'It may upset people to hear that competition may not be unqualifiedly good. We should be clear what we mean here. Some sense of competition seems appropriate. Competition can make for better learning and education. Sometimes credentials do reflect significant degrees of accomplishment. But the worry is that people make a habit of chasing them. Too often, we seem to forget that it’s genuine accomplishment we’re after, and we just train people to compete forever. But that does everyone a great disservice if what’s theoretically optimal is to manage to stop competing, i.e. to become a monopoly and enjoy success. -- One problem with fierce competition is that it’s demoralizing. The perfect illustration of competition writ large is war. Everyone just kills everyone. There are always rationalizations for war. Often it’s been romanticized, though perhaps not so much anymore. But it makes sense: if life really is war, you should spend all your time either getting ready for it or doing it. But what if life isn’t just war? Perhaps there’s more to it than that. Maybe you should sometimes run away. Maybe you should sheath the sword and figure out something else to do. Maybe “life is war” is just a strange lie we’re told, and competition isn’t actually as good as we assume it is. -- One truth about that world is that, as always, companies want investors. But another truth about the world of perfect competition is that investors should not invest in any companies, because no company can or will make a profit. When two truths so clash, the incentive is to distort one of them. ...monopolies pretend they’re not monopolies while non-monopolies pretend they are. Non-monopolies always narrow their market. Monopolies insist they’re in a huge market. One important data point is how much cash a company has on its balance sheets. Apple has about $98b (and is growing by about $30b each year). Microsoft has $52b. Google has $45b. Amazon has $10b. In a perfectly competitive world, you would have to take all that cash and reinvest it in order to stay where you are. If you’re able to grow at $30b/year, you have to question whether things are really that competitive. Consider gross margins for a moment. Gross margins are the amount of profit you get for every incremental unit in marginal revenues. Apple’s gross margins are around 40%. Google’s are about 65%. Microsoft’s are around 75%. Amazon’s are 14%. But even $0.14 profit on a marginal dollar of revenue is huge, particularly for a retailer; grocery stores are probably at something like 2% gross margins. But in perfect competition, marginal revenues equal marginal costs. -- For a company to own its market, it must have some combination of brand, scale cost advantages, network effects, or proprietary technology. Of these elements, brand is probably the hardest to pin down. One way to think about brand is as a classic code word for monopoly. -- The Goldilocks principle is key in choosing the initial market; that market should not be too small or too large. It should be just right. Too small a market means no customers, which is a problem. Markets that are too big are bad ... it’s hard to get a handle on them and they are usually too competitive to make money. If there is no compelling narrative of what the market is and how it can scale, you haven’t yet found or created the right market. A plan to scale is crucial. The best kind of business is thus one where you can tell a compelling story about the future. The stories will all be different, but they take the same form: find a small target market, become the best in the world at serving it, take over immediately adjacent markets, widen the aperture of what you’re doing, and capture more and more. Once the operation is quite large, some combination of network effects, technology, scale advantages, or even brand should make it very hard for others to follow. That is the recipe for building valuable businesses. -- There is always some room to operate in existing markets. Instead of creating a new market, you could “disrupt” existing industries. But the disruptive tech story is possibly overdone. Disruptive companies tend not to succeed. Disruptive kids get sent to principal’s office. Much better than to disrupt is to find a frontier and go for it. -- Zynga is another interesting case. Mark Pincus has wisely said that, "Not having clear goal at outset leads to death by a thousand compromises." Zynga executed very well from the beginning. They started doing social games like Farmville. They aggressively copied what worked, scaled, figured out how to monetize these games—how to get enough users to pay for in-game perks—better than anyone else did. Their success with monetization drove the viral loop and allowed them to get more customers quickly. The question about Zynga is how durable it is. Is it a creative or non-creative business? Zynga wants the narrative to be that it’s not a creative or a design company. If it is, the problem is that coming up with new great games is hard. Zynga would basically just be game version of a Hollywood studio whose fortunes can rise or fall with the seasons. Instead, Zynga wants the narrative to be about hardcore psychometric sauce. It’s a better company if it’s figured out how psychological and mathematical laws give it permanent monopoly advantages. Zynga wants, perhaps needs, to be able to truthfully say, “we know how to make people buy more sheep, and therefore we are a permanent monopoly."'

