Why The Dumbest Idea In The World is Maximizing Shareholder Value - Forbes - Stephen Denning

“Imagine an NFL coach,” writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his important new book, Fixing the Game, “holding a press conference on Wednesday to announce that he predicts a win by 9 points on Sunday, and that bettors should recognize that the current spread of 6 points is too low. Or picture the team’s quarterback standing up in the postgame press conference and apologizing for having only won by 3 points when the final betting spread was 9 points in his team’s favor. While it’s laughable to imagine coaches or quarterbacks doing so, CEOs are expected to do both of these things.”

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Analytics - The New Path to Value - Keep Existing Capabilities While Adding New Ones - MIT Sloan Management Review

Analytics: The New Path to Value: How the Smartest Organizations Are Embedding Analytics to Transform Insights Into Action is an excellent research report from the 2010 New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive Study and Research Project conducted by MIT in association with the IBM Institute for Business Value. Here is part 6 of the Report chosen because it deals with insights, modelling and visualisations - the basis of the Creative Leadership Forum's Management Innovation Index

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The Virtues of Being Unsettled

Phred Dvorak's "Theory & Practice" column in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) talks about the dangers of experience: "The more experience we have, the more overconfident we get," [says Kishore Sengupta, an associate professor at INSEAD who designs simulations that test for effectiveness in areas such as project management.] Alan Over, a managing consultant at U.K.-based PA Consulting Group who participated in Mr. Sengupta's simulation, says he now questions his assumptions more... "I try to force myself to be nervous," [Over] says. "Whenever I find myself falling back on what I did last time, or think I'm doing well, I try to unsettle myself." [My emphasis] I suspect Over's strategy of "forcing myself to be nervous" is an over-correction, but he's touching on an important dynamic. I've found that I'm more likely to make mistakes when I'm too comfortable, when I assume that I understand a situation because it feels familiar--in a word, when I'm settled.

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Do you Market like Led Zeppelin or The Grateful Dead?

David Meerman Scott "...Measuring success by focusing only on the number of times the mainstream media write or broadcast about you misses the point. If a blogger is spreading your ideas, that's great. If ten people email a link to your information to their networks or post about you on their Facebook page, that's amazing. You're reaching people, which was the point of seeking media attention in the first place. But most PR people only measure traditional media like magazines, newspapers, radio, and TV, and this practice doesn’t capture the value of sharing.

To create a World Wide Rave, forget about sales leads and ignore mainstream media. Instead, focus on spreading your ideas. Make your information totally free, with no registration required."

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Source: Change This