Total Recall - Closer than you think!
As many of you will know, at the World Economic Forum annual conference in Davos this year, I presented on the concept of Total Recall Systems in which everything you do and say is captured to be replayed. Well, lo and behold if it isn’t becoming a reality much faster than many of us thought. My parents sent me this clip from the BBC which reports how a Google product that captures images of people on the street helped police catch a couple of muggers, because the cameras had snapped their images (and that of their victim) just a moment before the crime took place.
George Orwell is alive and well and living in Holland, apparently.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 22, 2009
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Discovery Driven Growth is Now Available in a Kindle Edition!
That should be good news for those of you who like your reading in digital form.
The book will soon also be available in a chapterized version from Harvard Business Publishing.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 05, 2009
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Heard on the Street - Discovery Driven Planning Changes Leadership Decisions - at Harvard, no less!
One of our dear colleagues at Wharton happened to be teaching at a conference up at Harvard Business School. He was kind enough to report the following exchange to us:
Dear Mac -
I just came back from a long conference at HBS that included a lot of business people and HBS alumni. The discussion came up about best advice for pushing their leadership team, and one of the business people said, “Well, this discovery-driven planning program that I participated in taught me that I needed a new CFO because the one I had wasn’t flexible enough. So I’d recommend that.”
Our friend continues: “As you might imagine, the HBS moderator didn’t follow up that line of discussion.”
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 04, 2009
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Consumer Leverage Ratio - A tool to measure the ticking credit time bomb lurking for your customers
My co-author, Ian MacMillan and one of his colleagues, William Jarvis have just weighed in on a topic near and dear to my heart—the deadly situations companies create when they lend more and more to over-extended consumers (see post on why the smartest behavioral economists in the world work for credit card companies). In an article forthcoming in the Harvard Business Review, they show how devastating accumulations of such debt can be, and offer a simple tool to help companies figure out when it could come to harm them. Check it out - very interesting stuff.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 04, 2009
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Unsubscribe me, Please!
I’m not sure when it happened. Maybe it was the fact that since attending the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, I’ve been on the road about half the time. Maybe it was that with the economic crisis and concomitant uncertainty, more bits of potentially meaningful information are floating around. Maybe it’s that as more people and organizations go digital, there is just more digital communication going around. Or maybe it’s that with the addition of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other new sources of digital information, the potential places that messages could appear from have multiplied. Whatever the cause, and whenever it happened, I seem to have crossed some critical threshold of email overwhelm.
As a first step toward regaining some control, I’ve decided to go on a ruthless ‘unsubscribe’ campaign. What has astonished me is how much unsubscribing there is to be done. Deals from that monthly-club-purveyor? Toast. Newsletter from that consulting firm I once partnered with? Gone. Updates from my travel luggage provider? ‘bye. Updates from an executive search form? No more. Zen-sounding come-ons for mind-body-balance retreats? no more. Even updates from various professional organizations? You know, I can live without those.... and the list goes on. I just can’t believe how much routine receiving and deleting I’ve been doing. And to be clear, this is not spam. This is all stuff that I once upon a time must have expressed some interest in.
Yes, email is cost-effective and can be a great way to connect to interested users. But at some point, it just gets to be all too much…
Comments on coping strategies most welcome!
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 03, 2009
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recent entries
- Total Recall - Closer than you think!
- Discovery Driven Growth is Now Available in a Kindle Edition!
- Heard on the Street - Discovery Driven Planning Changes Leadership Decisions - at Harvard, no less!
- Consumer Leverage Ratio - A tool to measure the ticking credit time bomb lurking for your customers
- Unsubscribe me, Please!