'I have concluded that there are three basic conditions you need to meet to take advantage of Big Data: #The information content of whatever your company makes or sells is above a certain critical threshold; #Your workforce and operations can be instrumented to create enough of a data deluge that you need Big Data technology; #Your senior management can learn how to work with a larger strategy canvas. -- The design of your business model (its structure) follows your strategy (the core insight about an exploitable unfair advantage that you want to pursue). But the structure must also be expressed within the capabilities of the technology with which it is built. The architectural capabilities of the technology are the language within which your business model must be expressed. When the expressivity of a technology domain lags the creativity of the strategic thinking, strategy gets structurally constrained by technology. When technology leads creativity, the canvas expands, and those who notice the newly-breakable constraints are able to cause disruption. Exactly such a canvas expansion is happening right now. For information-intensive businesses operating with business models that can be cheaply instrumented to create and consume data deluges within feedback architectures, the scope for strategy has suddenly expanded. If you cannot paint a better picture on the expanded canvas, somebody else likely will. That’s why Big Data matters.'

'#The Apple relationship: I want Apple to be cool. Apple wants to be cool. That's why there's little pushback on pricing or obsolence or disappointing developers. '#The Walmart relationship: I want the cheapest possible prices and Walmart wants to (actually works hard to) give me the cheapest possible prices. That's why there's little pushback about customer service or employee respect... the goals are aligned. #The demagogue politician relationship: I will feel more powerful if you get elected and get your way. You will feel more powerful if you get elected and get your way.Alignment isn't something you say. It's something you do. Alignment is demonstrated when you make the tough calls, when you see if the thing that matters the most to you is also the thing that matters the most to the other person. The tension that comes from misalignment can work for a while, but it's when alignment kicks in that the enterprise really scales.'

'4 stage: "Creative inertia" strategy: #Stage One: We say nothing is going to happen #Stage Two: We say that something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it #Stage Three: We say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do #Stage Four: We say that maybe there was something we could have done but it's too late now.'

'Marketers like themselves, salespeople like other people, and PR people like ideas. Each turns his or her personality into a selling strength. On the subject of corporate culture: you don’t need to share core values (impossible) or all values (idiotic and impossible). You just need to share your selling values. This means, when you are wondering whether or not to join a particular company based on cultural fit, you should ask: what’s your preferred selling style (and everybody’s got one, whether or not they are in a selling profession). Do you like selling based on self-perceptions, starting with your own self-perception (sign: you can sell best to people like yourself)? Join a marketing-driven company. Do you like getting to know people and selling in personalized ways (sign: you can sell to anybody)? Join a sales-driven company. And finally, do you like selling ideas (sign: you can sell to anyone who “gets” it; they don’t have to like you or be like you)? Join a PR-driven company.'

'As for entrepreneurship – really, people make a big deal of it, but it’s not so hard. You need to (1) add value to things you touch, and (2) get some share of the value you created.public victory. -- There’s nothing magical about it. You get some inputs (your time, knowledge, resources, goods, whatever), you add some value to it by improving or rearranging the inputs, and you sell them for more than it cost you to get them. Profit.'

'A story that is neither necessary, nor sufficient to explain wild success has become both necessary and sufficient. “If you do it this way, you WILL succeed, and this is the only way you CAN succeed.” That’s actually the definition of a process: a manufactured, self-serving history justifying a conservative, “cleaned up” necessary-and-sufficient “do-over” evolution path that ends in a promised high-value-adding state that isn’t. Quite a nice piece of sleight of hand, isn’t it? What actually happened: luck, special conditions, and talents conspired to create a messy story that was neither necessary nor sufficient, and led to a high-value position, with most of the value already added, and a state that efficiently milks that position for a while. -- The real secret to getting from “good” to “great” is selective rule breaking. “Good” imitators either try and achieve modest success, or fail, by applying formulas religiously. But the “greats” find “good” formulas to break.'

