When I pull up to the village in which my mother grew up in
Bangladesh, I feel like I'm on the set of a cowboy movie. Two long streets
cross in the center, each bordered by a well-planned lineup of storefronts.
From this ...READ»
An ancient Chinese saying advises that you “borrow a road”
to reach your objective. If someone else has access to your customer, then
borrow his road to share this access.
An interesting permutation of this pattern is ...READ»
Last week I introduced an interesting hotel investment firm, Thayer Lodging. The owners, Lee Pillsbury and Fred Malek, were not new to the hotel game. They were part of a team that had driven jaw-dropping growth for Marriott Hotels. ...READ»
Every Friday vendors came around to play “lucky lotto.” These
vendors supplied food, chinaware, and table clothes to Lee Pillsbury
and Fred
Malek, the owners of Thayer Lodging, a
privately held hotel investment company that ...READ»
Does your company have an innovation strategy? If so, how was it first presented to you? Is it like a mission statement – detailed in an employee handbook and highlighted on a company website? Do you have to search high and low, ...READ»
In my book The Way of Innovation,
I talk a lot about how consumer habits can become a powerful underpinning of a
company’s grand strategy. For example, when I was a loyal Starbucks customer (someday I’ll share why I no longer ...READ»
Last week I spent a day with Microsoft managers in Redmond,
Calif. Much of the talk was about Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. You may
have already read a lot about Bing – the massive marketing campaign of people ...READ»
The reality is it’s both but most of the time it depends on your business, how big you are and how you’ve structured it!
For those that are unclear, top down innovation is normally the domain of the small business owner or ...READ»
There is so much more I want to say about Big Think, so many more patterns to
uncover, but time and space requires that we focus on just the core strategies
at work here. And from my perspective, Big
Think’s most ...READ»
Management can be quite loney. But it doesn't have to be that way if you have support. Roberta blogs about what you can do to build your own support system to hold you up through good times and bad.READ»
Last
week I introduced a
compelling new web site – bigthink.com. Its founders, Peter Hopkins and Victoria
Brown, didn’t have enough initial funding to take competitors head on, so
they had to find different approaches ...READ»
The economy is throwing everyone for a loop. You may wake up today and find you are in management. To thrive or survive, you will need to take matters into your own hands. This blog will help you navigate through the sea of opportunity that lies before you. Hang on. It's going to be quite a ride!READ»
What do Deepak
Chopra, Jerry Adams, Moby, Ted Kennedy, Wyclef Jean, Dennis Kucinich, John
Legend, Mitt Romney, and Mohammad Yunus have in common? They and 390 other big
thinkers are all waiting to speak to you, right now, thanks ...READ»
I’m in Colombia right now doing a
series of seminars for different groups and companies, including
Hewlett-Packard. As I travel across the globe, I see one positive sign of this
worldwide economic breakdown – people ...READ»
Despite the best efforts of the design community to the contrary, design is still struggling to influence companies in meaningful ways. The fault lies mostly within the design profession itself, which is unable to supply leadership ...READ»
A decade ago the ability to generate ideas for businesses was a terrific and unique offering, and often a good business. Many companies and consultants were conducting workshops aimed at coming up hundreds of ideas, and ...READ»
What if something you thought you knew to be true, turned out to be exactly the opposite? What if an approach you imagined was working for you was actually working against you?
Imagine if it were true, for example, that almost ...READ»
