Category: business

what physics can teach about marketing

TED talk by Dan Cobley

Summary:

  1. a=F/m  (Anderson launched Accenture; Hoover is more than vacuum cleaner; why P&G keeps separate brands).
  2. Δx Δh ≥ 1/2 (McDonalds sells millions, while mothers talk about healthy life to their kids).
  3. You cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove it (scientific method) – BP spent millions building environment-friendly image and than one accident ruined it all; Toyota perceived as reliable and one big recall changed that image; Tiger Woods.
  4. Increasing entropy (2nd law of thermodynamics) – your brand is more and more  dispersed; you can’t fight it; embrace it.

life, gamification and emergence

What is life? Life is a game, emergent on simple rules – humans cannot pretend to know even a tiny part of those rules. But games are the best way to learn about general and specific aspects of life such as business, politics, music…

Watched Matrix? Played Matrix Online?

But why do we play games? Fun (easy/hard), different mental/intellectual states and people. In a word: a richer emotional/mental/social set of experiences our lives rarely grant us.

Games reflect complexity aspects of life. No better game than chess for us to learn more about life.

definition of a person who changes the world

From Apple ad (1997):

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. Rebels. Troublemakers. Round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Schumpeter, R2 and innovation via hacking

There are about (cheers to taxonomic Carl Linnaeus) 8.7 million species (only 14% identified) on earth. There are only one species that could tweet: humans. And robots.

The first human-like astronaut robot R2 awakened at the ISS and already tweets/facebooks.

NASA apparently innovates, disruptively. Does it complement its existing ”high-end” (humans) with “low-end” (robot astronauts), by mimicking Apple’s famed ipod/iphone business model?

It was Schumpeter whose acute insights about disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship are still present with us in works of Christensen, Drucker, …

Less known is that hackers are essential for innovation. Pentagon agrees. Educators too.

how capitalism relates to shminovation and bible

Innovation, shminovation. We’re obsessed with innovation. But why care about innovation? Perhaps because it’s comfortable to think innovation is panacea for our social stagnation or economic graveyard called capitalism? Indeed, if capitalism, it must be  messy to drive innovation.

Ask yourself, how many Fortune-500 firms breathe innovation? Only few. In them “innovation initiatives face their stiffest resistance after they show hints of success.“

But, not all lost: creative capitalism + social  innovation = new social enterprise. Sure, capitalism. Even Bible indirectly condones value-based, compassionate capitalism, for which we need to be deliberate and motivated.

Oh, capitalism inspires poetry too.

who rules the world?

9th century Persian polymath Al-Khwārizmī needs credit. His treatise about linear equations was the most widely read in Europe during Middle Ages. “Algorithm” is a corruption of his name, referring to the decimal system from his book.

In 21st century, algorithms shape the world: “game of life,” robot-cleaners, algorithmic trading which runs 70% of Wall-Street (screwing it in 2010, Flash-Crash), e-commerce (a book “Making of Fly” being 23 million on Amazon), rental (60% of Neflix’s rental run by an algorithm), even Hollywood (an algorithm deciding which movies to produce) and health.

We have little idea about how much algorithms know/can do…

names can be cool – kum, shisha and george

Many argue that name is not a crucial factor for company’s success. Yes it is.

  1. Federal Highway Act of 1956. American families on the move, becoming increasingly suburban – demand for cars rises. There’s need for refueling cars, and why not, some snacks – it’ll be convenient. But how to differentiate your company from others with similar motifs? Name. Kum&Go. After 52 years, it’s the 5th largest private convenience store in America and donates 10% of its annual profits to charities/education.
  2. Fusion of brilliant name and off-the-mill design creates an emotional brand experience. Porsche Design Shisha.
  3. BehindTheName offers etymology of names. Browse George.

Innovation apple and lessons from Sonia Gandhi

“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative,” said David Ogilvy, the best ad-man there was. Innovation is commercialization of creativity, said Vijay Govindarajan. In practice, corporate innovation looks mostly as below.

This article spurred the below “what innovators can learn from Sonia Gandhi,” making innovation more impactful.

  1. Modest but perseverant (shuns publicity)
  2. Mindset/ears tuned towards customer/market demands (her econ-policies are extreme pro-poor)
  3. Surround yourself with smart/complementary-to-your-skills people (PM Singh takes care of administrative burdens of the office)
  4. Not interested in (corporate) politics
  5. Systematize (innovation) in order to capitalize (spearheaded successful systems/procedures)
  6. Earn trust from outside (customers/markets) and inside (leadership/employees)

Risk fin and why to embrace risk

Since 2009, SEC’s Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation, “parachuted into complex legislative matters demanding immediate specialized expertise“. Searching “risk fin” on EconomyInCrisis and DollarCollapse was fruitless.

A beautiful poem “Risk (author unknown)” contains:

To place your ideas, your dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.

concluding “Only the person who risks can be free.“

To succeed, organizational risk-management needs:

  1. rethink (danger->opportunity->necessity),
  2. contextualization
  3. consider (cross-disciplinary/organizational) success-stories
  4. tailoring to organizational structures

David (crowdsourcing) vs Goliath (innovation)

Crowdsourcing is predicted to outshine innovation. According to one research, nearly 50% entrepreneurs/startups are developing “knowledge-as-a-service” models, and crowdsourcing (not innovation)is THE jump-starter. Crowdsourcing has crowdsortium. Innovation hasn’t.

Google crowdsources creating maps in India.

But, crowd-wisdom has limitations and might encounter black-swans in complex systems.

LEGO, which almost went bankrupt in 1990s, changed its “chief-brick,” started an adult line, appointed ambassadors and is back on track – open innovation+customer engagement.

Threadless, MyStarbucksIdea – crowdsourcing successes; Apple iPhone, Starbucks VIA, …  successes ignoring crowd-wisdom.

Crowd-wisdom as “corporate/customer democracy” is oxymoron – an intermediate layer filters/selects raw input.

Crowdsourcing + innovation = ?(needn’t be 0-sum game)