'Terrence Ryan breaks down the patterns and types of resistance technologists face in many organizations. You’ll get a rich understanding of what blocks users from accepting your solutions. From that, you’ll see techniques for dismantling their objection... You’ll learn all about peoples’ “resistance patterns.” There’s a pattern for each type of person resisting your technology, from The Uninformed to The Herd, The Cynic, The Burned, The Time Crunched, The Boss, and The Irrational. From there you’ll discover battle-tested techniques for overcoming users’ objections, and strategies that put it all together: the patterns of resistance and the techniques for winning buy-in. In the end, change is a two-way street. In order to get your co-workers to stretch their technical skills, you’ll have to stretch your soft skills. This book will help you make that stretch without compromising your resistance to playing politics. You can overcome resistance (however illogical) in a logical way.'

#3. Preactive - predict the future. Preactive planning is an attempt to predict the future and then to plan for that predicted future. Technological change is seen as the driving force bringing about the future, which will be better than the present or the past. The planning process will seek to position the organization to take advantage of the change that is happening around them. -- #4. Proactive - create the future. Proactive planning involves designing a desired future and then inventing ways to create that future state. Not only is the future a preferred state, but the organization can actively control the outcome. Planners actively shape the future, rather than just trying to get ahead of events outside of their control. The predicted changes of the preactive planner are seen not as absolute constraints, but as obstacles that can be addressed and overcome.'

“If you as a company tell me that you have a brand name, I’m going to ask you a question: ‘Do you have the power to charge a higher price for the same product?’” Damodaran said, “If your answer is no, I don’t think you have a brand. You may think you do, but I don’t think your brand has any value.”

'In the view of F. Graetz, strategic thinking and planning are “distinct, but interrelated and complementary thought processes” that must sustain and support one another for effective strategic management. Graetz's model holds that the role of strategic thinking is "to seek innovation and imagine new and very different futures that may lead the company to redefine its core strategies and even its industry". Strategic planning's role is "to realize and to support strategies developed through the strategic thinking process and to integrate these back into the business".'

'#1. Product and Platform risk, #2. Market risk, #3. Business model risk #4. Deep risk, #5. Macro risk' -- Comment: Paul Sweeny: "If the product is free to use, you are the product. In such freemium models it's usually specific data you produce in your use that is useful to the premium user or third parties." -- The user is product

'Facilitate audience conversations and drive engagement with social currency' (Link to this "strategy")

'Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. Insight questions can only be asked after you develop situation awareness. They are necessarily local and unique to the situation. When you are faced with a difficult situation, you will start as a prisoner of the unanswerable/too expensive formulaic questions, and your first job is to break out. The reason the weird “right questions” work is that they expose cracks in your default, formulaic mental model. By attacking those cracks, you force the useless default mental model to collapse, creating room for a new one. The right questions set you up for real success or failure. You never know whether a clue leads down a bunny trail or to genuine insight. Unique insight that buys you time is really the last competitive advantage.'

Graphic: Resilience and Adaptive Cycles in Human Natural Systems - The Simplified Panarchy Model: Phases: #Building/Accumulation (Exploitation) #Locked-in (Conservation) #Creative Destruction (Release) #Renewal (Reorganisation)

'#Collaboration amd conversation over strategy decks and documentation #Simplicity of purpose over ’sacred’ consumer insights #Testing hypotheses over long-winded research and deduction #Responding to change over following a plan' -- Make the work work.

'Move symbols in increasing effectiveness of the move: ??: Blunder, ?: Mistake, ?!: Dubious move, !?: Interesting move, !: Good move, ‼: Brilliant move'

'Coopetition is a term that encompasses how rivals can compete for market share but cooperate to grow the market and speed up combined growth. In commercial coopetition, this is done by rivals sharing common platforms (a very important concept) that enable them to reduce costs (as in firms that share suppliers), widen variety, increase flexibility, etc. For example, coopetition is the basis for Internet standards and the Web. Vertical integration is an anathema to successful coopetition.'

