I’ll be in Boston Thursday, July 23 at 6PM. Come see me present the Without Bullshit ideas for the first time in any public setting. I’d like to see you there, listen, and answer your questions.
A trusted correspondent objected to my characterization of Donald Trump as an idiot. He’s right; I was wrong. Trump didn’t succeed by being stupid. Not only that, his blowhard gambit has been remarkably effective at shifting the debate. Donald Trump continues to make bunches of patently inaccurate statements. But in yesterday’s post, I forgot the first rule of analysis,…
It’s refreshing when a politician tells the truth. But what does that mean? And is it always a good idea? Donald Trump’s latest statements have me wondering. He said all these things recently: The Islamic State built a hotel in Syria. The Mexican government forces “bad people” into the United States. The Gross Domestic Product of…
Do you choose your path? Or are you making choices with consequences you can’t imagine? I was thinking about the choices that got me hired at Forrester, a 20-year job that determined my career and my future as an author. I’d like to tell you it was a deliberate and intelligent choice, but it’s way stranger than…
In the year 2000, when I was the top technology analyst in the television industry, I began to see the outlines of the transformation of television. TiVo had delivered a big shock to the television schedule. Video on-demand was another tremor. I could see the whole edifice shaking. I wrote a piece called “The End Of TV (As We…
I studied the television industry for more than a decade. It doesn’t work the way you think it does. Since TV is a highly visible but stodgy industry ripe for disruption, it’s a great topic for #5BullshitThings, highlighting industries that work in incomprehensible ways and why they do. I’ll explain your bloated cable bill, why TV programs…
Today I launch #5BullshitThings, an industry-by-industry analysis of the whacked-out way the world works now. I’ll start with book publishing. When rapid change hits stodgy industries you get disruption. Disruption generates cognitive confusion and threatens power dynamics. That, in turn, generates hypocrisy, and incomprehensible behavior. In other words, bullshit. Let’s look at five bullshit things about…
Adobe’s latest video taps into how we all feel about marketing jargon. My question is . . . is Adobe really who you think of as a jargon buster in marketing technology? Or are they part of the problem? Thanks to Steve Woodruff for the tip.
Letting people go in bunches varies from bad to dreadful. You can’t make it right with clear language, but you can certainly make it worse. On the heels of Satya Nadella’s excellent mission statement email, he had to dump 7,800 staff, mostly because of Steve Ballmer’s ill-conceived decision to acquire Nokia’s phone business. I’d give Nadella’s layoff…