Articles Tagged Technology

I don’t get it. I just don’t. It should be blindingly obvious to every owner of every business that it runs primarily on just one thing: the goodwill of its customers. If customers obtain value from you, they keep buying. If they keep buying, you keep making a profit. If you keep making a profit, […]

Looking at my mobile phone bill the other day, I noticed that the part of the bill generated by making calls has been falling steadily, while the data component has been rising. That reminded me: just over two years ago, I wrote on this page that the future of your business lay in the palm […]

The Encyclopedia Britannica has ended print publication after 244 years. I must admit I fell silent after hearing this piece of news earlier in the week. Anyone who admires books and has encountered the venerable encyclopedia in a home or library cannot fail to feel some sadness. The weathered leather covers, the musty pages, the […]

The 2 hashtags, #TwitterBigStick and #TwitterThumbsUp were never intended to be finished products in any sense. As I have said from the outset, they were simply a demo of what focused tweeting can do. They play on very human needs: to express frustration when good service or value for money is not provided; and to […]

“One of the odd questions I keep being asked about the iPad is “Where do you plug in USB stuff?” It’s a sister phrase to the weird criticism oft thrust at Apple’s device, “Ah, it’s too limiting for me: I can’t plug in USB sticks.” This is weird because other makers, notably Apple’s biggest competitor, […]

“As I jogged down Wall Street in New York in October through the barricades, police horses, and thousands of activists, something became clear. The masses had self-organized and social media had added yet another social movement to its résumé. At the same time, something else became clear to me. Much higher than street level, in […]

#TwitterBigStick is a hashtag that escalates bad service and bad behaviour by organizations. Thousands have used it to give instant feedback on poor experiences and neglect. It give ordinary people a voice and an instantaneous way of channelling feedback constructively. Ignoring #TwitterBigStick can lead to a severe reputation battering, often in a few hours of […]

A few weeks ago I predicted that 2012 would be the year of the “Twitter Big Stick” in Kenya: a time when both politicians and large organizations feel the force of feedback from social media. I pointed out that the reason for this is that the little people – customers, users, voters – now have […]

“The rise of tablets and smartphones also reflects a big shift in the world of technology itself. For years many of the most exciting advances in personal computing have come from the armed forces, large research centres or big businesses that focused mainly on corporate customers. Sometimes these breakthroughs found their way to consumers after […]

“In the mid-1990s I paid several visits to Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, and the cultural mindset was – with hindsight – on full display. Various executives told me how wonderful silver halide was. Professional photographers could not do without it, nor could Hollywood. Digital was for amateurs. And even they would always want […]

“Things move quickly in technology, which is why technology companies are fascinating to strategists the way fruit flies are for biologists — you can see an entire life cycle in a very short span of time.” RITA McGRATH, blogs.hbr.org (5 June 2011) Columbia professor Rita McGrath points out that technology companies are these days proving […]

“Even after a month of demonstrations in Tunisia had brought about the downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, on January 14th, some White House officials, along with American and Israeli intelligence experts, put the likelihood of a copycat revolution in Egypt at no more than twenty per cent. The hundred and twenty-five million […]

“What’s the best way to make the competition irrelevant? It’s a question that has obsessed generation after generation of strategists, pundits, and gurus. Is it new business models, new market space, harder hardball, or better knowledge? The answer is: none of the above. It’s Brian Fitzpatrick’s concise summary of Google’s great insight: “Disrupt yourself before […]

Consider this product. The life of the product begins when mammoth trees are grown on a huge scale, then pulled down and turned into pulp with massive machinery. The pulp is taken to giant mills and turned into huge rolls of paper. Those rolls are trucked and shipped around the world. The rolls are then […]

“Who sells the largest number of cameras in India? Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. The answer is: None of the above. The winner is Nokia, whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cellphones. Try this. Who runs the biggest music business in India? The answer is […]

1. No more 9 to 5 2. Productivity will be closely measured 3. Cogs will become redundant 4. The winners will be the linchpins 5. Work will become art SETH GODIN, Regus Business Sense (April 2010) Business guru and author Seth Godin spelled out some of the ideas in his new book, Linchpin, in Regus […]

One of the key practices of successful businesses is the ability to follow trends and anticipate market movements. This is extremely difficult: if any of us really knew what next year’s markets would look like, we would be billionaires. Some trends, however, are so predictable that the foolishness lies in ignoring them. And that is […]

“This Wednesday, Steven P. Jobs will step to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and unveil a shiny new machine that may or may not change the world. In the magician’s world, that’s called “the reveal.” And the most magical part? Even as the media and technology worlds […]

We are now getting very excited about the arrival of the various undersea fibre-optic communications cables in Kenya, are we not? I certainly am, probably more than most. The internet is a great tool for me: it is the medium through which I communicate most often; where I conduct most of the research I need […]

“…research shows that in America (knowledge workers) spend less than a third of their working time in traditional corporate offices, about a third in their home offices and the remaining third working from “third places” such as cafes, public libraries or parks. And it is not just the young and digitally savvy.” The Economist (April […]

“Every year, companies spend more than $2 trillion on computer and communications equipment and services. Underlying these enormous expenditures is one of modern business’s most deeply held assumptions: that information is increasingly critical to competitive advantage and strategic success. …I will argue that IT’s strategic importance is not growing, as many have claimed or assumed, […]

Peter Drucker, widely acknowledged as the greatest management thinker of the past century, died 3 months ago. His death went largely unremarked here in Kenya; not surprisingly, as we tend to pay little attention to management – either as a concept, or as a way of doing things. Drucker was just a few days short […]