Mastering The Hype Cycle

As Seth Godin points out in a recent blog posting, there is often a long preamble to the trigger that launches an innovation on its path up to the Peak of Inflated Expectation. In Mastering the Hype Cycle, we track the advent of usage-based car insurance offerings (such as Snapshot from Progressive Insurance) back to [...]

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… so says Lars Rasmussen, Google engineer and Wave project co-founder in a recent Huffington Post blog. First , we agree, from Lars Rasmussen’s viewpoint,  the internal project is likely to be following the hype cycle.  Big projects do this because there is a collective social reaction from the  development team and internal management. It [...]

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I really owe it all to Miss Mackie, former headmistress of the City of London School for Girls. Once a week she instructed our class of energetic 11-year olds in English literature, keeping us pinned silently to our desks by force of her imposing presence. The book open in front of us was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, an [...]

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If you are old enough, or a film fan, you will recall the famous speech by Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street where he espouses the idea that ‘greed is good’‘ There is a double edge to using that analogy to support my argument – but here goes!… In a non-tech corporation, the biggest [...]

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The graphic above was originally drafted to be an end-piece for the book – a ‘photocopy and keep’ aid to help people remember the realities of the Hype Cycle’s twists and turns as they wrestle with project situations and perhaps need to regain their perspective. For both Jackie and I, this was our first book [...]

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“Expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.” This is a line from Eva in the novel “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, referring to her expectations of motherhood. In a series of letters to her estranged husband, Eva deliberates on the lead up to her son’s Columbine-style shooting of his classmates and [...]

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As we have said before in this blog, the phrase ‘next big thing’ is a giveaway to Hype Cycle watchers. When you see this buzz-phrase in a few media articles, it’s a good indicator of a new cycle forming or in play. It gets used many times – around the technology trigger, the peak and [...]

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A slightly ominous posting today (Friday 13th) Last week I passed by a sad sight in Hounslow, London UK  that I just had to photograph and share. If you have read chapter one of the book you will know the case. When you are deciding what to cut from your portfolio in response to the recession, beware the strategic consequences of [...]

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Over a decade on into the full onslaught of internet delivered digital media, books can seem a bit of an old fashioned way to access new ideas. Even so – when people need to delve deeply they still need books, so their arrival and sales can be useful datapoints for hype cycle watchers. For example, [...]

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We’ve targeted the book’s advice primarily at adopters of innovation, but an understanding of the hype cycle can also offer insight for the “supply” side of the equation too.  In recent review of the book, Britton Manasco rightly advises marketers to watch for the Trough as “True thought leaders will see this coming and prepare their prospects and [...]

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