Growing up in Baltimore, I got in a lot of fights – more than I’d like to admit, but probably fewer than my memory serves. One particular fight, at age twelve, stands out in my memory. In my neighborhood there was a pecking order. And I, a skinny kid with an undersized stature, needed to [...] Read more – ‘Business lessons from a Baltimore childhood’.
Way back in the 20th century, 1994 to be exact, a price war was raging between the Daily News and the New York Post for the price of New York’s Daily Tabloid Newspaper. The lessons of this exercise in game theory provides insight into the ongoing console wars between Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. In addition, [...] Read more – ‘Game Theory: How Sony Gave PS3 Another Year of Profits with a Simple CES Announcement’.
A few weekends ago, I watched the movie version of Freakonomics (available on Netflix instant streaming here). Except for the film’s final section, “Freakonomics: The Movie” covers exactly the same topics as the first book in a more digestible format.The final section covers a test conducted at a Chicago Heights High School, exploring the question: [...] Read more – ‘On Freakonomics Part 1’.
‘We dropped our shorts to make more money. Hope you don’t mind.’ (this excerpt is a bit lengthy but I find the in the trenches Starbucks anecdote interesting, hopefully you find it worth it!) . . . Now, Starbucks was hiring hundreds of specialists from the outside, many from management positions at Burger King, McDonald’s, [...] Read more – ‘The McDonaldization of Starbucks’.
Disclosure prior to joining Qworky I was a Product Planner at Microsoft working within Television, Music and Video one of the groups that gave birth to the Kin. While I did not work directly on the Kin, it’s ‘codename’ was a semi-frequent resident of meetings and product plan discussions. Color me impressed. And it seems [...] Read more – ‘Microsoft Kin- Social Media Case Study’.
I recall . . . As an intern sales representative in the pharmaceutical industry leading up to the 2004 Presidential elections the company I was working for had its sales force in a stupor. Everyone was deathly afraid of Kerry being elected. The consensus was that if John Kerry was elected it would mean death [...] Read more – ‘Recollections on Healthcare’.
Second post in the ‘Is Nook a Kindle Killer?’ series by Mikal Lewis, coauthor of Notsocommoncents & CEO of nascent Technology Startup Qworky. At the conclusion of the last post on Barnes & Noble’s strategy I wrote: What I would do if I was Barnes and Noble: Discover what business you’re in. You’re not in [...] Read more – ‘Why Barnes & Noble Is Not in the Book Selling Business’.
In a word. No. Barnes and Noble execs (hopefully) know it, Amazon knows it. Everyone except for PC magazine knows it. But I don’t blame David Coursey’s cursory commentary, after all someone had to write the obligatory five reasons why… list. Silicon Alley one of my favorite blogs has a good list of reasons explaining [...] Read more – ‘Is Nook a Kindle Killer?’.
When I first heard the news Oracle – Sun merger, I had high hopes that given a quick transition there would be some interesting disruptive effects. This immediately threatens IBM who for years have used less expensive, home-grown hardware to propel sales in higher margin enterprise software. Oracle not only acquires the hardware to implement [...] Read more – ‘Slow M&A process leaves Sun eclipsed’.
Here at notsocommoncents, we love and support collegiate athletics. We also love Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University. I hope you take the time to wear your colors, whatever they may be. Read more – ‘College Colors Day’.
This is the second post of a two part blog series on some exciting news and future blog topics After much delay, I am proud to announce the second piece of news. True to my word, you are going to get some inside access into The Resume Lounge as we start up and get our [...] Read more – ‘A principled approach – Part 2’.
This will be a two part blog series on some exciting news and future blog topics As you can see Mikal and I have been grappling with this notion of aligning our personal and professional goals to fundamentally engage and help people in a transformational way. Every day on the news we hear about the [...] Read more – ‘A principled approach – Part 1’.
Pepsi’s branding vs. Coca-Cola over the years. Read more to see graphic. via Digg What does it mean to be Indelible? Visionary ● Discipline ● Consistent ● Timeless ● Visionary ● Patient ● Relevant ● Is your business strategy indelible? *the graphic is representative not intended to be taken literally- there have been minor changes [...] Read more – ‘Indelible’.
Building on Justin’s post: Who are you working for? “No, that is not your problem,” he says.”Your problem is you don’t know what the goal is. And, by the way, there is only one goal, no matter what the company.” That stumps me for a second. Jonah starts walking toward the gate again. It seems [...] Read more – ‘The Goal – Do you know yours?’.
It’s good to be back!! Yesterday I had a very informative conversation with a client of mine with a deep marketing background. The topic centered around “Web 2.0″ companies and could small to midsized, non “Web 2.0″ companies, borrow some of the same concepts to grow market share and brand awareness, social networking, and focused [...] Read more – ‘Attitude’.
A few weeks ago I came across an article by 24/7 Wall St titled: Why Yahoo! (YHOO) WIll Never Recover. I fell for the hyperbole and read through the article. What I uncovered was more notsocommoncents. The general premise is that since Social Networks are challenging Yahoo in page views, and Microsoft has the money [...] Read more – ‘The Gold Rush Fallacy: Why Yahoo Will Never Recover’.
