When customers can go online and help themselves, we've always thought of this as the best kind of service there is: self-service. But social media tools have made it possible for businesses to provide an even better type of customer service: crowd-service. Companies such as SAP, Lenovo, Verizon, iRobot, and Pitney-Bowes are now using social media tools to enable some of their customers to help other customers. CustomerThink's Bob Thompson coined the term "crowd-service," a particularly descriptive and appealing label, analogous to "crowd sourcing." (You can download Thompson's white paper "Crowdservice," sponsored by RightNow, at our Web site 1to1.com.)

Continue reading "Self-Service vs. Crowd-Service" »

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Computer servers at the Climate Research Unit, based in the UK's University of East Anglia, were recently hacked. Internal email messages reveal that the scientists who were entrusted by the UN to provide the most objective view of the climate problem were actually engaged in over-hyping the dangers posed by global warming, suppressing research findings which might either cast doubt on the issue or reduce the sense of urgency, trying to discredit dissenting scientists, and even rigging the peer-review process itself, to reduce the influence of some of the more problematic research studies and scientific papers.

Continue reading "Perils of Consensus: Climate-gate, WMDs, and Asset Bubbles" »

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In my previous post, I posed a question with respect to how to handle a customer service problem at a great hotel - the Balmoral, in Edinburgh, Scotland. What should the night manager do, if anything, on the day after the fire alarm roused guests from their rooms after midnight? The several folks who commented on this posting all suggested appropriate measures. The correct solution would be to offer a small gift or rebate - something nominal, nothing very expensive - and to do this in as personal a manner as possible.

Continue reading "The Balmoral Flunks a Customer Service IQ Test" »

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This is a quiz, designed to test your sensitivity to important customer service issues.

In the 15 years since Martha and I published our first book we have both become increasingly discriminating customers, much less tolerant of incompetent or uncaring service, and more willing to provide feedback, even when it isn't requested of us. Our careers now involve a great deal of business travel, often international, and so of course some of the services we know a great deal about include hotel service, car service, and air travel.

Continue reading "Test Your Customer Service IQ: What's the Right Decision?" »

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It's no secret that mobile phone service in the US isn't as ubiquitous, US phones aren't as stylish, and the whole mobile system just doesn't work as well as in Europe, Asia, and most of the rest of the world (with the possible exception of Africa). Even our proudest mobile phone technologies often don't live up to the most basic standards of service expected in the ROW.

Case in point: The Droid. Now here's a beautiful phone just launched by one of the country's most accomplished technology companies, Motorola, using Google's innovative software, and sold for use on the largest US mobile network, Verizon Wireless. But guess what? The Droid won't work on non-US networks! Or, in the sophisticated technical jargon of Verizon Wireless, the Droid is not a "world phone." Which begs a point: What planet does Verizon Wireless inhabit, anyway?

Continue reading "AYFKM? Why the Droid is Just Not Ready for the World Stage" »

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A recent issue of the Wall Street Journal has a wonderful article comparing to two different corporate cultures being nurtured by two different Internet companies - Facebook and Zappos. Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg says his company is nurturing a culture designed to attract entrepreneurs, even though he knows that many of these creative people will leave the firm later. Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh says his firm wants a culture of committed, engaged employees - people who buy into Zappos' mission and plan to stay.

Continue reading "A Tale of Two Corporate Cultures" »

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Billionaire fund manager Raj Rajaratnam and a bevy of other highly placed Wall Streeters have just been arrested on charges of profiting from inside information in their trades of securities over several years. Under financial regulations, insider trading is prohibited because it gives an unfair advantage to people who have information not available to public investors. In the days of paper-based financial reports and a news cycle that was measured in hours, if not days, this might have made sense. But today, news travels at Twitter speed, and the wisdom of the online crowd might itself be a much better policing mechanism than a thousand pages of difficult-to-read legal jargon.

Continue reading "CONTRARIAN IDEA: Let's Legalize Insider Trading" »

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My first job out of the Air Force was as an economist for an independent oil company. We were based in New York City at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, which is the building that backs up onto Radio City Music Hall. I spent a little over a year in a shared office on the fourteenth floor at 50 Rock, before being promoted and transferred to Houston. Our office had a great view over the roof of Radio City, and we became a prime destination for lunchtime meetings and get-togethers during spring and summer, because on clear days we could usually spot several of the Rockettes out on the roof, tanning their legs.

