Passionate about technology and gadgets.
Obsessed with simplicity and usability.
Keen on photography.
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
And a few more thoughts, from one of the greatest men of my lifetime:
“On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.”
. . .
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
. . .
“The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”
Clayton Christensen is an inspiring guy. Not only has he disrupted the business world throughout his career as one of the foremost innovation academics, he has also overcome a bout with cancer and a recent stroke. Introduced as “the Kobe Bryant of the innovation world,” he kicked off the 2011 World Innovation Forum. He began by informing the audience of close to 1,000 that after his stroke one month ago, he had to relearn to speak one word at a time. He then went on to discuss some of the reasons good companies falter. He offered two particularly surprising explanations:
What causes innovation to be a crapshoot is following the management principles taught in business schools.
This is not the explanation one would expect from a Harvard Business School professor. He went on to say that if you’re doing everything by the book, then you are doomed. His point was that disruptive innovation often comes from unexpected places – the tiny competitor, the startup company in the garage, the rebel manager. To some extent, necessity fuels innovation. It’s cozy at the top, and coziness is not a hotbed for disruption. Christensen also warned that with China and India coming on strong, the U.S. needs to continue to innovate or the country is in danger of getting “stuck at the top” the way Japan’s economy did. It is important to push for innovation in both good times and bad.
Focusing on core competencies and outsourcing noncore activities can cause good companies to fail
Christensen told the cautionary tale of how Dell’s repeated outsourcing of noncore activities to Asustek ultimately led to the liquidation of Dell’s business model. At every step, it seemed like Dell’s managers were making a rational decision; focusing on the highly profitable aspects of their business and diminishing costs for the rest. There are two dangers with this approach. First, companies need to think about what their core competencies need to be in the future, not just what is most profitable now. It is important to forecast where the market is gong and anticipate how you will serve your customers as the landscape changes. Second, if you continue to outsource everything from customer service to distribution you wind up losing contact with your customers. Suddenly, you are completely removed and out of touch with the people whose problems your products/services are supposed to be solving.
In the lead up to today's release of the Steve Jobs biography, there's been an increasing stream of news surrounding its subject. As a business researcher, I was particularly interested in this recent article that referenced from his biography a list of Jobs's favorite books. There's one business book on this list, and it "deeply influenced" Jobs. That book is The Innovator's Dilemma by HBS Professor Clay Christensen.
But what's most interesting to me isn't that The Innovator's Dilemma was on that list. It's that Jobs solved the conundrum.
When describing his period of exile from Apple — when John Sculley took over — Steve Jobs described one fundamental root cause of Apple's problems. That was to let profitability outweigh passion: "My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."
Anyone familiar with Professor Christensen's work will quickly recognize the same causal mechanism at the heart of the Innovator's Dilemma: the pursuit of profit. The best professional managers — doing all the right things and following all the best advice — lead their companies all the way to the top of their markets in that pursuit... only to fall straight off the edge of a cliff after getting there.
Which is exactly what had happened to Apple. A string of professional managers had led the company straight off the edge of that cliff. The fall had almost killed the company. It had 90 days working capital on hand when he took over — in other words, Apple was only three months away from bankruptcy.
When he returned, Jobs completely upended the company. There were thousands of layoffs. Scores of products were killed stone dead. He knew the company had to make money to stay alive, but he transitioned the focus of Apple away from profits. Profit was viewed as necessary, but not sufficient, to justify everything Apple did. That attitude resulted in a company that looks entirely different to almost any other modern Fortune 500 company. One striking example: there's only one person Apple with responsibility for a profit and loss. The CFO. It's almost the opposite of what is taught in business school. An executive who worked at both Apple and Microsoft described the differences this way: "Microsoft tries to find pockets of unrealized revenue and then figures out what to make. Apple is just the opposite: It thinks of great products, then sells them. Prototypes and demos always come before spreadsheets."
Similarly, Apple talks a lot about its great people. But make no mistake — they are there only in service of the mission. A headhunter describes it thus: "It is a happy place in that it has true believers. People join and stay because they believe in the mission of the company." It didn't matter how great you were, if you couldn't deliver to that mission — you were out. Jobs's famous meltdowns upon his return were symptomatic of this. They might have become less frequent in recent years, but if a team couldn't deliver a great product, they got the treatment. The exec in charge of MobileMe was replaced on the spot, in front of his entire team, after a botched launch. A former Apple product manager described Apple's attitude like this: "You have the privilege of working for the company that's making the coolest products in the world. Shut up and do your job, and you might get to stay."
Everything — the business, the people — are subservient to the mission: building great products. And rather than listening to, or asking their customers what they wanted; Apple would solve problems customers didn't know they had with products they didn't even realize they wanted.
By taking this approach, Apple bent all the rules of disruption. To disrupt yourself, for example, Professor Christensen's research would typically prescribe setting up a separate company that eventually goes on to defeat the parent. It's incredibly hard to do this successfully; Dayton Dry Goods pulled it off with Target. IBM managed to do it with the transition from mainframes to PCs, by firewalling the businesses in entirely different geographies. Either way, the number of companies that have successfully managed to do it is a very, very short list. And yet Apple's doing it to itself right now with the utmost of ease. Here's new CEO Tim Cook, on the iPad disrupting the Mac business: "Yes, I think there is some cannibalization... the iPad team works on making their product the best. Same with the Mac team." It's almost unheard of to be able to manage disruption like this.
