by Tom Austin | April 24, 2013 | Comments Off
I’ve seen the future … and now it’s within grasp. It’s going to impact your life and your work before this decade is out. We just published a note entitled Exploit the Intersect of IBM’s Social Business and Solution Selling Strategies. A part of that note, probably one quarter, dives into what has been fascinating me [...]
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by Tom Austin | April 26, 2012 | Comments Off
I’m inspired by Amy C. Emondson’s article, “Teamwork on the Fly” in the April 2012 Issue of Harvard Business Review. I’ve referred numerous clients to it over the last four weeks (since I first saw it). The “in brief” summary of the piece reads as follows Idea in Brief In today’s fast-moving, ultracompetitive global business [...]
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by Tom Austin | April 9, 2012 | Comments Off
There’s a broad and grey line between the study of human behavior (which can very often be “irrational”) and the study of neuroscience (a study of the mechanisms that, at some level of abstraction, lie beneath the irrationality). The Washington Post, today, in a blog posting entitled “Is neuroscience the new ‘Freakonomics’?” is playing fast [...]
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by Tom Austin | April 4, 2012 | Comments Off
The economist has a piece this week on a study of whether signing up for Facebook follows germ-contagion patterns or not. The piece reports on a PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) report that analyzed 54 million email invites users sent out to friends who had not yet joined Facebook. So what did [...]
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by Tom Austin | March 23, 2012 | Comments Off
Andy just blogged on material that relates to the excellent book he and Erik Brynjolfsson wrote last year, “Race Against The Machine“. Read the blog. Then read the book — it’s short and to the point (and reflects many of my much less widely read musings of the last few years). The video of “Big [...]
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by Tom Austin | March 22, 2012 | Comments Off
I’m at the Adobe Summit in Salt Lake City, listening to Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter) talking about his digital self and I’m realizing I’m somewhat conflicted about the basic question: does my digital self, as reflected on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Linked-in and a host of other much smaller sites reflect me as a person? [...]
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by Tom Austin | February 29, 2012 | 4 Comments
Many of you will recall my earlier blog post “Do not reply to this email!” Here’s a new, related example: This morning, I awoke to learn that a favorite company of mine has decided to stop taking requests from its customers via email. The only mediums that will be accepted are filling out a form [...]
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by Tom Austin | February 19, 2012 | 1 Comment
Interesting piece in today’s NY Times (and reprinted in the Boston Globe), recounting how Boston Beer’s Jim Koch bypassed the traditional IPO route in 1995 to offer stock in his company directly to consumers (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/your-money/an-ipo-process-that-is-customer-friendly.html?scp=1&sq=sam%20adams%20ipo&st=cse). [Disclosure: I own a small stock position in Boston Beer.] Google did a similar thing in 2004 with its modified [...]
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by Tom Austin | February 16, 2012 | Comments Off
We’ve been having a raging debate internally about the emergence of new working relationships between employers and workers. We’ve read, for example, that in Germany “According to a survey conducted by the IG Metall union, more than 70 percent of companies in the electrical and metal industry in Baden-Württemberg now use such <temporary, project-based> contracts, [...]
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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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