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:
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!”