31 December 2010
In my last post I sang the praises of Daniel Pink’s book Drive. If anyone needs any convincing that the Type X approach to managing professionals is counter-productive, they should look at how demotivated so many teachers in Britain have become as a result of top-down targets from politicians, inane box-ticking and morale-destroying [...]
Creative destruction
20 January 2010
Google’s announcement that it is no longer prepared to cooperate with the Chinese authorities in ‘filtering’ search results and may pull out of the country altogether is proof positive for the faithful of just how different a company it is. The fact that there were probably business considerations behind the decision as well [...]
11 January 2010
This post was to have been about Google’s vaulting ambitions and its supposed similarities to Microsoft, but John Gapper’s latest piece in the FT and Chris Dixon’s blog made me think again. While I agree with almost all of Gapper’s observations on open systems and much of what Dixon says, I have reservations [...]
24 December 2009
The suggestion that there is an entrepreneurial gene –
that entrepreneurs are born not made, raises interesting questions about what we mean by entrepreneurialism. There are many facets to it and entrepreneurs come in many different forms. Some of the most successful ones do not correspond with the stereotypes of a relish for [...]
26 November 2010
Long before it actually became market leader, Dell was the hottest name in the PC industry and Michael hailed as a business genius. His face on endless magazine covers, author of a deservedly best-selling book, he was the subject of a reverential interview in the Harvard Business Review. The CEOs of leading manufacturers, [...]
21 November 2009
The news that Dell has been pushed from second to third position in the PC market is a reminder of how short are the reigns of most industry leaders – in the first half of this decade it was number one and undisputed heavyweight champion. This industry of course has always been ferociously [...]
11 November 2009
Despondency in publishing circles has plumbed such depths recently that some have even wondered if the printed book itself is not doomed. To put this in perspective it is worth considering how railways, cinemas, mainframe computers and photographic film were marginalized.
8 November 2009
This may be a bit rich coming from me, but perhaps expressions like ‘winners and losers’ and ‘creative destruction’ have reinforced a crudely gladiatorial view of the complex patterns of economic change. If Google is up , then Microsoft must be down or, as Gore Vidal put it apropos of literary rivals: it [...]
4 November 2009
Tim asks what the difference is ‘between peaceful evolution and continuous revolution. Is CD a revolutionary argument that peaceful evolution does not exist?’
3 November 2009
I agree that the financial sector is no more immune from creative destruction than any other industry, though the fact that it is too crucial to the rest of the economy for governments to allow widespread failure makes it a special case. The barriers to entry are also pretty formidable. The telecom industry [...]
