inspiring and meaningful business books
Uncategorized
In my day job at New Kind, I spend quite a bit of my time working on brand-related assignments, particularly for organizations interested in community-based approaches to building their brands.When marrying the art of community building to the art of brand building, it's hard not to talk
Uncategorized
This week I finally got a chance to sit down and digest IBM's latest Global CEO Study, newly published last month and entitled Capitalizing on Complexity. This marks the fourth study IBM has done (they complete them once every two years), and I've personally found them
Uncategorized
It might be a better world if we all worked in open, collaborative organizations where the best ideas win. But unfortunately, the reality is that bureaucracy still rules in all but the most progressive companies. We have a long way to go. The reality doesn’t always match the dream.
Uncategorized
The other day I was chatting with friend and digital strategy/social media expert Ken Burbary on the phone. He was advising a colleague on some good community-building techniques to consider when all of the sudden the following words came out:"You have to find your cheeseheads." What?
Uncategorized
Let's face it. There are tons of projects out there in the world being run the open source way today. While the great ones can accomplish unbelievable things, the bad ones, even the average ones, often fail to achieve their goals.In many cases, the failed projects still
Uncategorized
A few months ago, I had the opportunity to meet Jim Gilmore, co-author (with Joseph Pine) of the book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. I first read the book a few years ago, and it really struck a nerve for me—these guys were on to something.So I convinced
Uncategorized
A few weeks ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst wrote an article for BusinessWeek suggesting that Toyota might benefit from doing things the open source way when it comes to building the software inside its automobiles.From Jim's article: Open source is about leveraging the power of participation
Uncategorized
On opensource.com, we aspire to take principles the open source software movement has applied to building better software faster and find more uses for them in business, education, government, the law, and generally in our lives.So a few weeks back, I was excited to see that BusinessWeek (now
Uncategorized
Poor words. As they get more popular, as we give them more love, we also keep trying to shove in new meaning to see if they can take it.In the technology industry, this happens over and over. Take "cloud computing," which used to mean something pretty specific
Uncategorized
In my post last week, I talked about what I see as inefficiencies in the system design of many crowdsourcing projects. Today, I thought I'd stick with the inefficiency theme after reading a blog by Umair Haque entitled The Efficient Community Hypothesis (thanks to Rebecca Fernandez for pointing