I've been experimenting seriously with Twitter now for about two months. Truth is, I was highly skeptical of its benefits at first, partly because everyone seemed so irrationally ga-ga over it (I am inherently suspicious of fads). But also, puh-lease: 140 characters per tweet? To someone who's made a decent career out of writing 75,000-word books, and who has already written hundreds of articles and blog posts ranging from 300 to 3,000 words each, a 140-character tweet smacks of attention deficit disorder, pure and simple. Also, I've never been big on text messaging, which is where the 140-character limit comes from in the first place. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, I took a Twitter tutorial from one of our Peppers & Rogers Group consultants (thanks to @bcarroll7), I installed Tweetdeck on my laptop, and then I plodded awkwardly off into Twitterland, vowing to dedicate at least a few minutes each morning and evening to monitoring, reacting, and tweeting.

Continue reading "My Adventures in Twitterland: A Two-Month Status Report" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (6)

Clayton Christensen classifies sustaining innovations as those that continue to improve a product or service, and move it up and up and up along the customer's need. Often, sustaining innovations achieve a quality far in excess of what most customers actually need, and as quality improves, price and margin improve as well. In fact, Christensen says, competition in sustaining innovations has a tendency to increase the price of the product (in contrast to the common economic wisdom that competition reduces prices). However, at some point below this level of high product quality and innovation, there are disruptive technologies that will always chip away at the higher end products.

Continue reading "Christensen - Part Two" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (3)

Clayton Christensen's presentation is in two parts, and the first part is just concluded, but it's already clear to me and to several others I've talked to here at the HSM World Innovation Forum that his thoughts on innovation are definitely worth the trip.

Two questions he posed in this initial presentation:
1. Why is it so difficult to sustain success over time (i.e., to innovate again and again)? and
2. Is innovation really as much of a random event as it seems?

His tongue-in-cheek conclusion is that the principles of good management taught in places like Harvard actually sew the seeds of failure and ensure that innovation doesn't succeed.

Continue reading "Clayton Christensen Scores an A+" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm now ensconced in the bloggers' perch, on the balcony overlooking the stage at the Nokia Theater in NYC (two blocks from Times Square), ready to take in the talks at HSM's Innovation Forum - Clayton Christensen, CK Prahalad, Paul Saffo. Big names. BIG conference.

Continue reading "Ready for the HSM Innovation Forum?" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (2)

Economists used to concern themselves with how an economy settled into equilibrium, looking at the supply or demand for particular products, their prices, and so forth. When there were more products than demanded, prices would fall, production would slow, and vice versa. In this old model of economic thinking, technological progress was thought to be an "exogenous variable" - something imposed from outside the economy by events not really under the control of the individuals and businesses operating within the economy itself.

Continue reading "It's Innovation, Stupid!" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (0)