For the last two days I've been sitting inside Radio City, observing and recording my impressions of HSM's World Business Forum as a member of the IBM-sponsored "Bloggers Hub." Radio City's atmosphere is electric, its setting majestic, and its historical pedigree authenticated by rows of now pointless public phone booths in the washrooms. But no sunning Rockettes were spotted. Instead, for the last two days we have been shining the light on business ethics, strategies, corporate culture, innovation, and employment practices.

Continue reading "No Rockettes at Radio City This Week" »

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It seemed to me that the message brought to us by the several international business leaders during HSM's "International Insights" segment of the World Business Forum provided an interesting counter-position to the heavily pessimistic views of both Jeffrey Sachs and David Rubenstein, yesterday afternoon. The other bloggers and people I talked with all agreed, that it seemed these business people, when they were talking about the future as it looks now, were fairly optimistic about their own prospects for growth. They each acknowledged the challenging environment, and the fact that margins are still under pressure, and the economy is still sluggish, but they each also felt that the worst was now behind us, and prospects are decent. Not super, but decent.

Continue reading "WBF, Day Two: Hamel Promotes Network-Based Management Technology" »

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The first afternoon at the World Business Forum, our after-lunch speaker was David Rubenstein, billionaire investor and founder of the Carlyle Group, former Carter advisor and generally very bright guy. His rapidly delivered speech was like a ticker-tape coming almost too fast to read, fact and stat, fact and stat, stat stat stat stat. Recession is way worse than most people think. Taxes will increase substantially following recovery. Government will continue too involved with business for a long time. NYC will no longer be the world's financial capital. The dollar will cease to be the world's primary reserve currency. On the other hand, he says, a downturn like this creates great investment opportunities, and lots of room for innovation. His was a rapid, bleak, but fairly balanced presentation. Sobering, disturbing, worrisome, and factual.

Jeffrey Sachs, on the other hand, gave what can only be described as a disappointingly shallow and politicized analysis of the world's problems in his "Economics for a Crowded Planet" talk.

Continue reading "Hellfire and Brimstone on a Tuesday Afternoon" »

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There were three principle speakers the first morning of the World Business Forum - Bill George, Bill Conraty, and Patrick Lencioni, and they perfectly illustrate the generation-gap problem that afflicts discussions of management and technology these days.

The consensus around the Bloggers Hub was that Lencioni gave by far the best presentation, as a stand-up presenter. George had good material, although he didn't have the energy or style that Lencioni had. But Conraty was not so good, either in terms of style (a somewhat plain and boring PPT presentation) or substance (he seemed to miss the ball on CEO pay and on social media, for instance).

Continue reading "Generation Gap: The First Morning at World Business Forum" »

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I participated in a panel discussion in Atlanta today, talking about the employment situation now and in the future. How has the current crisis changed the employment climate? Will unemployment persist? Will the lost jobs come back?

While unemployment is always painful, one thing I have noticed personally about this recession is that many of the people I know who have had their positions cut are not exactly idle. That is, they are looking for full-time positions, but at the same time they are making ends meet by doing a variety of part-time or free-lance projects. It's much more common in this crisis than in previous ones to find laid-off professional people working "virtually" from home, at least temporarily, while trying to land a more permanent position.

Continue reading "How Real Are the Unemployment Figures?" »

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The people who've tried to define customer loyalty have usually approached it from one of two different directions - attitudinal and behavioral. Although each of these directions is valid, they have different implications and lead to very different prescriptions for businesses. (This is analogous, but I don't think it is precisely aligned, with Estaban Kolsky's distinction between "emotional" and "intellectual" loyalty.)

Continue reading "Customer Loyalty: Is It an Attitude? Or a Behavior?" »

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Let's grant that behavioral loyalty is what pays the bills, but that attitudinal loyalty is also important, especially when it can be used as an indicator of higher behavioral loyalty. I think that's the general, if not unanimous, conclusion of the discussion on this topic.

