Caveat: This series of thoughts was sparked while preparing for an ideation / innovation session at the Bank but does not disclose any Bank related content or concepts – these are purely academic reflections
Prof Hal Varian’s article in the Jan 09 McKinsey Quarterly on the impact of free and abundant information raises a number of interesting questions on many levels … here are some gut-feel reactions on the impact of such information on organizational decision making …
In my initial lens I dwell on converting the ‘Information Challenge’ that Prof Hal Varian talks about into a ‘Decision Challenge’- i.e. in this era of freely available and accessible free information how do we make right + timely + relevant business decisions … and here is my early stream of consciousness – the pricing challenge (where price = marginal cost and if mc = 0, good bye revenues!) aside, the ‘decision challenge’ in a large complex organization boils down to 2 states of nature / ‘information consequences’ from a leadership perspective …
(1) do something with what you have / know OR
(2) Do nothing with what you have / know.
Prof Hal Varian touches upon ‘ranks having access to information’. I believe this creates a 3rd new state of nature
Read more…
Our team has picked the dynamic industry analysis of the publishing industry as our topic for the Strategy course. Even in the few short weeks since we finalized the topic we have seen Sony abandon its initiative to introduce a standard and join Harper Collins and Adobe et al to define a common platform ‘against’ Amazon’s Kindle, seen Borders send a weird and intriguing survey out that calls out the possibility of an Apple iPad (wishful thinking or seeing ahead?) and more … this is definitely a dynamic industry and makes for one interesting strategy paper!
Recently I authored a paper on leveraging social media within large, complex organizations like the one I work at. It’s been an exciting couple of weeks – pulling together insights and recommendations for the social media leader at the bank. Stay tuned for the source paper I wrote on this topic being published on one oy my two publishing channels soon. IN the meantime, I will leave you with some words to ponder – Browsers, Talkers and Solvers … stay tuned for more coming soon to this space.
I am back to writing articles for Gantthead. Check out the latest piece titled “Stakeholders as Consumers” at: http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/248230.cfm
This paper provides a succinct and actionable model for service providers (written in the context of corporate IT but equally applicable to most ervice domains) to effectively manage their consumers’ expectations.
And while you are there, please do sign up for Gantthead and post your comments on this or any of the 10 or 11 other articles I have written for them over the last few years. Thanks!
PS: gantthead has 400,000+ registered users and ‘is the insight leader for project managers in the areas of business intelligence, application development, CRM, knowledge management, process improvement, project management, project portfolio management, workforce management, web services, and more.” Check them out today …