'The second standing order of modern insurgencies is to generate economic connectivity in order to manufacture allies and increase the ability of the insurgency to fund itself. It's simple: Grow Black Economies. This requires cooperation with existing criminal organizations within "illegal" economies. This requires a variant on how the nation-state grew via becoming a protection racket -- protection at a rate worth that is worth the value provided and the willingness to expand the business potential of those being protected. Induced shortages, through network disruption, expand business opportunity. Further, broken "legal" economies, generate a plethora of free lancers...'

'The future of advantage: #Allocative. Google's advantage was built on allocating attention to content and ads better than its rivals. Google's real secret? Relevance, media's measure of how efficiently attention is allocated. #Creative. Apple... Creative advantage asks: is our strategic imagination 10x or 100x richer, faster, and deeper than our rivals? -- And the past: #Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. #Protective. Monsanto's made sure that farmers are locked in to Monsanto as tightly as possible. Protective advantage asks: are buyers and suppliers locked in to dealing with us, 10x or 100x more tightly than to rivals? -- These dimensions are mutually exclusive. The opportunity cost of protecting yesterday is creating tomorrow. The opportunity cost of extracting resources is allocating them in better ways.'

'We're not looking for a message - we're looking for an organising principle by which the brand behaves. That can be applied to all activities.'

'Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements. -- Demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company's strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible.'

'...when given the choice, try and move up the hierarchy of value. If given the opportunity to work with two customer segments, one of which sees your product as a basic utility and another of which sees it as a lifestyle statement, choose the latter. IMVU made that choice early on, when we abandoned some profitable customers who wanted to use our product as a regular-IM substitute. There was no way to service them while still engaging with the goths, emos and anime fans who were rapidly becoming IMVU's top evangelists. We doubled-down on identity value, and it worked out well.'

'[Arbitrageurs] collect the “spread” until other entrants show up. Arbitrage by definition is low risk and typically a return slightly higher than the risk. Buffett succinctly says: “The key to investing is … determining the competitive advantage of any given company and the durability of that advantage.” -- Both Microsoft and HP would have failed Buffett’s durable competitive advantage test in their early days. To scale, both jumped from one niche to the next without much planning or analysis. Any one wrong jump would have done them in. -- Durable competitive advantage is usually the result of unpredictable and rare random events... They happen to a very small minority. Because entrepreneurs are arbitrageurs, they constantly watch companies with durable advantages. They then try to find a way to carve off a piece of that advantage for themselves. Durable competitive advantage is an anomaly and quite rare.'

'The Fabian strategy is a military strategy where pitched battles are avoided in favor of wearing down an opponent through a war of attrition. While avoiding decisive battles, the side employing this strategy harasses its enemy to cause attrition and loss of morale. Employment of this strategy implies that the weaker side believes time is on its side, but it may also be adopted when no feasible alternative strategy can be devised.'

'The US military is extremely top heavy. Why? It's staffed for great power war. This means that it has the middle management and 'leadership' to absorb millions of conscripts. As a result, internal competition for 'inclusion' in combat ops is fierce (for promotion and 'validation of value' purposes). This also leads to extreme specialization of bureaucratic function -- lots of different types of oversight.' -- '#Pinpoint specific decision making processes for disruption.'

'After watching this movie, opponents of spectacular capitalism will understand the importance of studying The Game of War. By playfully competing against each other over its board, they are learning the strategic and tactical skills required for success in the deadly struggle against the global bourgeoisie. In our film of Debord's game, Class Wargames has divided these teachings from the battlefield into five sections: terrain, combat, cavalry, arsenals and lines of communication. Analyse their insights with great care, fellow workers. As the crisis of neo-liberalism intensifies, you will need this military knowledge to thwart the wicked schemes of bankers and bureaucrats.'

'Parasitic competition within a specific host generally increases the fitness of the parasites involved in the competition. Here's three examples of parasitic competition. All three methods use an indirect approach that leverages control of environmental variables to limit competitors: #Exploitation: The ability of the parasite to control host behavior. For example, the control of host hormones (sex, metabolism, etc.) to accelerate their own fitness at the expense of competition.