And when it is positioned as a straight yes-or-no proposition, the concept of customer loyalty, as a behavior, is relatively easy. A magazine subscriber who elects to renew her subscription at the end of the first year is engaging in loyal behavior.

Continue reading "Is Lifetime Value a More Useful Metric than Loyalty?" »

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I'm speaking at the Motivation Show in Chicago on Wednesday, September 30. Tuesday's opening keynote will feature Jennifer Rosensweig, a former colleague of mine at Carlson Marketing (although neither of us is there any more). Jennifer coined the term "positive engagement," based on the principles of the modern "positive psychology" movement, to describe employees who are not just happy as employees but happy generally - people with a positive outlook, balance, and fulfillment in their lives. She says the elements of positive engagement include wellness and good health, connections with others, and appreciation and gratitude for what they have. Such employees are also open to new ideas and innovative, they are curious and seek to improve their skills constantly, and they are self-directed. In a nutshell, they are not just happy employees. They are happy people.

Continue reading "Positivity Makes the World Go Round" »

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New academic research explodes the myth that green technology is economically stimulative.

It's no doubt true that if we introduce legislation to encourage green technology, we will not only improve our environment, but we will stimulate some economic activity. But it doesn't logically follow that this activity will amount to NET new activity for the economy as a whole. In fact, green technology, encouraged by regulatory or tax policy, will impose an economic cost on our society. If a cleaner environment or less global warming is the goal, then we should be willing to pay for this, but green technology does not create net new jobs, so that's not a reason to embrace it.

Continue reading "Green Jobs Do Not Stimulate the Economy" »

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Should you or shouldn't you let your own customers review your products and services on your own website? Only about 50% of online retailers currently do. This is the question we'll explore in this post.

In Part One of this story, we pointed out how deceitful Nero Software is in the way it cons money out of unsuspecting customers. My feeling is that making money off of customer mistakes or customer naivete is never a very good business strategy, in terms of creating long-term shareholder value, and I predict that as long as Nero follows this strategy, we'll never see it amount to much more than a non-US-based peripheral player in this category.

Continue reading "Trustability and its Opposite - Part Two" »

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I'm a very frequent Amazon customer, buying five to ten books in a typical month, almost all for business. Martha and I write business books for a living, and we each have to keep up with what's out there.

So when I see a news or journal article that references an interesting book, I simply log on to Amazon, click on the book and with that one click it comes directly to my home (or more often gets downloaded onto my Kindle). Presto!

One time, however, a few months ago, I saw a book I thought would be interesting, and when I ordered this book I got a warning: "WARNING: You already bought this book from Amazon. Do you want to buy it again?"

Continue reading "Trustability and its Opposite - Part One" »

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A psychological study of American football players once revealed an interesting difference between defensive and offensive players:

Offensive players' lockers were neater and more orderly than defensive players' lockers. The most obvious inference is probably right: Offensive players get ahead by following well-crafted plans, executed flawlessly. Timing, position, and order are everything to them. But defensive players succeed by wreaking havoc with others' plans. They are more at home with disorder, chaos, and unpredictability.

Continue reading "The Conflict Between Innovation and Efficiency" »

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I was interviewed the other day on an Australian television business show, Lateline Business, and I made a brash prediction. You can see the six-minute clip or read a transcript of it here. The question I was asked was: "What about the industry [direct marketing] generally: how important today is going digital, the whole online space to direct marketing?"

And my unequivocal answer was as follows: "It's indispensible. There's going to be no non-electronic direct marketing within 10 years - none."

Continue reading "Will There Be Any "Non-Electronic Direct Mail" In Ten Years?" »

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It's no secret that the pace of change is accelerating. The more innovations we create, the faster the next ones will come. And we're now even innovating the process of innovation itself, with companies doing "experiments" with small subsets of customers to test new ideas and bring things to market so much faster. Cycle times are accelerating, inventions get to market faster, and life continues to speed up.

Observing this from my own perspective as a man in his 50's, it occurs to me that as the pace of innovation has picked up, the distance between the generations has also increased. That is, our own children are much more different from their parents than we were from our parents. And I suspect, as the pace of change continues to increase, our children's children will be even more different from their parents.

