When I was a kid, I played with mercury I harvested from thermometers. (I also made lead weight belts from scraps of lead I retrieved from gutter repairs we performed on my grandmother’s three-decker flats in the factory town of Brockton, MA where I...
If something is digitizable, and can be well described and monitored, it will be traded. Services are more and more tradable every day. The best way to extract value from the global trade in services is to start with a short, but difficult question:...
Despite much talk about new organization forms, and networks, most profit making organizations have more in common with the Roman Army than any new form of self organized, self directed network of value. Many organizations I visit have traditional bureaucratic mechanisms for command and...
When it comes to content, the internet collapses time. “Now”, “then”, and in some cases even the “future”, is a click away. This means that every piece of accessible content is potentially relevant and old content comes alive again — with the right merchandizing....
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a story about how Boeing purchased Aviall, one of the largest parts distributors and a host of an electronic marketplace for independent parts distribution and used parts, as well as related services. As I mentioned in an early blog,...
A few days ago (April 26) Gary Hamel wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal explaining what Google needs to do to keep growing. He said that they, like other great firms such as Dell and Microsoft in the past, need to make...