Michael Jordan is considered to be the best basketball player ever. With 6 NBA titles, 5 MVP awards and 15 All-Star game appearances, it’s hard to argue that anybody has ever dominated a sport like he did.
Yet he wasn’t always so great. He didn’t make his high school varsity team as a sophomore and wasn’t the first player picked in the NBA draft (he was third). He showed promise as a young player, but then again so do a lot of people who never amount to much.
We often have to make decisions about things like a young Michael Jordan. Many new innovations, opportunities and employees show great potential, but we can only pick a few. So we need to use data in order to make predictions about the future. How we do that can mean the difference between success and failure, so we better get it right.
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I don’t consider myself an early adopter of technology. I still prefer books on paper and I don’t feel the need to try out every device or app that comes on the market. At best, I’m a reasonably fast follower.
Nevertheless, when Google came out with Chromecast, I ordered it within a few days (which still made me too late to get one before the first batch sold out). It came last week and so I’ve had some time to put it through its paces.
So far, I like it a lot. It was easy to set up and I like the way I can control my TV from my tablet. With my Apple TV, I would always search for what I wanted on another device before I would start fiddling with the clunky remote. Yet what really excites me is not what the Chromecast is, but what it’s going to be and how that will change my life.
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In 1960, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt published a landmark paper in Harvard Business Review that urged executives to ask, “What business are you really in?” Even today, a half century later, his challenge still resonates.
By pointing out that no industry grows forever, he gave rise to many concepts we still recognize, such as the customer centered business, Porter’s 5 Forces and value chains. Many executives who seek to be modern are often merely repeating Levitt’s insights.
Nevertheless, a lot can happen in 50 years and just as we recognize many of Levitt’s concepts as still valid, others have been thoroughly debunked, perhaps none more so than the central question he presented. In today’s semantic economy, it serves little purpose to ask what business we’re in. Instead, we must ask why we’re in business in the first place.
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In 2008, Jeff Zucker complained that media companies were “trading analogue dollars for digital pennies.” As chastened media executives repeated the quote over time, it eventually became amended to “trading analogue dollar for digital dimes for mobile pennies”.
It seems quaint now. Clearly, if the eye-popping valuations of companies like Google and Facebook are any indication, there is a ton of money to be made in digital media and, as The Economist reports, traditional media companies are starting catch on.
While many old media giants, like The New York Times, continue to cling to outdated business models and struggle, the fact is that there never has been a better time for the media business. There are more opportunities to make money and to connect with the audience now than ever before. Publishers should stop whining and get on with it.
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One of the great concerns of social scientists in the 21st century has been the digital divide, a stratification of society into those who have new economy skills and those who do not.
The mobile internet and cheap handsets have helped make enormous progress toward closing the digital divide, but have opened up a new rift, this time between firms who are able to use data to create value and those who are getting left behind.
To help bridge the gap, UC Berkeley’s School of Information has begun a Data Science Masters Program that will train a new breed of professionals to manage big data. As the Web of Things becomes ever more pervasive, big data can no longer be considered something only tech companies do, but must be embraced by executives of all stripes.
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Many people are Apple fans. Many others do not like Microsoft. That’s completely understandable. Apple has dominated the last decade by making products consumers fall in love with.
Microsoft, on the other hand, often seems like a lumbering giant. They have, in the past, been heavy handed, built some lousy, bug ridden products and got themselves embroiled in an ugly antitrust suit. On top of that, Steve Ballmer can really say some stupid things.
However, what is not understandable and what is, in fact, irresponsible, is that many business writers and tech pundits seem to be positively gleeful about trashing Microsoft (and, alternatively, praising Apple) without even a modest effort to ascertain the facts. In doing so, they are propagating misconceptions rather than informing the public.
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Everywhere you go, people are talking about innovation. There are conferences and gurus, workshops and webinars, apostles and practitioners.
But what is it, really? It’s hard to go about the practice of innovation when there is so much confusion about what innovation actually is. Some have proposed frameworks (i.e. discovery/invention/innovation), but to be honest, I don’t find them particularly helpful.
It seems obvious to me that a common sense definition of innovation is that it is a process of finding novel solutions to important problems. Unfortunately, in order to make innovation palatable to organizations, many have tried to narrow the definition to make it more purpose driven. That’s getting it backwards, after all it is we that need to adapt.
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Many people, while they deplore Edward Snowden’s acts of criminal espionage, welcome the debate he has inspired about privacy. Unfortunately, that’s a red herring.
While there is a very small chance that your government is snooping on you in any significant way, there is nearly a 100% chance that someone else is, with almost non-existent oversight or restriction.
My point isn’t that corporations are evil and governments are good. The companies that I have worked with have uniformly been concerned with and acted responsibly regarding the privacy of consumers and the integrity of the data that they collect. Nevertheless, we’re being watched and no one is watching the watchers. Here’s what you need to know.
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It’s hard to believe that it’s already been four years since I started Digital Tonto. To be honest, I never really thought it would amount to much or that I’d continue to do it for so long, but here we are!
It really is amazing what you can accomplish with a keyboard and a bottle of scotch. Since its inception, Digital Tonto has attracted nearly a half million unique visitors. Some of you have become valued friends, while others simply come here to read.
In either case, I am grateful for your participation. It is the readers who have transformed Digital Tonto from just a blog to a true community. Your comments here, as well as on Facebook, Twitter and other places have really contributed to the discussion and enriched me than you know. As in past years, I’d like to share some of my favorite posts.
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While median wages are flat or even losing some ground, CEO pay is at an all time high. The average corporate chief now makes $12.3 million, hundreds of times what the average worker brings home, a ratio that has increased 1000% since 1950.
That makes chief executives an easy target. As my Forbes colleague Adam Hartung made clear in his article, Oops! Five CEOs Who Should Have Already Been Fired, when things don’t go well, the knives come out, quickly.
I don’t cry for the pampered executives, with their perks and golden parachutes, who can soothe their wounds with a nice bottle of chardonnay by the golf course (while laid off workers face foreclosure instead), but I do think if we’re are going to vilify them we should at least get the story straight. Too often we don’t and that’s a problem.
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