'Taleb buys options because he is certain that, at root, he knows nothing, or, more precisely, that other people believe they know more than they do. -- ...we're more willing to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to our gains. That's why we like small daily winnings in the stock market, even if that requires that we risk losing everything in a crash. At Empirica ... every day brings a small but real possibility that they'll make a huge amount of money in a day; no chance that they'll blow up; and a very large possibility that they'll lose a small amount of money. -- "We cannot blow up, we can only bleed to death," Taleb says, and bleeding to death, absorbing the pain of steady losses, is precisely what human beings are hardwired to avoid. -- What the normal trader gets from his daily winnings is feedback, the pleasing illusion of progress. At Empirica, there is no feedback.'

'Actions companies take belong in one of three boxes: #Box 1 - Manage the present; #Box 2 - Selectively abandon the past; and #Box 3 - Create the future.'

'Identify forces likely to bear on the problem, organize them into future possibilities, envision paths that would lead to those futures, and devise a strategy for surviving them all. With a sharp picture of potential futures and corresponding plans of action, you’ll always be one step ahead.'

Starting at the base: '#1. Find and fight fires (or CYA) #2. Build relationships with customers. #3. Seek out feedback on products and marketing. Rather than monitoring for the huge PR nightmares, companies ask lots of its employees to listen every day, seeking little insight they can use to improve products and marketing. Product managers, research groups and marketing managers love using Scout Labs in this way. #4. Be a customer-centric organization. #For a company at this stage of evolution, customers are partners. Listening to customers and engaging with them to build better products and sell more is a strategic priority and part of a company’s culture. Everyone—from the CEO to customer service, from product to PR—is tuned in to what customers are talking about, coming up with new, customer-inspired ideas, jumping into conversations to build relationships, and truly innovating.'

'Already, Twitter made up “90% of the content” on Google Blog Search. As the minutes put it: “We are this product.” There was also talk of including microblog results on the main search page, which would be “the biggest change to google search in years.”'

'... two new qualities of leadership: #The first is the ability to distribute a leader's influence to as many followers within a given time. #The second is the ability to be sufficiently persuasive to change and hold the allegiance of followers who they can influence. When these factors come into play, the balance of power depends on the distribution of leaders. ...the key to seizing power, or at least gaining a significant foothold, is the effective distribution of a small number of leaders within a larger group. "A better distribution pattern has larger influential region and greater clustering factor, which can equip the leaders with the capability of influencing more followers in a given period and strengthening the persuasion power on the followers as well."' -- In the linked paper: '...the mechanism underlying such an apparent “following the minority” in the whole group is due to the scheme of “following the majority” locally.'

'#Free 1: Simple cross-subsidy #Free 2: Ad-supported #Free 3: Freemium #Free 4: Gift economy -- #Reversible business models: In China, some doctors are paid monthly when their patients are healthy. If you are sick, it’s their fault, so you don’t have to pay that month. It’s their goal to get you healthy and keep you healthy so they can get paid. -- In Denmark, a gym offers a membership program where you pay nothing as long as you show up at least once a week. But miss a week and you have to pay full price for the month. The psychology is brilliant. When you go every week, you feel great about yourself and the gym. But eventually you’ll get busy and miss a week. You’ll pay, but you’ll blame yourself alone. Unlike the usual situation where you pay for a gym you’re not going to, your instinct is not to cancel your membership; instead it’s to redouble your commitment.' -- On the fallacy of consistent price elasticity: 'The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.'

'Transmedia Activism provides activists and content creators with a framework to be strategic and proactive in the use of media to create social impact. -- Before creating a campaign, three foundational areas must be explored: #A. Social Change - what are you trying to change? #B. Storytelling - what is the narrative thread? #C. Resources - what do you have? -- In setting up a campaign, these areas are explored and used as the basis for a plan: #A. Audience Segmentation - who are you engaging? #B. Resources - what do you need? #C. Story Universe Strategy - how do you define the story? #D. Content Strategy - how will you craft and distribute content? #E. Partners and Stakeholders - who will participate? #F. Engagement - how do you engage toward change?'

