I’ve got a soft spot for Australia – sure they’re not so good at sports, and they spell culture with a capital “K”, but despite their failings I’ve grown to like them. Part of this came from spending a…
2010 has seen a fair amount of criticism directed at enterprise software vendors – I’ve called a bunch of offerings marginal, lacklustre, me-too clones and worse. But I’d be the first to admit that sometimes buyers of enterprise software…
Holiday season is a good time to write some posts that are, depending on your location, easy to consume while sitting on a beach or sipping a mulled wine. First up is an old-faithful, that definitional post. I’ve long…
Warning – only part of this post is a product review, while the rest is a rant against bad PR. But for anyone out there with a fledgling product (or an established product for that matter) the second part…
As part of the recent DreamForce conference. FinancialForce decided to take a novel approach towards educating the marketplace and used the approach taken by Eliyahu Goldratt in his management book The Goal. FinancialForce commissioned a book called The Deal…
A recurring theme in briefings with vendors is a search for a point of differentiation – there are many application types where there are a huge number of vendors all battling for market share – in situations like this…
Recently a mini storm blew up when Kashflow CEO Duane Jackson posted explaining that he’d be asked by the organizers of the Global Entrepreneur Week not to attend a function as it was a private Sage event. While the…
I posted the other day about the twitter firehose and specifically the announcement that Gnip would be selling access to a trimmed version of the feed. I intimated about the “other firehose” an aggregation of data that even makes…
We’ve been told for years that incentivizing employees is the secret to better performance.
A great talk given at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) questions the assumption that if you reward something you get more of the behavior you want and, the corollary, that if you punish something, you get less of the behavior.
Dan Pink refers to a study at MIT which was funded by the Federal Reserve. In this study, a whole group of students were given a set of challenges – physical, cognitive, and spatial. Performance was incentivized via monetary reward in an approach typical of most workplaces. So what happened?
Sometimes in the race towards automation, we lose sight of the fact that there’s times when, by using people, we can avoid a lot of the errors computers make. The question to ask then is how do we make…