They can do it because Apple hasn't optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority. When you do this, the fear of cannibalization or disruption of one's self just melts away. In fact, when your mission is based around creating customer value, around creating great products, cannibalization and disruption aren't "bad things" to be avoided. They're things you actually strive for — because they let you improve the outcome for your customer.
When I first learned about the theory of disruption, what amazed me was its predictive power; you could look into the future with impressive clarity. And yet, there was a consistent anomaly. That one dark spot on Professor Christensen's prescience was always his predictions on Apple. I had the opportunity to talk about it with him subsequently, and I remember him telling me: "There's just something different about those guys. They're freaks." Well, he was right. With the release of Jobs's biography, we now know for sure why. Jobs was profoundly influenced by the Innovator's Dilemma — he saw the company he created almost die from it. When he returned to Apple, Jobs was determined to solve it. And he did. That "subtle difference" — of flipping the priorities away from profit and back to great products — took Apple from three months away from bankruptcy, to one of the most valuable and influential companies in the world.
This is my very simple tribute to one of the greatest visionaries of our time, which changed the daily lives of many people and the course of consumer electronics - hopefully a long-lasting change.
We'll miss you, Steve.
This gem comes from hedge fund manager Eric Jackson on Forbes. Good luck figuring out what Balsillie's talking about here:
"Yeah on the iPhone touch, I mean I don’t know, we do a lot of focused groups in what we do, there’s a lot of market research in what we do, we had a lot of market research from our customers in the markets on what the market expects from a solution. However, there has been some debate previous on graffiti and different touch and tactility things and [mechanical] vulnerability costs and battery kind of things and tactility things. I think the best thing will be that for these things to just get in to market and get going, and its just there’s just so many dimensions in our space happen sometimes people over define the category like its all about for so at last its all about the keyboard or its all about some input mechanism or its all about music play or something.
And I think it’s a bit of multi-dimensional, it is a lot of multi-dimensional conversion space that we play in and it tends to be iterative and evolutionary. My experience is one person may be make a baby in nine months, nine people can’t make a baby in one month. But who knows may be some natural constructs can be shifted and we’ll have to revive those views and they can shorten these realities. But I think the best thing, the good thing is this, there is a lot of attention to this space, its growing the space, its validating extensions to the space. On a leadership positions, we see the growth current — and really keep it up and meant some go in the future. And that’s really what I focus on. I am not really want to play a gamesmanship, my input mechanisms funkier than your input mechanism.
We’re really focused on compelling user experience the highly aligned relationships with the carriers and a tremendous amount of channel support and service support and care, and application extension, because our experience is there is a lot of heavy lifting there. And beyond that I can’t say as I really pay that much attention to all these little dynamics because it doesn’t help me, help my customers and help and channels more and so let it be what it will be.
In terms of pricing of (inaudible) Curve sometimes they do special promos for new products, sometime they are slightly lower cost structure for us to make them. A lot of good carriers special programs and positioning, they excited and see an opportunity and sometime cause things for us and you also can see it kind of service plan they bundle to it and that kind of ads they allow to it. So, and different piece of hardware priced differently in different markets for us so, but the 8800 is a little more expensive in the Curve but its delightful to see the carriers pricing the Curve so aggressively because, my experience is when they do this it should actually takes two or three months for the momentum to really sort of kick in the gear.
So if you start doing stuff like that in May, you generally start to really, the channel as we get bigger are kind of slow train are coming but comes sort of midish August, they really start gathering speed and then you can ride that through the back to school and the sort of Christmas kind of phase so, that’s we are pleased to see it and I don’t know if the 8800 that’ll shift that way maybe, maybe not, there’s just so many different programs and so many strategies. Its hard for me to sort of generalize it all."
Check out this video on YouTube:
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Este anúncio foi publicado num conhecido website nacional de procura e oferta de trabalho. Um jovem recém-licenciado na área leu-o e achou que deveria responder à letra. A Revista Visão de 16 de Julho publica um artigo sobre o jovem que deu esta resposta. “A XXXXXXXXXX está a aceitar candidaturas para estágio na área de Design. Requisitos Académicos: Finalista ou recém-licenciada(o) em
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"Desculpem se trago hoje à baila a história da professora agredida pela aluna, numa escola do Porto, um caso de que já toda a gente falou, mas estive longe da civilização por uns dias e, diante de tudo o que agora vi e ouvi (sim, também vi o vídeo), palavra que a única coisa que acho verdadeiramente espantosa é o espanto das pessoas.Só quem não tem entrado numa escola nestes últimos anos, só quem
"Eu axo q os alunos n devem d xumbar qd n vam á escola. Pq o aluno tb tem direitos e se n vai á escola latrá os seus motivos pq isto tb é perciso ver q á razões qd um aluno não vai á escola. primeiros a peçoa n se sente motivada pq axa q a escola e a iducação estam uma beca sobre alurizadas. Valáver, o q é q intereça a um bacano se o quelima de trásosmontes é munto montanhoso? ou se a ecuação é
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