"... the grand strategy of Al-Qa’ida can be thought of as auto-immune warfare... The aim is to provoke and manipulate the enemy until their reactions create many more zones of dubious authority where they can move in, and eventually until the West is exhausted economically. ...we are to be destroyed by the over-reaction of our own security system, just as auto-immune diseases turn the immune system on the body. The main-force guerrillas’ role is to stage spectaculars, which provide propaganda of the deed, create chaos, and intimidate or chase off the representatives of the state or of traditional authority. The other elements of a classic guerrilla system – the clandestine administration, and its part-time local guerrilla force – then step in. Meanwhile, the strike force moves on to other battles or melts back into hiding."

"This film is about design strategists and how they identify the right ideas." -- "Sometimes people's needs are to be surprised and delighted, and they can't tell us how to surprise and delight them, that has to come from us as creative people."

"#Never have an ideal. I've talked at length about the power of ideals. Without an ideal to strive for, authentic innovation becomes mere novelty. Where are the ideals in the venture industry? Nowhere. And that's the reason investors keep making these mistakes in the first place. Where are the ideals in most industries? Nowhere — and that's the ultimate reason most companies invest so much in innovation, only to fuel wave after wave of novelty-driven hyper-imitation."

'In an effort to bar the door against expanding criminal networks, certain communities will move to regulate, tax, and control everything from illegal immigration to illicit drugs... A newly vigilant and networked public will push for much greater levels of transparency in government and corporate operations, using the Internet to expose, publish, and patch potential security flaws. Over time, this new transparency, and the wider participation it entails, will lead to radical improvements in government and corporate efficiency. Like the Internet, these new networks will develop slowly at first. After a period of exponential growth, however, they will quickly become all but ubiquitous--and astonishingly powerful, perhaps as powerful as the networks arrayed against us. And so we will all become security consultants, taking an active role in deciding how it is bought, structured, and applied. That's a great responsibility and, with luck, an enormous opportunity. Choose wisely.'

'Is Fang Shangpu hinting that China has intentionally, as a deliberate strategy, divided its reserves into two general holdings, official and secret... the secret reserves [holding] predominantly dollar-denominated assets? If this is the case, then China could employ a number of schemes to clandestinely further reduce its total exposure to the dollar ... how might it propose to use those secret reserves to further decrease its exposure to the dollar? Enter China's resource buys... at a time when the prices of hard assets are extremely attractive and many more such buys are in the offing. If the details of such measures should become sufficiently public and should attract undue global attention before China accomplishes its goals, a dollar panic might be triggered. ... it is likely that China will enjoy cover and gain breathing space to enact its prudent measures while much of the rest of the world continues to rush into the [treasuries] bubble.' -- Clever China

"I want to leave you with this: The gold market is giving you free leverage in gold. That leverage is called: Hyperinflation. You don't need to borrow money to leverage gold. Hyperinflation will leverage your gold for you."

'... it’s hard to build a business model anymore out of screwing people - since when you do, we the screwed can rise up and be heard and fight back and make evil too expensive. Our interconnectedness is also what made the complex derivatives - the toxic assets - that triggered the financial crisis possible - but that is all the more reason why we will demand transparency, our best antidote to evil. That will change how business is run in fundamental ways.

"#Predictive #Propagative #Personalized #Participatory"

"Here are five questions every decision maker should kick off 2009 by asking: #What is the role of marketing in a world where consumption must slow? #What is the role of distribution in a world where consumption, savings, and investment will accelerate in volatility? #What is the role of production in a world where consumption becomes savings? #What is the role of strategy in a world where the game is no longer about winning more consumption than rivals? #What is the role of innovation in a world where greater investment will flow to reinventing moribund industries?"

"... companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively. True power isn't the power to manipulate. It's the power to create. There is a world of difference between the two - that orthodox economics has yet to understand."

