Articles about general management, leadership and strategy issues.
This blog post is based on a totally unscientific review of my own experiences with two companies, French energy provider Gaz de France (GDF) and computer manufacturer Lenovo, but I do think it provides some useful insights into what helps make cu…
One of my favorite events in France every year is the third Thursday in November when the Beaujolais Nouveau comes on the market. Wine experts will go to great lengths to describe the new wine (fresh out of the presses as the grapes were just harv…
A simplified model of strategic planning places strategists at the top, largely isolated from daily operations, and fed on a stream of largely quantitative data that is increasingly aggregated as it moves up the pyramid. Occasionally, these strate…
Everyone in business wants to demonstrate their added value, and the overuse of the word “strategic” has exploded as a result. Do you know any consultants who don’t claim to be strategic? Most professional communicators now claim to practice “stra…
(Updated 11 November 2010) I strongly believe in networking as a way of life. According to organizational theory, people who link the “holes” between different networks are very influential. Many people are familiar with the “strength of weak ties…
I have always been struck by how much more sociable European dogs seem to be than American dogs. I think it has to do with the unintended signals sent by their owners. For example, the reason that dogs are hostile to the mail deliverer (assuming t…
Why do lamps have lampshades? The rather surprising answer is: because Thomas Edison tried to hide the revolutionary nature of electric lighting by making it seem as similar to gas as possible. This entailed centralized electricity generation, run…
Entire books have been written about the portrayal of women in popular media and advertising. A few years ago, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty won kudos for tackling this problem head-on. Kotex, a North American brand of products for menstrual per…
This morning I received a pitch so bad that I feel the need to extract some lessons from it. Maybe the author will see them and learn. Hopefully at least one person on the planet will get just a tiny bit savvier about what does and doesn’t work wh…
[Update: When I used my “Share this page on Posterous” tool to share this, I really thought my paragraph comment would show up at the top and make it clear that I was referring to this being a great resource rather making it look like I was taking…
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