Continue reading "Privacy Dies as Distance Between Generations Grows" »

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As a founding member of the Enterprise Engagement Alliance (on Twitter and LinkedIn), Peppers & Rogers Group has a vested interest in pursuing the issues involved in both customer and employee engagement. Our feeling is that the whole idea of "engaging" customers and employees is something that has become more and more obvious with the increasing use of collaborative technologies, social media, and customer-centric management practices.

Continue reading "Defining "Engagement," for Customers and Employees" »

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I've been experimenting seriously with Twitter now for about two months. Truth is, I was highly skeptical of its benefits at first, partly because everyone seemed so irrationally ga-ga over it (I am inherently suspicious of fads). But also, puh-lease: 140 characters per tweet? To someone who's made a decent career out of writing 75,000-word books, and who has already written hundreds of articles and blog posts ranging from 300 to 3,000 words each, a 140-character tweet smacks of attention deficit disorder, pure and simple. Also, I've never been big on text messaging, which is where the 140-character limit comes from in the first place. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, I took a Twitter tutorial from one of our Peppers & Rogers Group consultants (thanks to @bcarroll7), I installed Tweetdeck on my laptop, and then I plodded awkwardly off into Twitterland, vowing to dedicate at least a few minutes each morning and evening to monitoring, reacting, and tweeting.

Continue reading "My Adventures in Twitterland: A Two-Month Status Report" »

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An airline executive colleague of ours submitted his resignation the day before his airline reported that its financial results had swung severely down, reversing a previous record of profits and recording a loss described by the trade press as "staggering." The reason for the loss? Fuel hedging. Twelve months ago, when oil was climbing beyond $145 a barrel, and many observers predicted $200 oil by the end of 2008, this airline and others began to hedge their fuel costs against further price increases. Naturally, these contracts were expensive at the time, because no one knew how high oil prices would go, so the financial players selling the options didn't want to lose money any more than the airlines did. But airlines that had successfully hedged in the past were seen as responsibly managing their exposure to commodity price risk.

Continue reading "Fired by Randomness" »

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You know you're in the boondocks when you're in a country where Blackberry messaging doesn't penetrate. Ethiopia, for instance, where I am now, as I write this blog post. My Blackberry works as a phone, but the email doesn't happen.

Continue reading "Hobbyists are the Ultimate Engaged Employees" »

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Earlier this week in Boston, we ran a small, intimate workshop for about 20 of our 1to1 Media "insiders." These are folks who regularly access our Web site and Webinars, subscribe to the 1to1 Magazine or to our new journal, and so forth. We hand-picked the participants from our opt-in database, in order to ensure that the room would be filled with people who had their "fingers on the trigger" of analytics at their companies. What we wanted most were those folks who were wrestling with the problem of starting, upgrading, or just managing their companies' customer analytics functions.

Continue reading "Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement" »

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Dr. Dean (yes, he's an MD) did a session at Fortune Magazine's Brainstormtech last week in Pasadena, and one complaint he has about the current state of political discourse on the health care debate is that the Republicans just aren't being serious (in his opinion). Therefore, he says, the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, more moderate than their Pelosi-led House brethren, are at least keeping Congress honest. Dean says he's happy at least someone is raising the right issues, and of course one of the issues that greatly impacts the constituencies of many Blue Dogs is the Pelosi bill's initiative to "soak the rich" to pay for the increased costs of health care. According to Dr. Dean, this is an initiative that would send our own marginal income tax rates on the top brackets into the stratosphere, where we would be surpassed only by countries like Sweden and Denmark. (The top marginal rates proposed by Pelosi are greater than 50%! What are they thinking?)

Continue reading "Howard Dean Critiques the Health Care Debate" »

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I attended a fascinating, intimate breakfast session at Fortune Magazine's Brainsstormtech Conference in Pasadena on Friday (Twitter #brainstormtech). This was maybe the most interesting session I attended at the whole three-day event. There were three presenters, from Cisco, Athena Health Systems, and mPedigree. The mPedigree guy, Bright Simons (pronounced "Simmons"), developed a technology and launched a company to help consumers in Africa verify the authenticity of the drug products they buy at pharmacies, using mobile phone technology.

