The NFL’s Cleveland Browns just hired stats guru Paul DePodesta, a baseball guy, as “Chief Strategy Officer.” I’ve read the press release, and I still have no clue what that means. You’ve probably heard of DePodesta. He was the analytics whiz in Moneyball, the one that Billy Beane embraced to turn around the Oakland A’s. (Jonah Hill…
When it comes to bullshit, nothing is more sublime than communist propaganda. North Korea says it tested an H-bomb this week (US officials say it was only a regular nuclear bomb). That’s terrifying. The official statement from the North Korean government isn’t really helping their cause though. I’d forgotten the loony nature of totalitarian communist Newspeak. The English translation…
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey suggested that he might allow long tweets — up to 10,000 characters. That’s fixing a bug, not fixing Twitter. It won’t change much. Twitter has limited Tweets to 140 characters since the start, a limit that arose out of length restrictions on text messages. Short tweets defined the service. Nobody tweets by text message…
I miss data. I love data and I can do great stuff with it. When I started at Forrester, we had no consumer data. Then Bill Bluestein challenged me to come up with a consumer segmentation. We used that segmentation, Technographics, to build our first consumer surveys. We entered an awesome world in which you could find…
The Boston Globe is now a week into its epic delivery mess. You could blame digital disruption, but you’d be wrong. The Globe’s management did this to itself. First, let me single out the Globe’s journalists for praise. In the wee hours Sunday morning, reporters volunteered to help deliver papers. (I love Hiawatha Bray‘s caption for this photo…
This time last year I was just scheming. Now I’m rolling. Thanks to all of you, I’m on my way to something new. Here’s a recap of what happened in 2015 and what I expect in 2016. 2015 milestones March 2: Escape. I leave Forrester Research after 19 years 10 months. I’ve reveal my scheme…
The Boston Globe has managed to survive the inescapable digital transformation of the world, only to destroy itself in spectacularly shortsighted analog fashion. Like all media, the Globe faces digital disruption. But from the innovative launch of Boston.com in 1995 to the responsive-design works-on-all-devices site of today, its digital steps have been clever and effective. The paper’s…
The fantasy world of merger announcements bears no resemblance to the reality of mergers. Michael Dell’s post about the Dell-EMC merger is a fine example. Why do companies merge? There’s always language about “complementary skills and assets,” but that’s always bullshit. There is always language about “serving customers better” but that is also bullshit. Companies merge for…
I have coauthored three books, so I know: writing together is the intellectual equivalent of marrying someone — it is that intimate, getting it right is just as rewarding, and getting it wrong is just as painful. Here’s how to collaborate on a shared writing project. Decide on your shared objectives It’s hard to share the work if…