Management and Strategy

Following are couple of videos by C.K. Prahalad on New age of Innovation. Read good stuff.

The new landscape of business Management expert C. K. Prahalad discusses the new landscape of innovation, in which companies must learn to co-create with their consumers, making use of a global ecosystem of resources.

Part 1:

Part 2: 

Great article to read around Cloud computing. I believe Cloud computing will be huge for next few years. Every application will start moving towards cloud. It has already taken of with offering from Google and Amazon. It just makes sense to let big companies take care of all the infrastructure.

But there are challenges too and the article by Stacey Higginbotham just highlights these challenges. The 10 reason provided in article that will hold cloud computing back for enterprise customers are.

1. It’s not secure.
2. It can’t be logged
3. It’s not platform agnostic
4. Reliability is still an issue.
5. Portability isn’t seamless
6. It’s not environmentally sustainable.
7. Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers.
8. The need for speed still reigns at some firms.
9. Large companies already have an internal cloud
10. Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans.

I may not agree with all of the above but there is merit to challenging the cloud.

Read More at: 10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud - GigaOM

Today while flying back from Dallas I picked up this book. I wanted to read something that I could finish in couple of hours and was valuable in business terms. This book turned out to be a real good one. There is some fluff in it but some content is real great. George has really done a great job of keeping it in around 100 pages and highlighting the key future strategies.

According to George the 5 key strategies to look forward to are

1. Supply Chain Gymnastics : Our infrastructure on west coast is crumbling and in future importing things from overseas through sea route may not be feasible. How can you react as business to this?
2. Sidestepping Economies of Scale: Bigger may not be always better. George talks about disposable factories. It is not a new concept, it is very common concept in project oriented industries where you setup small manufacturing operation on project site. 
3. Dynamic pricing: Ability to provide unique price to individual buyer. I have heard about this in past but George brought it home with a great example. Example he gave was of toll charges which change based on traffic patterns using RFID. It is being tested in Washington state.
4. Embracing complexity: Other way of putting this is increasing and accepting configurability of products. Every individual should be able to uniquely design the product he desires. Great example of this is MINI.
5. Infinite Bandwidth: Leveraging high speed Internet bandwidth to change business processes or even define new business models.

It is a good book and will highly recommend it to everyone. Enjoy

Great article on Innovation at Tata Motors. Nano is the cheapest car available at roughly 2500$. I think it is engineering miracle. I think it is a must read article… 

Too often, when they think of innovation, they focus on product innovation using breakthrough technologies; often, specifically, on patents. Tata Motors has filed for 34 patents associated with the design of the Nano, which contrasts with the roughly 280 patents awarded to General Motors (GM) every year. Admittedly that figure tallies all of GM’s research efforts, but if innovation is measured only in terms of patents, no wonder the Nano is not of much interest to Western executives. Measuring progress solely by patent creation misses a key dimension of innovation: Some of the most valuable innovations take existing, patented components and remix them in ways that more effectively serve the needs of large numbers of customers.

Learning from Tata’s Nano

Great stuff… So you ready to write some new Apps for iPhone??? 

iFund™

KPCB’s iFund™ is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund™ is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment.

KPCB - iFund™ Initiative

Another amazing slide show from Business week. This time is is about Cities at center of design. Enjoy..,.

Cities at the Center of Design

Business Innovation & Design - BusinessWeek

Read a very good article around importance of adopting open innovation in current economy… You should read it… Enjoy

A Ripe Time for Open Innovation

Recessions present a good opportunity to collaborate with others on finding, developing, and marketing new ideas

by Jeneanne Rae

A Ripe Time for Open Innovation

One of my close friends recently decided to leave Microsoft and start his own company. He has been with Microsoft for a long time and the change from MS to a starting a new organization will be a big one. When I started thinking about this change I started thinking about my own journey through various organizations. Every organization has an character, a heart and a soul. What do I mean? Let me take you through my journey through these organizations and explain…

Baan(1997-2000): A Successful ERP company trying to accept globalization and experimenting with distributed development across NL, US and India. In 1997 that was tough thing to do with infrastructure limitations and also cultural limitations. There was still frictions between different teams on ownership of work. This instability was not just in development but also in management originally the company was run from NL then it was taken over by management in US. Management styles are very different between NL and US. It was a great learning experience to see how a successful company was struggling to cope up with time.

Nortel(2001): Again a successful company trying to survive in economic downturn. There was chaos everywhere. The goal seemed to be survival to fight another day. It was tough with major layoffs going on in every division. Moral was low and people spend more time in worrying rather than working.

e-Emphasys(2001-2005): An entrepreneurial venture trying to define itself. Are we Consulting company or a Product company? Should we focus on long term strategy or short term gains? How do we refuse lucrative consulting projects today and just focus on product development for long term benefit? It is amazing how this conflict impacted every decision we made. Basically we just could not decide what we were. Some employees loved consulting and working closely with customers other did not like traveling as consultants and were happy doing product development but for a startup you do not have choice you make your call based on daily needs. The key learning was define your strategy and follow it. You cannot do everything successfully and grow.

SAMSys/Sirit(2005-2006): Another small entrepreneurial venture in RFID space struggling to raise capital and survive to see brighter days. We all could see the hockey stick but the rapid growth in industry was just not happening. Finally we just ran out of money and Sirit took us over. The key lesson was raise capital when you can and not when you need it most.

Microsoft(2006-2008): Amazingly successful company trying to maintain alignment across all its products. Think about it when a new release of Visual studio is planned you have to make sure it is compatible with the latest under development release of SQL, Share Point and Office. When new version of BizTalk is built it is also dependent on SQL, Share Point and Office and Visual studio designer. Did I miss the Windows releases. How do you keep all this in sync. It is a complex problem to solve and I think the company does pretty well to maintain this alignment.

Alignment is really crucial for overall success but I personally think it takes too much time and effort and affects time that can be spent on innovation. I am sure someone higher up in the organization thinks about it.

So this brief info about companies I have worked for. What about your companies? What was/is your company like? What does its character look like? Do share with me… Until then enjoy…

Bruce Nussbaum has recommendation for 10 books on innovation. I think it is a great list.

Here goes for the 10 top books on innovation for 08:

1- The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin.

2- Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas K. McCraw.

3- Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync? Seth Godin.

4- The Design of Future Things by Don Norman.

5-Innovation Nation by John Kao.

6- Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

7-The Future of Management by Gary Hammel.

8- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

9- The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.

10- Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See, by Andrew Burroughs.

NussbaumOnDesign 10 Best Books On Innovation To Get You Through The Recession. - BusinessWeek

Businessweek also has another article predicting 10 things that may happen in 2008. Another good read and interesting stuff. Following is the list. Please read the detailed article by following the link below.

1. Green Crisis
2. Airline Consolidation Begins
3. Bloomberg’s Historic Run
4. Bye-bye, CDs
5. Facebook Fatigue
6. Finally, Internet TV
7. The Biggest Bribe Penalty Ever
8. Web Crash 2.0
9. Crude Oil Will Top $100
10. Big Brother Fears Return

Ten Likely Events in 2008