"... It is only by capitalizing the things we really value that the spark of value creation can be lit again. Next-generation businesses are built, instead, on human, social, natural, and cultural capital - to name just a few. Next-generation businesses are critical because next-generation assets are the key to rebalancing capitalism's toxic value equation. Ultimately, only next-generation assets can redefine how productive capitalism can be in the 21st century.... capital isn't just whatever beancounters and boardrooms decide it is. It's what we - collectively, as global citizens - decide has value, because it impacts our productivity, well-being, and quality of life. Capital is formed when people are willing to agree that something has value. And the miracle of the 21st century is that in a hyperconnected world, millions of people can debate, discuss, and decide in the blink of an eye. It's never been easier to capitalize something - so what are you waiting for?"

#Network effect #Data mines #Digital sharecropping or "user-generated content. #Complements #Two-sided markets #Economies of scale, economies of scope, and experience -- "None of these strategies is new. All of them are available offline as well as online. But because of the scale of the Net, they often take new or stronger forms when harnessed online. Although the success of the strategies will vary depending on the particular market in which they're applied, and on the way they're combined to form a broader strategy..."

"Tomorrow's sources of advantage aren't like yesterday's. They're not built on being able to exploit, dominate, or coerce more strongly than others -- they don't result from being harder, better, faster, stronger. They're about exactly the opposite: being softer, better able to fail, having the ability to be slower, gaining the capacity for tolerance and difference. Ultimately, they are about a true advantage -- one that accrues not just to the corporation, at the expense of people, society, or the environment; but one that accrues to all."

"It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s strategy. Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, launching browsers and satellites, and giving away all sorts of Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because as the cost of information falls it makes more money."

'The time is now. Now is the time for revolutionaries to step up and build something better, something more real, and something greater. There will probably never - at least in our lifetimes - be an opportunity for total economic reinvention this tremendous. Or this meaningful. Because that's what it's really about - not shareholder value, money, or "competitive advantage". But doing something that means something.'

"You don't need to invest billions to disrupt industries with shared resources - a few million devoted to a handful of bright people will do. What Google did with Chrome, tomorrow's revolutionaries will inevitably begin doing across industries - that's why asymmetrical competition is so dangerous and so difficult to fight."

Great presentation on Agile and 'Fragile' processes. 111 slides but well worth the clickage (some crazy images in there!)

"Markets cause strategic domino effects. Markets are strategically radical: once the basis of competition has been altered, an economic tsunami is unleashed, often unstoppable. The dynamics of competition shift irrevocably. In mobile, for example, Apple's market driven approach has each player striving to be more open than the last."

"Data has this really weird quality. In economic terms data has an increasing marginal utility. Anyone who took Econ 101 knows that most physical objects have a decreasing marginal utility. Data has the opposite characteristic. Each incremental point of data adds value to the ones you all ready have. Google’s services all benefit from additional data albeit in different ways. Google could potentially provide a better value proposition to the end user with an inferior algorithm powered by more data, sourced from a broader range of services." Comment: Greg: "total utility increases... marginal utility decreases."

"The macro crisis is the reflection of a global financial system that wasn't built to last. It's riddled with moral hazard and adverse selection because incentives are myopic, information is poor, ethics are totally absent, valuation is a black art, models are divorced from reality - and that's just the tip of the iceberg." -- Comment: Ray "add 'shallow innovation' to the list too"

"... marketers see social media as opportunity, and never seem to consider it will be the snake that bites them. it is the new tool that helps them get more, be more “effective”, establish “realtionships”, develop a network of “friends”.... if you think social media is a tool to get something, you will fail. used to give something, you will be king. ironic, eh? beautiful, actually."

"brands are living, organic things - because all the time, those with knowledge of a brand are changing. They may grow richer or poorer and will certainly grow older; and as the perceiver changes, so inevitably, does the perception. If a marketing company closes both its eyes and its ears; if it relies on the single dimension of current sales; if it believes that yesterday's successful strategy is an infallible guide to tomorrow's profit: then it's heading for disillusionment of barometric severity."

"Brands within the infrastructure of the cultural mechanism, are the verbs of life, they are not about trying to facilitate the consumers interests - it’s deeper, more transparent, more beneficial - it’s about the organisation working towards a common goal - and that is - mutuality. If Brands think that their role is to rise above ‘acceptability’, then they are going the wrong direction. Brands, if they want to be the life of the consumer, must be the reasoning of the consumer."

