marketing

My colleague and friend, Hak, made an observation about types of firms based on whose hand is on the tiller. Sometimes I am reminded of the classic game The Secret of Monkey Island. Stan is a sales guy and it doesn’t much matter what he’s selling. There are basically two types; there are others, but they’re in the noise. They describe themselves when they describe their company philosophy. One type says they are “customer driven....

Is Drupal a Disruptive Technology? What if Harvard College takes on Notre Dame in football. Of course we can beat them; after all, they’re only men. —Professor Harry H. Hansen, Harvard Business School, on understanding the limits of the possible. There is a lot of talk, some would say hype, about Drupal being enterprise-ready. Certainly Drupal is no piker system. From a relatively unknown Content Management System (CMS), Drupal has burst on the scene and now accounts for one-percent of all websites, which to some might seems small until we stop to think how big the web is....

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Customers don’t want a 1/4-inch drill; they want a 1/4-inch hole. So said Ted Levitt and his article, “Marketing Myopia,” stands as a classic. In my own experience at Hewlett-Packard Medical Electronics, our engineers were positively charmed by their inventions, but what the savvier marketing folks understood was that the patient’s vital signs were not the central reason the equipment was purchased - although it was very important - but more to the point, the physicians and staff wanted a trend line....

“You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe. In the next several weeks I will be blogging on my memories of starting out - my first position out of college - and how I chanced to be hired by E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Inc., of Wilmington Delaware. I hope this will be more than a “remember when” story. I hope to make it relevant. Why is this a remarkable story?...