Managers are increasingly finding that “Doing what you always did will no longer get you what you always got.” Customers, business partners, and others are demanding better, faster, cheaper.  Working harder will not suffice; change is needed. Yet, the requisite resources to undertake large-scale initiatives to produce these results do not exist. 

A solution: look for meaningful, smaller changes that will affect the way separate units – departments, functions, businesses - interact with each other. Relatively small steps can yield huge dividends:  Continue reading…

In yesterday’s New York Times, David Carr writes about Hollywood’s ability to return value to their shareholders. Actually, he writes about Hollywood’s inability to return value to their shareholders. He notes that, according to Jonathon A. Knee (investment banker, media professor and author with a book coming out, The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong With the World’s Leading Media Companies), since the year 2000 large media companies have written down $200 billion, yep billion, in value. Sheeesh!

How did this happen? Surely, the movies weren’t that bad. No, they weren’t. It happened in large part in response to the ballyhoo surrounding the digital world. Continue reading…