Perhaps it is professional burnout, but lately I’ve been getting extremely tired of all the stupid things people say about innovation. Especially stupid positive things. A great deal of the stupidity in the conversation about innovation is driven by the desperate urge to be original for the sake of being original. There is a pervasive, unexamined assumption that originality is always a good thing. Copycats, by Oded Shenkar is a delightful little book that takes on a project that I strongly ...| ribbonfarm
I have lost track of the number of times I’ve had conversations about product-driven versus customer-driven businesses in recent years. It’s a distinction that just keeps cropping up, and has featured in every consulting gig I’ve had in the last three years, but surprisingly I haven’t found any treatment of it that satisfies me. So this post is partly an attempt to save myself from future repetition.| ribbonfarm
On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan. Two weeks later, they wa...| ribbonfarm