Latest business reading
What am I reading these days (when I have ten free seconds)?
McKinsey Quarterly: Software as a Service (free reg required): ASP’s were, like many Internet phenomena of the late ’90s, ahead of their time. Can we all agree that “software,” as code installed on a PC, is going the way of the floppy drive?
McKinsey Quarterly: How Businesses are Using Web 2.0 (free reg required): Well, really how businesses are using online collaborative tools to manage knowledge and decision-making capabilities. Guess what? They generally find the services relevant and valuable.
Knowledge@Wharton: Are Your Customers Dissatisfied? Try Checking Out Your Salespeople (free reg required): No duh. Four years ago, Circuit City had the good idea to ditch their old commission-comp system for an hourly wage force. But now it thinks it’s going to grow more profitable by firing all its experienced salespeople for cheaper novices? This is like Amazon degrading its site performance and disabling its recommendation engines to reduce costs.
Andrew Deitz’s Executive Green: a blog about executive management in the emerging CleanTech universe. Giddyap.
Foreign Policy: Why the World Isn’t Flat: I’ve always suspected that while globalization is obviously on the march, many of its perceived impacts are overblown. Pankaj Ghernawat, global strategy professor at HBS and IESE, contends that the predominant share of business and informational transactions are still local or at least domestic (90% is a good presumption for a given activity), and that the forces against “flatness” are perhaps stronger than those supposedly guaranteeing its inevitability. Food for thought. Mmm.