Archive for December, 2009

Thriving on Chaos

If you haven’t read the classic Tom Peters book Thriving on Chaos, you should.  It outlines the demise of businesses based on the organizational management superstructure.  It’s all about being nimble and outlines strategies to help companies embrace the notion of being chaotic. Of course, this is nothing new now: we all strive to create [ READ MORE ]

Absolut(ely) Fantastic

You are Absolut Vodka. 20 years ago,  High Schools had to make policies to determine if they were going to allow students to hang your very artistic (not to mention wickedly cool) print ads in their lockers. You basically own the market of hip vodka and you own the world of hip print advertising.  So much [ READ MORE ]

3-D — The New New Thing — please say no

Caught NPR this week discussing how amped up the movie industry is about James Cameron’s new movie ‘Avatar’ that is supposedly incredible (I’m sure it is, he typically makes pretty good movies) and its going to revolutionize the movie industry. Typically, we look at things that are stuck on the blade with frustration, but in this [ READ MORE ]

Glacial Speed

Starting a new company is awesome. You want to build a product and service that people want and hopefully make a couple dollars along the way.  While everything about your company is moving fast the rest of the world is moving slow. As a business you want that BIG strategic partnerships that are going to [ READ MORE ]

Shopping for Sport

Another week, another set of killer deals just trying to pry cash from our pockets on the way to Seasonal bliss. This week, Ann Taylor has had in their store windows ‘40% Off Today only’ for an entire extended weekend.  Its always suspect when a store produces some really slick (read expensive) signage that says ‘Today [ READ MORE ]

SPAM — The Ultimate Bladerunner?

Its amazing, SPAM is getting more and more sophisticated, and clogging up a ridiculous amount of email server storage, processing power, etc. And yet — its getting no where.  This is an approach that with a little bit of handy work could make a communication medium that we all rely and depend on daily absolutely 100% [ READ MORE ]

Shopping has become a calendarable event

Forget about the retail doom and gloom that has been forecast for the the Holiday entire ‘09 season. One company isn’t sitting on its laurels, putting on the kneepads, getting on all fours and waiting for the pain — they are playing rainmaker for themselves and trying to make something happen. Gap, Inc., owners of [ READ MORE ]