The B2B marketing automation industry has evolved to the point where serious money is now being spent on these software platforms. The benefits promised by nearly every marketing automation vendor range from lower customer acquisition costs to shorter sales cycles to breakthroughs in revenue performance management.
In 1939, John Steinbeck introduced America to the Joads, a family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home as a result of the economic hardship created by a series of unexpected transitions in the agricultural industry.
As part of his attempt to develop precise mathematical descriptions of how objects move, the seventieth century French philosopher René Descartes began with the idea that the total “quantity of motion” in the universe is conserved.
In the context of classical mechanics, when we talk about momentum, we’re generally referring to the power embodied in a moving object, and how much force it will take to stop it. Momentum is considered one of the most fundamental quantities in physics, but just what is it and why is it so important?
At one time or another, most of us in the field of marketing have undertaken the task of developing a 5 Forces Analysis as part of a long range planning exercise. A framework for industry analysis developed by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, the model is most often used for analyzing the competitive dynamics of a given industry.
From the source of Eve’s temptation to the cause of the Trojan War, apples have long played a key role in our legends and myths. Ripe with symbolic meanings and associations, the fruit has been used to signify temptation, wisdom, joy, fertility and youthfulness. According to popular legend, a falling apple in an English orchard in 1666 led Isaac Newton to postulate the inverse square law of gravitation.
I received some interesting responses to last week’s post on mass as the primary inhibitor of business acceleration. In case you missed it, we defined mass as the quantitative measure of an object’s tendency to resist a change in its state of motion. We further suggested that people are the principal source of mass in every organization, resulting from our inherent tendency to want to keep doing what we’ve been doing.
Jim Collins opened his landmark study of corporate performance with one sentence: Good is the enemy of great. In his search for the determinants of corporate greatness, he characterized his research effort as akin to looking inside a black box, using the following illustration:
From a symbolic defense of the gold standard in economic politics, to a metaphor for the feminine transition to adolescence, the search for the real meaning behind The Wizard of OZ has been the topic of much speculation over the years.
If films can truly be considered as mirrors into the world of human behavior, then my vote would have to go toward the Wizard of Oz as a metaphor for new business meetings. Here’s why.
Earlier this week I came across a YouTube clip featuring a well known “business futurist” lecturing an HR audience on the concept of building business velocity. Shortly afterward, I came across a similar AT&T video on business velocity accompanied by the following summary quote from David Murray:
“Marketing video for AT&T. They handed me a bunch of boring interviews and the title “Business Velocity” and asked me to make something out of it…I still have no idea what these people are talking about!”