"Communication is going on here. But it's not verbal communication. It's communication with other bits of the brain. Mirror neurons are firing. All sorts of things are happening. But it's not about a single, clear message." -- AMAZING presentation from way back. Gotta love the long tail.

"Mad Men, a simpler time of real men, real problems and lots of sex on mid century design classics .... its real success in adland was down to a wistful longing for a time when clients were actually clients. In other words the people that ran and had often founded the business being advertised and simply wanted to sell more of their products by any means necessary. Of course the arrival of professional marketing departments has changed the relationships that agencies have with client organisations and the roles that they play for them. But it hasn’t change the need for clear business objectives." -- Or you just have to get on and identitfy them yourself.

"It's not just cheap oil we're addicted to: it's cheap everything. And the world we're entering isn't really of Peak Oil as it is one of Peak Consumption. In a world where consumption itself must slow, the boardroom faces tough choices. Does it continue to hawk stuff that ‚'satisfies' largely artificial needs? Or does it choose to do something authentic, meaningful, and purposive– something that makes us all radically better off than we were before?"

"To me this is further vindication for Google's social media strategy of building social features into existing sites and properties. Facebook, Twitter, etc. are transitory places... they aren't permanent structures." -- Google = A Rhizome not a Net/Web

"Strategy isn’t arbitrage. Strategy isn’t dealmaking. Strategy isn’t an arms race. What is strategy? It’s simple: strategy is what’s strategic – what is in your long-run best interest, factoring in everyone else’s long-run best interest."

"Context > Content: Most user generated content, is, in fact, context. The bulk of what connected consumers create isn’t content: its context – information

"Today, advantage is, to use an unintentionally ironic metaphor, in a company's operating system - not in its hardware. Advantage begins in the DNA. It's a function of the principles you use to organize and manage..."

"The logic is simple. Connected consumers are rational. They will continue to defect to digital media: the value proposition is explosive, and their attention is allocated far more efficiently than being forcefed inert, linear media."

#1 Usefulness #2 Utility #3 Ubiquity -- "... the application economy ... will be fueled by organizations and individuals who have figured out how to retool Web design into something more engaging, rewarding, useful and valuable. "

"How do we begin reorganizing the industrial economy? By using markets, networks, and communities to alter the way resources are managed: to weave a fabric of incentives for sustainable growth and authentic value creation into the economy... "

"In an interconnected world, media is everywhere: it’s the stuff that plugs consumption and production together. The opportunities for value creation are greater than ever before - but we must expand our vision of what media is to begin realizing them."

Umair Hague on flows not stocks: "Markets, Networks, Communities." -- On creating value: "It's not how or what, it's why and who." -- Stocks = The bigger frame is learning for new mental MNCs. Experience = Neuroplasticity. "Delight" is only one pathway.

"Today, it's hugely powerful to apply hacker principles not to bits, but to industries, markets, and companies - because putting resources and activities together is cheap and getting cheaper."

"Players playing by radically new rules are rewriting the rules of strategy. And I think the Obama campaign is one of the best examples of the rise of asymmetrical competition."

"when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches..." -- Features not ads.

"Microsoft unveiled its big plan for online search, and it reeks of desperation. The company is rolling out a cashback search service, which lets users get rebates for purchases they make through Live.com." -- How bizarre!

"Google's shift to openness - can you see how it unlocks value for everyone? Google is in a class of its own - across the economy - when it comes to next-generation strategy. Google opening up its ad networks is strategic greatness at work."

"The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet *is* the social network."

"... being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and above all, it helps them be decisive.... I'm suggesting [being good] because it works."

"Can it be linked to or have you gone and wrapped them up in a big Flash movie that no one can link to? If it’s a Flash movie then there’s less material that can be shared in social book-marking sites." -- Flash: The Enemy of the People. ;^)

"the real root cause of the macro crisis: the exploding divergence between today's economics and strategy trapped in a faded, rusting past – consigning firms to act out, like mute players on a stage, moves bereft of imagination, meaning, and purpose."