My execution wedding date is today and as such I will be blogging even less over the next 2-3 weeks. Don’t worry, the shop won’t be closed though… just consider us on a work schedule similar to our friends in Paris…. While I am blogging, I’d like to note that USD -> EUR exchange rate [...] Read more – ‘Getting Married’.
While taking a mental break this morning to read my new favorite blog Coding Horror, I came across Jeff’s post about UNIX turning 40 years old. While I digested his points about the different closed source, open source and mixed source flavors of *NIX, I was pleasantly surprised when a quote from Joel Spolsky in Jeff’s [...] Read more – ‘Who are you working for?’.
There is an inadvertent side-effect to going deep into subject areas that may or may not be current news, you have fewer opportunities to link to friends.* So this is the post where we let all our friends know that yes we do read your blogs. Martin Gillard @ The Digital Corner – a quick [...] Read more – ‘Friends Make the Best Bloggers (and Guest Posts)’.
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by The Brand Mason (Steven Mason), a marketing, communications and naming artisan. Follow on twitter: @thebrandmason Over the past 22 years, Steven has been a marketing executive at—and consultant to—public and private Internet security/networking, enterprise software, B2B platform, e-Business firms, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) firms, as [...] Read more – ‘The Brand Mason’s Peer Review: 7 Common Cents Naming Insights’.
Will.i.am front man for pop sensation Black Eyed Peas is a business genius. Its forgone that he’s a creative genius, having transitioned his group’s brand from a feel good hip hop group to a full blown pop sensation. Along the way he’s developed a production resume that ranges from the Yes We Can Obama campaign [...] Read more – ‘Will.i.am: Business Genius in the Music Industry’.
Seth Godin has a new post up positing that it doesn’t hurt to ask, unless it does. I’ve voiced a bit of my opinions of Seth’s business advice previously, so I was a bit surprised when I found myself in agreement with his post. His post begins: “It doesn’t hurt to ask” Actually, it does [...] Read more – ‘It hurts to ask, or it doesn’t … Wait? Wha?’.
Wolfram Alpha, the computational search engine, had a soft launch on Friday. While some are calling this a Google killer, I personally think the two engines will complement each other and allow for information to be served depending on your needs. Wolfram Alpha provides me with some capabilities that Google did not, i.e. the ability [...] Read more – ‘Test Driving Wolfram Alpha’.
A co-worker sent me a link to BusinessWeek’s special report on Social media. There were two things that really stood out to me: Jakob Nielsen’s critique on Twitter & CEO’s was spot on. The Survival of the Twittest article had an interesting bit on Domino’s Pizza limiting the fall out from its “employees adding, shall [...] Read more – ‘An Executive Guide to Social Media’.
Part 1 in what is likely to be an ongoing series across multiple blogs on naming a company. Naming your company or a project is serious business. If you’re anything like me naming the beast is on the critical path to designing the website or lay out. I’ve gone through this experience recently with Jon [...] Read more – ‘7 Common Cents Insights for Naming Your Product / Company’.
Folks in case you weren’t aware, there is a “War of the Birds” going on between El Pollo Loco, KFC, Chick-fil-A, and <insert your chicken joint here>. El Pollo Loco CEO Steve Carley launched the first salvo at KFC by challenging them to bring their new grilled chicken offering to a taste test in California [...] Read more – ‘KFC prank calls El Pollo Loco… and gets caught’.
As I noted in an earlier post, my posts will be semi-deep dives into under represented analysis or data points in business. As a music aficionado, looking at the media space in my daily role, figuring out what was going on in the music industry seemed like a natural first dive. The good news is there are [...] Read more – ‘Study: To SELL music you need more than Good Music’.
“Life is often compared to a marathon, but I think it is more like being a sprinter; long stretches of hard work punctuated by brief moments in which we are given the opportunity to perform at our best” - Michael Johnson Priority 1 So we’ve done it. We’ve disturbed inertia and finally have notsocommoncents up and [...] Read more – ‘Of Sprints and Marathons’.
Merck continues it’s stellar string of “achievements” by creating a fraudulent peer-review journal to publish data that casts a favorable light on Fosamax and other drugs. I’m not surprised at this course off action from Merck, a company that hasn’t had a blockbuster drug in years. I am more furious at Elsevier, a respected academic journal publisher, that did NOT [...] Read more – ‘Shame on you Merck’.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on Apple’s efforts to assemble the people and intellectual property pieces into a strategy to exploit opportunities for exclusive features and to take back control over its product release cycle. While I can understand and appreciate Apple’s desire to limit 3rd party involvement around new and updated products, what [...] Read more – ‘Apple’s shift into chip design’.
There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of time. But it was a beginning. – Robert Jordan I knew I wanted to bring notsocommoncents back to life when I found myself blogging about the disruptive trends in business and technology on my company’s SharePoint. Somehow, I had finally become comfortable [...] Read more – ‘An Introduction of Sorts’.
So we’re in the first week of relaunching the blog. Complete with not yet altogether template – and devoid of course of content. Justin and I made the conscious decision to just get it up and running and observe how the blog evolves from there. I don’t want writers block to settle in, so I’ll [...] Read more – ‘What can business learn from Academia?’.