Continue reading "Getting Serious About Fixing the Health Care Payment System" »

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If you think the economy is bad now, just wait until the new health-care legislation is passed. Income tax rates on high earning people (i.e., the most productive members of the economy, the ones who create the most jobs and generate the most innovation) will be increased to levels higher than all but a few of the European countries. The marginal rate on Federal income tax will be increased from 35% to more than 47%! Counting state and local income taxes, and the 2.9% Medicare tax, on average the marginal tax rate on the highest U.S. incomes will soon be 52%, which will be higher than the highest marginal rates in every other OECD country except Sweden, Denmark and Belgium!

Continue reading "Assisted Suicide for Our Economy" »

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I constantly hear from B2B executives that it's a challenge to develop strong relationships between the B2B sales staff and clients. But it doesn't have to be.

Continue reading "Peppers Unplugged: Elevate B2B Sales " »

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Maybe Shakespeare's character had it right in King Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene II. ("The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.")

Yesterday I woke up at the Hilton Garden Inn in Norwalk, Connecticut, and on my way out I stopped at the breakfast buffet and asked the cook to do a couple of eggs for me, sunny side up, please. He told me he was no longer allowed to prepare eggs sunny side up, and had to do them over easy, instead. He seemed to think this was a new law or state regulation, although I suppose it might just have been HGI policy, promulgated by their attorneys to avoid liability for salmonella poisoning.

Continue reading "First, Kill All the Lawyers" »

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So Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, disappears from the radar screens of the press, his colleagues, his security detail, and everyone else, literally vanishing into - where? In short, Sanford "unwires" himself, in the old-fashioned, pre-Blackberry, pre-email sense, which means no one knows where he is, and no one can find out. In the Manchurian Candidate sense.

Continue reading "Manchurian Governor" »

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Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, FriendFeed - you name the vehicle, what's very clear is that we are now swimming in a much larger ocean of information than ever before. Over the next few years we can expect an array of software tools to filter, sort, edit and aggregate this information in ways that match our personal preferences. In the meantime, however, it's just a heckuva lotta data.

Another issue many of us don't think too much about is how this fountain of information will be paid for. Yes, it's possible that Twitter will start charging something, and maybe some of the other vehicles will charge, also - but almost certainly the biggest cost burden will fall on advertisers and marketers, who will be producing a prodigious amount of "ride along" marketing appeals, with increasingly relevant messages.

Continue reading "Funding the Revolution in Interactive Marketing" »

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When Don Peppers and I wrote our first book, The One to One Future, the year was 1993 and there was as yet no internet. No email either. To collaborate, we mailed floppy disks to each other in overnight mail. At the Post Office.

Continue reading "Social Networking 3.0: Interconnecting the Future" »

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Rampant, undisciplined short-term thinking is what did GM in, and no one should really be shedding too many tears over it, in my opinion.

For decades, GM management negotiated with the UAW by trading future retirement benefits for concessions on current hourly wages. This was a natural thing to do if your eye is on the current numbers and you aren't going to be around for the long run anyway, right? You just pass the problem on to the next generation of managers.

Continue reading "General Motors Succumbs to Short-Termism" »

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Barney Frank is up to his old self-dealing tricks again. He's the politician who, more than any other (and there were many many others), pushed Freddie Mac to subsidize more sub-prime mortgages. He did this for one or both of these reasons: (1) he was genuinely concerned about providing better, more affordable housing for people who otherwise couldn't afford it, or (2) he wanted the votes of these people. You be the judge of motive, but the results were economically ruinous.

Well, he's at it again now. JUST after General Motors declared bankruptcy and gave a majority of its equity to the US Government, Barney Frank called GM's CEO personally to dissuade him from closing a distribution center they had been planning to close, in Mr. Frank's home state of Massachusetts. Apparently, his effort was successful, and CEO Fritz Henderson changed the plan after talking with Mr. Frank.

