Lead and Gold has started a series of blogs on the oft-misunderstood topic of Competitor Intelligence. Despite being supported by the likes of the legendary Peter Drucker
CI has a worse than mixed record inside of corporations. In 1999 the president of the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals noted that 90% of new corporate CI groups are shutdown or abandoned after three years.
The blog offers great intelligence as to why this might be the case.
Tim Wortsall offers two very short nuggets on his blog this week. Firstly, the idiocy of publishing a Welsh language guide to claiming asylum in the UK. Think about it. Or if your grasp of Geography is about as good a Microsoft's (who admitted this week that their lack of knowledge has lost them millions) read the blog.
And a nice little dig at The Guardian who seem to be muddling up cause and effect.
Well spotted Tim.
Arnold Kling at EconLog has been taking a look at who's best, the US or Europe. Actually, that simplifies his argument rather too much as it's a very thoughtful piece on productivity in the two continents. So what are the differences and how can they be accounted for? And what does Church attendance contribute to the equation?
Innovation is the theme at Drakeview this week - specifically, how you spot tomorrow's genuine winning ideas from the over-hyped or just plain bad ones. The article particularly focuses on disruptive innovations and why they're important.
My own contribution to disruption looks at why VC's often display herd-like behaviour, following the funding of a whole bunch of Java games developers. These are the guys who are writing games for the new generation of mobile phones (or Cellphones, as you call them in the US).
But why is it that otherwise rational VC's display this tendency to play "follow my leader"? It's actually very simple - it's a natural human behaviour which can best be described as "fear of loosing out".
What happens is that one VC decides to take a punt on an investment, for good, logical reasons, or plain stupid ones - it doesn't really matter. And then other VC's hear about it and assume that the original one MUST know what they're doing. So they MUST follow suit or lose out.
Actually, as I go on to explore, they don't have much choice really. Which is great if you currently own a Java games development company or whatever next month's investment focus turns out to be.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
hi Russell, looks like I missed that first post back in March, sorry.
This is a cool feature - money is good. Thanks and a belated welcome!
2 - Robert T DeMarco
This is the first time I read one your posts--excellent.
On the issue of books and their availability. Even when a book sells fast there is no guarantee book stores will reorder or that publishers will publish more copies. It could be as simple as the contract that was signed prior to the book being published or any of a long list of factors. In this case, the book received an inordinate amount of free publicity on the talk shows. It is unlikely that this could have been anticipated. Another factor could be it is seen more or less as a "fad" book. Or, the audience is limited to "mean spirited" right wing fanatics. Who knows?
You might change the word "loose" to "lose" Or Phil Winn might come in here and give you a spelling lesson.
I'll come back in later and delve into this post further when I have more time.
Bob