Reading List
Effort trumps ability
Fantastic article in the New Yorker from Gladwell about how David beats Goliath.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell
David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak [...]
Book review – Making the Number
After reviewing Making the Number, there are a number of points about sales benchmarking that apply to our own theories about marketing.
The scoreboard for sales professional is and always has been the pay stub – this is the crudest form of sales benchmarking. For marketing, it has always been a bit stickier and this is [...]
Marketers as publishers
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3630814
Decent article here about content and the “emerging role” of marketers as publishers. Like a magazine, marketers should start thinking about their editorial calendar and pushing a new edition out every month to their customers and salesforce.
Send to Facebook
what is your monopoly?
This post is short and to the point. It is a worthwhile read.
What is your monopoly?
Xerox sales training basically can be summed in in a few words: Find your monopoly. This is my summarization, not theirs, but I think it speaks volumes. Every premium priced product has more options then a standard priced [...]
Transferring American Military Values to Iraq
Found this article here: http://netwmd.com/blog/2007/10/05/1985
October 5, 2007, 9:32 am
by William Bache*
The President of the United States expressed his desire to build a democratic Iraq that could serve as an example to the rest of the Arab and Islamic nations. The American military was the instrument chosen to build an Iraqi security structure that could fight [...]
Another way to improve marketing results?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070904/od_nm/nepal_airline_odd_dc_1
Great news here about sacrificing goats to get an airplane back into the air.
There was no mention of whether the sacrifice worked.
Perhaps animal sacrifices could be applied to marketing problems? But if you do use this as a tactic, we recommend that the sacrifice match the problem. If an airplane the size of a [...]
The new nationalization, debt as a weapon
Interesting article in the New York Times about foreign investments being used as a weapon.
Now, with sovereign wealth funds, many experts are asking whether cross-border investment is evolving into cross-border nationalization, raising the prospect of government interference in free markets, only this time, in other countries’ markets.
Send to Facebook
New Maister Article on Client Relations
Because of prior poor experiences – or the generally bad caricatures that exist about many professions – clients are often suspicious (at least initially) of the motives of their service providers. Whatever your profession, you need to be prepared for the fact that, at the beginning of every new relationship, you must avoid confirming other [...]
Innovation Happens Elsewhere – open source as a business strategy
I really don’t know where these entries about open source and insurgency are going to go. Most of the time, I doubt if I’ll have a well formulated beginning middle or end to any of this content. If you’re not patient, don’t read this.
Thinking about Brave New War, I grabbed a copy of Innovation Happens [...]
Brave New War
I just read an excerpt from The Brave New War, a new book by John Robb of Global Guerrillas. I intend to buy this book. Based on the 11 page excerpt, it appears Robb has examined the GWOT from an open-source perspective.
“We have entered the age of the faceless, agile enemy. From London to Madrid [...]