Continue reading "And Now, From the People Who Brought Us the Mortgage Crisis..." »

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Whether you agree with their politics or not (and for the most part, I do not), you still have to hand it to the Obama Administration when it comes to employing modern technologies to meet political goals. Case in point: His masterful speech, "A New Beginning," delivered at 1 pm in Cairo today (6 am Eastern time). Designed to reach out to the Muslim world as a whole, and to begin a serious dialogue toward more and better cooperation with the West, in this speech Mr. Obama touched on all the major issues that have divided the Muslim world from the West for decades, including extremist violence, nuclear proliferation, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, women's rights, religious tolerance, democracy, and even modernity itself. If you haven't yet watched his speech in its entirety, it is well worth the 55 minutes required, and you can easily find it online (or click here for full video and transcript).

Continue reading "U.S. Government Now on the Technology Bandwagon" »

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By their very nature, networks - of customers, Web sites, weather patterns, evolutionary systems, or economic competitors - are subject to random and unpredictable movements.

Networks of interrelated things, whether we are talking about the Web or a collection of stock and bond prices, often grow in a kind of "cascading" pattern. For instance, because one person buys a stock, others think it must be valuable, too - so they buy it. Influential customers become more influential at a faster rate than those who aren't already influential. The most visited Web sites gain visitors faster than others, and wealthy people become wealthier at a faster rate than others. The reason this kind of cascading occurs is easy to understand, but the effects of cascading like this can be quite random. Cascading means that two systems could be set up with nearly identical initial conditions, but even very slight, almost undetectable differences between them will inevitably escalate into major differences after just a bit of time, creating what has come to be known as the "butterfly effect."

Continue reading "A Networked World is a More Random World" »

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This is one of my favorite topics, behavioral economics. I already have Ariely's book on my Kindle, and it is queued up next for reading (after I finish The Drunkard's Walk, about randomness). Ariely talks a lot about illusions, emotions, and irrationality as a way to explain human decision making. His point is not that decisions are irrational because they are random and unpredictable, but rather that they are irrational in certain, easily understood ways - ways that make the type of irrationality predictable.

Records show, for instance, that in some countries a very high percentage of people elect to donate their organs after they die, while in others - even similar cultures - the percentage of people who participate in organ donation programs is very low. So his question is: Why?

Continue reading "Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational - and a Great Presentation" »

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Fred Krupp was up next at the HSM World Innovation Forum, talking about green technology and climate change. He is the author of a book, Earth: The Sequel. According to Krupp, our planet is in dire straits. Global warming is within our control if we act now, but if we don't tackle global warming, it will tackle us. This represents a potential "Gold Rush" for entrepreneurs and innovators. Less carbon will equal more jobs, Krupp says. There are more Americans employed in the wind industry today than in mining coal, he says, so we're talking about a lot of economic activity.

Those of you who read my posts regularly know that I am deeply skeptical of big claims like this. I didn't believe the world was ending because of global cooling when that was the fear back in the 1970s, and I didn't believe it was going to end with Y2K, when that was the fear in the 1990s, and I don't believe it is ending now, due to global warming. See my post from April 1 this year. Climates do change, of course. Our climate is always changing, and at different times in the distant past it has been far warmer than it is now, and it has been far colder. But the science behind man-made climate change is not "incontrovertible" despite what the propagandists say.

Continue reading "Fred Krupp Talks About Green Innovations at HSM Forum" »

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Clayton Christensen classifies sustaining innovations as those that continue to improve a product or service, and move it up and up and up along the customer's need. Often, sustaining innovations achieve a quality far in excess of what most customers actually need, and as quality improves, price and margin improve as well. In fact, Christensen says, competition in sustaining innovations has a tendency to increase the price of the product (in contrast to the common economic wisdom that competition reduces prices). However, at some point below this level of high product quality and innovation, there are disruptive technologies that will always chip away at the higher end products.

Continue reading "Christensen - Part Two" »

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Clayton Christensen's presentation is in two parts, and the first part is just concluded, but it's already clear to me and to several others I've talked to here at the HSM World Innovation Forum that his thoughts on innovation are definitely worth the trip.

Two questions he posed in this initial presentation:
1. Why is it so difficult to sustain success over time (i.e., to innovate again and again)? and
2. Is innovation really as much of a random event as it seems?

