by Tom Austin | November 21, 2011 | Comments Off
Harumph! Have you ever noticed all the emails that you receive that say “Do not reply to this email”? I bought a new car from a US big three manufacturer in October — and have been inundated with satisfaction surveys offered via email — email to which I can’t respond. If I could, I’d tell them [...]
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by Tom Austin | June 11, 2011 | Comments Off
I was inspired by a review of Bob Lutz latest book, “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” that I found in today’s Wall Street Journal. I’ve followed Lutz for at least 20 years. Unconventional. Iconoclastic. The “review” of his latest book is worth reading. Lutz has always been a guy with more passion and emotion than [...]
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by Tom Austin | June 10, 2011 | Comments Off
In her post on the HBR site, “People are not Cogs”, author Nilofer Merchant argues persuasively that people matter, people engagement is important to business performance and most organizations don’t get it, behaving as though we are all still running an industrial age factory. Have you figured out how to bridge the gap between performance oriented [...]
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by Tom Austin | June 6, 2011 | Comments Off
If most of your employees are dissatisfied with their lot in (business) life, don’t implement and encourage the use of social tools inside the enterprise. Or so it seems given the central message in some recent social sciences research that was based on applying text analytics across large amounts of Facebook data. On the other hand, [...]
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by Tom Austin | April 12, 2011 | Comments Off
We are being overrun by -aaSs. They’re being stuck on everything from Software to Storage (SaaS versus SaaS) and virtually everything in between. . I know it’s too much to ask that we disrupt the -aaSification of the industry too soon. Everyone is doing it these days (much like sticking e before everything a dozen [...]
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Category: Uncategorized Tags: aaS, SaaS
by Tom Austin | February 13, 2011 | 1 Comment
Our email/IM/calendaring tools could get a lot better than they are. – This post started out as a rant about “Out of office” messages that read something like this: ”Please STOP and read this message. I will be unavailable for the next 13 days.” This is an example of the useless lengths people will go trying [...]
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by Tom Austin | February 9, 2011 | 2 Comments
The industry lost a down to earth giant on Sunday night. Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) passed away. At lot of words have been written about him, including repetitions of the out-of-context claim that he had no vision for personal computers and couldn’t see why anyone would want one. That quote misrepresents [...]
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by Tom Austin | December 16, 2010 | Comments Off
A month ago, I download a copy of the RedLaser app for my iPhone as I headed out the door for Australia. In an airport along the way, I saw Clive Cussler’s new novel, Crescent Dawn. But instead of buying it, I shot a picture of its barcode with RedLaser which immediately clued me in: I could [...]
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Category: Business Models Internet Uncategorized ecommerce smart phones Tags:
by Tom Austin | December 6, 2010 | 1 Comment
The New York Times had an elegant but dystopic vision of the future of work captured in its recent photo essay http://nyti.ms/hfPRae wherein photographer Piotr Relinksi sketches out life, as it were, in the Atlas Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A busy world of solitary confinement within a sea of others. The caption on the [...]
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by Tom Austin | October 13, 2010 | Comments Off
If you’re not in control, you are out of control. Simple as that. People who complain about having too much information to deal with have themselves to blame. (Or their boss which is really a reflection on their willingness to put up with information abuse.) Set the right expectations and you’ll be fine. If you [...]
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