Is this yet another sign of how America has lost its way? Once a land of honor and integrity, there is much truth to the cynics who declare that America’s “me first” culture is the root of our many societal woes and diminished competitiveness on the world stage.
Now contrast this with what happens here domestically. In the US, when a CEO bungles the strategy and greatly harms shareholder value, they don’t stick around to fix their errors like Iwata and forego compensation, instead they resign and take multi-million dollar contract buyouts and easily find another company to destroy.
Today the world’s most successful video game company took some rare, drastic steps to jumpstart sales of their newest product with a giant price cut. Nintendo has long been considered similar to Apple, due to its ability to offer innovative gaming consoles (not to mention the white plastic industrial design) that are rarely discounted and can maintain premium pricing even during recessions, while competitors must slash continuously to maintain sales. Hopefully this is not the latest sign of the lingering nature of global economic malaise.
Some of the lessons from the struggles of the 3DS:
To quote MIT’s Charlie Fine, “All advantage is temporary,” and recent results are not an indicator for future success. While the two predecessors of the 3DS (the DS and the Gameboy Advance) were supremely profitable market leaders, the newest innovation is not maintaining that legacy. You are truly only as good as your last product. Nintendo has another major new console launch (the WiiU, successor to the mega successful Wii) coming up in the next year, and this recent development will surely affect their entire business model for that product. Could this ever happen to Apple? Read more…
For the past day or so, I have been sitting in on Management Roundtable’s workshop on Program Management, and I think it is safe to say that the complexity of most modern organizations is mind boggling.
A big part of discussion on the first morning was working through the distinction of the roles of project management, portfolio management, product management and program management. From a theoretical perspective the distinctions can be pretty clear, but in practice the overlaps and interdependencies between these specialties can be pretty fuzzy. Perhaps, if you were only dealing with these four forms of “p”-word management (feel free to add other forms (via the comment feature) of other types of management that begin with the letter p) that could be manageable, but the reality is that you have to deal with multiple job functions within your organization as well as resources that are outside your organization. Read more…
Is the current state of patent litigation threatening to kill US innovation? NPR’s This American Life dives into the seedy world of patent trolling, and how the legal side of technology licensing is threatening the source of new ideas for every industry.
Critics of open innovation often like to say that the only ones making money from it are the lawyers.
Companies actively engaged in open innovation and technology scouting can be highly vulnerable to companies who were formed not for providing any goods or services but entirely for the purpose of filing IP litigation. These groups have major funding sources behind them and use business obfuscation techniques like employee-less shell companies and NPEs (non-practicing entities) in very “grifter-like” ways.
Some have even likened these organizations to a type of “Patent Mafia,” who employ “protection” schemes to profit either through lawsuits, settlements or strong-armed licensing agreements.
By now you are definitely not one of the cool kids if you haven’t heard of “planking.” But planking is so yesterday, which on the Internet clock means so old it probably has an AOL domain for email.
That’s right, all the really hip people are now “PowerPointing.”
Lean and I go way back and I consider us more like friends than acquaintances. How well do we know each other? In the early 1990s, Management Roundtable conducted a series of events called the “Manufacturing Leadership Summit.” We would gather top executives from numerous industries, mostly automotive and aerospace, who would come together as delegates in a congress of sorts to network and learn about how to make more money “making stuff” with tools such as target costing, MRPII, and yes, the Toyota Production System. The summits were limited to about 150 executives and were held in the amphitheater lecture hall at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Read more…
My godson wants to be a hardware engineer, loves Dr. Who and is a major force at his high school’s stage crew. For several birthdays now, I have given him a gift certificate to ThinkGeek, the absolute best online store for geek-oriented novelty items.
If you need a gift for an engineer, a sci-fi or fantasy fan, video game addict, or cube dweller, this place demands a visit. Read more…
Before about 6 years ago, I used to like to tell people that I “was the only Asian person on the planet without a cell phone.” It was good for a few chuckles every once in a while. I’m not really a phone person, I don’t like talking on them for very long, and my rational was that I’m almost always with someone whose phone I could borrow if necessary.
Eventually, my friends broke me down and I got a basic flip model cell phone, which led to a blackberry, and today I have a Motorola Droid X running Android. I’m still not a phone person, but today phone calling is only a small percentage of their use, and I love the power of pocket computing that we enjoy now and the non-verbal communication efficiency (text and email).
People like to debate whether or not smart phones increase or decrease productivity. While having email and access to data that was previously desk-bound is great, the phone can also distract you at any time and break the flow of what you are doing at that moment.
Does your company have a formal technology strategy or are you just winging it? Deciding what to develop, what to outsource, where to pioneer and where to follow can be critical to the fate of your products and have direct impact on lifecycle and profitability. Below you’ll find a link to a paper, “Elements of Technology Strategy: Identification of Key Technologies and Developing Sourcing, Innovation and Balancing Strategies,” that outlines the basic approach you should consider when reviewing your technology portfolio.
This paper was written by consultant Jay Paap, who is the instructor for Management Roundtable’s workshops on Technology Scouting and Roadmapping. Here’s an abstract of the paper with links below to the full text .pdf. Read more…
Years ago I wrote MRT’s monthly email newsletter dubbed “The Critical Path,” which after a gap of about 5 years is now replaced by this blog, which seems to have filled the niche left behind by newsletters now that paper printing is getting closer to the fate of the dodo thanks in part to Rupert Murdoch’s underling transgressions.
In this installment I’m posting the main article that was published on February 15, 1999, it even has references to the iMac and Firewire, so you know it’s old. Since this was published, I’ve seen several others produce similar models of innovation, so I’m sure at the time, mine probably wasn’t that unique either. Read more…
Is this yet another sign of how America has lost its way? Once a land of honor and integrity, there is much truth to the cynics who declare that America’s “me first” culture is the root of our many societal woes and diminished competitiveness on the world stage.
For the past day or so, I have been sitting in on Management Roundtable’s workshop on Program Management, and I think it is safe to say that the complexity of most modern organizations is mind boggling.