His tongue-in-cheek conclusion is that the principles of good management taught in places like Harvard actually sew the seeds of failure and ensure that innovation doesn't succeed.

Continue reading "Clayton Christensen Scores an A+" »

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Emerging markets may offer a tremendous opportunity for companies in more developed countries, but they have to think about their businesses in different models. So, for instance, Ford made a mistake when they tried to adapt an inexpensive car for the Indian market. To cut costs, they eliminated one set of power window options - the front seat would come with power windows, but the back would not. Problem: In India, if you can afford a $15K car, you are defined as wealthy. You have a chauffeur. So for its Indian-entry car, Ford gave the power window to the chauffeur.

Continue reading "Vijay Govindarajan: Innovation and Emerging Markets" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments ()

Sorry, but on the whole I was deeply disappointed in Prahalad's presentation. I could be wrong, and at lunch I talked with another blogger who said she really liked his talk, although not as much as Saffo's. But for my money, Prahalad struck out.

Next practices, not best practices. Amplifying weak signals. Focusing on value creation process. Changing nature of the firm. Global perspective. These are some of the issues Prahalad put up on his first couple of slides. Mega-issues, it seems to me, but not very illuminating, noteworthy, or even interesting. His perspective on innovation was hard to read from this beginning, and it didn't get any better for the whole hour.

Continue reading "CK Prahalad - Disappointing" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments ()

One of Saffo's most interesting perspectives is that innovation moves in phases. New scientific discoveries come in waves, and following these discoveries you have new technological applications that change everything. Chemistry innovations in the very early part of the 20th Century led to new giant companies like IG Farben and others. Then physics, in the second or third decade, and then electronics (or IT), in the 1950s. This is the scientific discovery that has shaped the entrepreneurial landscape over the last several decades. Now, we're seeing big discoveries in biology. And of course these industries overlap. The structure of DNA was understood in 1954, then the human genome project came fifty years later, and the biotechnology revolution is starting to happen.

Continue reading "Paul Saffo: Change Comes in Waves" »

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I'm now ensconced in the bloggers' perch, on the balcony overlooking the stage at the Nokia Theater in NYC (two blocks from Times Square), ready to take in the talks at HSM's Innovation Forum - Clayton Christensen, CK Prahalad, Paul Saffo. Big names. BIG conference.

Continue reading "Ready for the HSM Innovation Forum?" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments ()

Economists used to concern themselves with how an economy settled into equilibrium, looking at the supply or demand for particular products, their prices, and so forth. When there were more products than demanded, prices would fall, production would slow, and vice versa. In this old model of economic thinking, technological progress was thought to be an "exogenous variable" - something imposed from outside the economy by events not really under the control of the individuals and businesses operating within the economy itself.

Continue reading "It's Innovation, Stupid!" »

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In the news now, United Airlines has joined a number of other carriers in imposing extra fees for super-sized passengers - passengers so obese they have trouble putting the armrest down, say, or fastening their seat belts. Lots of angry passengers out there, including me, and I'm not obese. I'm angry because airlines in general have increased the seating density and reduced the comfort levels on most of their domestic aircraft over the last several years, exacerbating the problem of accommodating larger passengers.

Continue reading "Will Obesity Be the Next "Disability" Protected?" »

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Here at Peppers & Rogers Group, everyone is very careful about using the "S" word. "S" for "segmentation."

Continue reading "The `S` Word in Marketing" »

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If you think that being a "global warming denier" makes me too radical, I suggest you take a look at this past Sunday's NY Times Magazine article on Freeman Dyson, of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Dyson is one of science's legends, truly. And the article is a thoughtful essay on how Dyson has come to doubt the "science" behind the global warming debate.

Continue reading "Guilty as Charged: Global Warming Denier" »

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Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has announced a new program under which the US government will join with private investors to purchase bad assets from various commercial banks, so that these banks' balance sheets can be cleaned up, enabling them to lend again. Finally, here is a program that is very likely to work well when it comes to fixing the financial system and getting banks to lend again.

