Sam Thornton

The important thing to remember five years from now and beyond is to allow yourself to be dynamic. With things changing and developing as rapidly as they have in the last few years, you need to be able to adapt or you will get left in the dust. Even better than adapting is being out in front of sweeping changes.

An interesting example to consider is the whiskey space in liquor. Recently a lot of different varieties have sprung up, particularly from small and craft distilleries, and all kinds of varieties as well. Clearly, all of these options take money away from the major producers. Heck, good ol’ Jack and Jim started producing all kinds of new…[Read more]

Nice tip about the dollar bills, Mike! I’ve actually thought about first mandating chores to teach responsibility, and then offering paid ones so that he learns the value of working for what he wants. I plan to be an old school kind of dad, but as always, we’ll see how that goes…

Thanks, Elaine. That’s actually in line with the best piece of advice I got which was actually, “Don’t take anyone’s advice.”
And don’t worry, I’m of the frame of mind that those sighs over the dishes were part of the perks of being a parent. When I was a kid, our dishwasher was broken for something like ten years, and whenever my brother and I…[Read more]

I don’t belong to any professional communities of practice, but reading through the material I couldn’t help but think of becoming a new parent (as I did last month). Since the birth of our son, my wife and I have been going through the ringer of rearing a newborn. We’re constantly trying things to keep him quiet and happy, or to keep him from…[Read more]

The idea of self-publishing is something that seems like it should have been easy to see coming by traditional publishers. As Christensen, suggests, some companies do see these types of innovations coming but simply don’t have the ability to re-position their capabilities to get out in front of the disruptive innovation. I feel like publishers…[Read more]

I was thinking the same thing, Alex. The number one measure of success would be implemented projects resulting from the Open Innovation initiatives. How many things can they get out of the program and put to use within the company? That could be anything from processes, to technologies, to marketable products. After that, Kevin has some good…[Read more]

It seems that the main thing a company considering Open Innovation should consider is whether or not it is a diversion from their core functions. The danger is that if it is seen as such, employees will have little motivation to participate. Maybe even worse, it becomes a hole for costs to be thrown down if the program takes away from their main…[Read more]

Overall, the production and distribution of digital music is much less expensive than physical media. Record companies save on the physical production, shipping, and so forth. Then, while actually decreasing the cost of the album, the can actually make more based on the lower overhead costs. I think the resistance lied in two areas. One is…[Read more]

In a way, this type of release can be viewed as part of the “aura” of Radiohead. They’re unconventional and cutting edge. The release in itself is actually a pretty smart way to market the album without the use of a publisher or advertising beyond their own website. All the buzz about the release spreads like wildfire and everybody talks about.…[Read more]

The one thing that I think will always keep cloud computing from taking over completely is the lack of security of always having access to a physical copy of your data. I don’t think anything can really beat that. The article mentions outages knocking out Netflix, Pintrest, and the like. Imagine if you really wanted to watch a movie or a show…[Read more]

My wife is a sixth grade writing teacher and just this year her team really started utilizing Google Docs for their students. It allows them to track progress, comment on drafts, and so forth. I know they’re really enjoying the ease of use that it provides, especially in terms of grading. My wife actually ends up using a lot of cloud access for…[Read more]

My law firm semi-, or at least unofficially embraces BYOD. The partners all have iPhones and iPads bought for them from the company coughers, and then certain employees who need devices are given them from the same funds. I don’t know how much of this has to do with security, or the lawyers just wanting to have the latest gadget and not directly…[Read more]

Interesting point about the future of globalization. As more and more companies become global, surely the barriers to entry for newer companies will become more difficult to overcome. I wonder if perhaps that might lead toward a swing back to more multinational corporations as described in this article that focus more specifically on their own…[Read more]

IT has absolutely enabled the emergence of global brands. While maybe not an absolute necessity, it sure makes things a lot easier. As we saw in the Wyeth case, IT can be the unifying device that knits together multiple business units spread across the world into one global brand. The ease of information transfer and sharing, the…[Read more]

Sorry, Duke – for some reason there’s no Reply button for your comment below, so I’ll just do it here.

I certainly won’t argue with the way things were before the globalization effort. Where I do disagree with you, however, is that I believe the IT projects are indeed the mechanism to spur the culture and mentality change you and I agree is…[Read more]

S3 is the basic framework for storing and retrieving data from anywhere on the internet. There is a small charge per gigabyte per month for companies using this service. This is much cheaper than the the cost to maintain your own servers and security software/protocol, and convenient due to the internet access points.

EC2 is a service that…[Read more]

I saw this a bit differently than you, Duke. If the IT globalization was the enabler of the overall globalization effort, I don’t think it needed to be secondary, but rather directly tied to the culture change. It provided the venue for the messaging regarding the new global view and the resulting process changes. They were initiating these…[Read more]

I liked the way the case put it, that IT was an enabler for Wyeth’s globalization efforts. Facilitator might be an even better word. The process of instituting the global IT plan really helped to reshape the various autonomous units into a business organized around central processes and operations. Because so many of the business units had been…[Read more]

This is a bit of a tough one for me to answer. It’s hard for me to say my law firm has under-invested in information technology because we do have a lot of programs to improve our daily operations. We have accounting and billing software, research databases, our website, e-newsletters, electronic records management, and so on. At the same time,…[Read more]