Company Culture through Prof Sutton's Lens

Professor Bob Sutton is one of the most colorful business researchers on the Stanford campus, a Professor of Management Science at the Stanford Engineering School with more than 30 years of organizational research under his belt. These snippets from an interview with Melody Stone on Stride provide a toolbox full of insights from his work with companies such as McKinsey, Netflix, McDonald's, JetBlue and more: + Find out what the cultural norms at McKinsey are all about + What drove IBM's most famous change in the company's history + What are the underlying cultural differences between JetBlue and United ...and more... What 30 years of Stanford research tells us about company culture https://www.stride.com/blog/what-30-years-of-stanford-research-tells-us-about-company-culture

Thoughts on Product Design and the Hotel Bathroom Puzzle

One of the most error-prone challenges we encounter in business is product design. How often have you walked into a bathroom at a hotel you'd never been at before, stepped into the shower...and had no idea how to work the darn thing?? Personally I am not ashamed to admit it's happened more times than I care to remember. Yeah, you fiddle with the faucets, or dials, or levers - or whatever tortuous device the manufacturer had come up with and managed to convince the hotel architect to recommend and purchase - but shouldn't showers, and thousands of other products, be designed so intuitively we in our consumers' shoes shouldn't have to think about how to operate them? The "Hotel Bathroom Puzzle" is a classic. Read Alec Nevala-Lee's excellent short treatise on the subject and learn, learn, learn. #failure #learningfromfailure #productdesign #design #Productmanagement

James Dyson on Leveraging Failure to Reach Success

James Dyson talks to Entrepreneur about leveraging failure for success - click here

Business as a Baseball Game...

Think about this...

If business were a baseball game, you'd only have to get it right 33% of the time to be considered a "star," "expert," or genius...

Avis ditching "We Try Harder..."

Here's another strange one for y'all -

Avis has been using the "We Try Harder" tag line for half a century - literally since before I was born...it's as strongly associated with Avis as America is with apple pie.

In a strange move Avis has announced it will be ditching one of the most successful tag lines in business history for..."It's your space."

"It's your space."

Huh?

Here's some good commentary from The Blake Project.

Apple losing lawsuit after lawsuit...

When Apple wins one over Samsung, the media world is abuzz...I find it strange that when Apple loses lawsuits one after the other to HTC - little is said...

YOUR thoughts??

Apple Loses Another One To HTC

Conspiracy of the apploids??

WSJ Publishes Old News on VC-backed Startup Failures

WSJ published some old news today...according to Deborah Gage, the VC (Venture Capital) secret is that 3 out of 4 startups fail...

News flash: 1 out of 10 succeeds...

Rough VC stats are as follows - for each 1,000 business plans a typical VC sees:
=> VC communicates with 100 teams
...meets with 10 teams for presentations
...invests in ONE single venture

Success stats are approximately:
+ 5-6 fail ... negative returns
+ 2-3 breakeven - living dead etc. ... zero returns
+ 1-2 minor success ... minor returns, in today's climate barely return VC investments
+ 1 raging success ... major returns, finances the whole deal

DO THE MATH - for a single raging success a VC team has to review approximately 10,000 business plans, sit through 100 presentations, invest in ten companies and work with them for periods that can stretch out to ten years and beyond.

It ain't an easy business - even if top firms like Kleiner Perkins and Accel sometimes make it seem like cake.