Continue reading "The Public-Private Investment Program is a GREAT Idea!" »

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Ahem. Warren Buffett (does he really need an introduction?) is one of the world's richest men and a trusted, if informal, economic advisor to President Obama. And, during a three-hour CNBC interview last Monday he made exactly the argument I first made in my October blog post on our 1to1 Media blog: One of the biggest problems behind the meltdown of our commercial banking system is that newly adopted "mark to market" accounting rules have an exaggerated and unjustified effect on banks, as opposed to other businesses.

Continue reading "Warren Buffett Agrees With Me: "Mark to Market" is the Problem" »

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OK, I feel like I'm harping on the Obama Administration, and I really don't mean to. But Laura D'Andrea Tyson has an op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal that perfectly illustrates why democracies need an educated public. Ms. Tyson sits on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Read this statement from her article and see if you can tell why it's misleading:

"Critics charge that President Obama's tax rates for high-income earners will strangle small business and stifle economic growth. Such claims are misguided or disingenuous. A full 97% of small businesses will see their rates unchanged or enjoy additional tax benefits under the Obama plan."

Continue reading "An Educated Public Is Democracy's Biggest Asset" »

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So far, the downturn we are encountering looks like a recession. It may be one of the more severe recessions in the last 50 years or so, but it's still only a recession, and not even close to turning into a genuine "depression," if you define that as a 10% or greater decline in GNP.

We should all remember, however, that economic downturns are entirely natural events, and you can't prevent them any more than you can prevent ocean waves, or thunderstorms. The global economic system is a highly complex, path-dependent system of interacting forces. In fact, in the aggregate the economy performs very much like the weather, and will always generate unpredictable results. No one has ever successfully predicted economic cycles consistently, and no one ever will - ever. This is because the better we get at predicting them, the more opportunities we create for imaginative investors to arbitrage those predictions away with their own investments.

Continue reading "Three Steps to Turn a Recession into a Depression" »

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In my latest video blog, I look at the peanut salmonella outbreak from a business perspective. Short-term thinking by Peanut Corp. of America led to catastrophic circumstances.

Continue reading "Peppers Unplugged: Short-termism Kills" »

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Well, if you're working in a business, and you're not employed in the government, it's now time to begin making plans to hunker down for a long, grueling, slow-down, courtesy of a government whose members appear not to have the faintest clue about how a real economic system functions. No one is even pretending that the Pelosi pork-barrel express, masquerading as a "stimulus" package, is going to stimulate anything other than Democratic fund-raising. Not even the Congressional Budget Office likes it.

Are my worst fears come true? Has our new President, despite all our high hopes, simply caved in to his party's left-wing? Have we all been duped, after all?

Continue reading "Obama, Where Art Thou?" »

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Call me crazy, but I think it is dead wrong to restrict immigration into the United States on the grounds that we are somehow "protecting" American jobs. In contrast, I think a better way to create jobs in the US is to encourage MORE immigration, from a much wider variety of countries.

The idea that immigration somehow deprives current Americans of their jobs stems from a mistaken interpretation of how the economy really works. You really can't think of our economic system as some type of pie that can only be cut up and divided in so many ways. It is not a static "thing," but a vibrant, growing, inter-connected system.

Continue reading "Contrarian Thought: We Need MORE Immigration in the U.S., Not Less" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments ()

News flash: The global warming scare is based on bad science, and if we're not careful it could lead to disastrous economic policies.

As an environmentalist myself, I firmly believe in the wisdom of managing our resources wisely, and behaving as responsible stewards of the planet. And I'm definitely sympathetic with the intentions of those who are sounding an alarm over global warming. Nevertheless, far from the unanimity we frequently read about in media reports, the fact is that climatologists do not all agree that the climate is warming much at all, and if it is, to what extent this may be caused by human activity.

Continue reading "Contrarian Thought: Global Warming is Just a "Meme Bubble"" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments ()

All my life I've rebelled against the "common wisdom" or whatever the correct thinking was at the time, and this is surely a symptom of my vast ego. A person must be supremely self-confident, even conceited, to willfully spurn the collective opinions of others in such a flagrant manner as I regularly do.

Continue reading "EXPOSED: Don Peppers is a Contrarian" »

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