As science begins its march into every discipline I see companies falling into the trap of driving their business from research (customer insight) while still lacking any sense of purpose.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve come to the conclusion that meetings are good.   And we need more of them – not less.
Most executives have …

Just because “the audience now has a voice” doesn’t mean it should be exercised without interruption.

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. That appeared on Radar. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming …

I just appeared on an NBC affiliate in San Jose along with Guy Kawasaki and Dave McClure.   The Green Room and studio experience with those two was worth the price of admission.   The cameras …

The last time I saw Charlene Li was in the speaker’s lounge of the Web 2.0 conference. It was March 2008 and her defining book on social technologies, Groundswell, (co-authored with Josh Bernoff) was just being released. There have been tectonic shifts in our economy (and Charlene has moved from Forrester to found the Altimeter group) since then so I wanted to get her sense of the state of social media today.

Roughly one year ago I was in conversation with the CEO of one of the largest online portals for Human Resources.  My pitch:  Human Resources should be leading the charge in helping businesses understand the …

As a rule the traditional organization has very few people dedicated to listening (Customer research) and a whole lot of people dedicated to talking (Marketing, Advertisting, PR, the communications dept., Events etc.).  What’s worse, the …

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our TV president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.
Quietly at noon yesterday, as the world was fixated on the televised inauguration of Barack Obama, some obscure …

Last week I took a walk with Tim O’Reilly (my boss) and cameraman Kirk Walter (who has perfected the art of walking backwards with a 15 pound camera on his shoulder!). We spoke about a wide range of topics that will be released over the coming weeks. This is the first in that series, “Work on Stuff that Matters,” a subject that Tim spoke about throughout 2008. It seems even more relevant in 2009.