Signals of Noise

Category: management

The Truth of the Consultant

A former consultant at BCG spills the beans on how consulting really works. Also, how he was offered money not to tell this story. Not that we didn’t know it already! What I could not get my head around was having to force-fit analysis to a conclusion. In one case, the question I was tasked [...]

Growth vs. Innovation

Joel Spolsky makes a metaphorical comparison of McDonald’s and gourmet food to discuss why some of the biggest IT consulting companies in the world do the worst work. The big idea is that scaling a company that is innovative when small is not the easiest thing to do. The common way of dealing with the [...]

What Guy Kawasaki Learned about Experts from Steve Jobs

Guy Kawasaki wrote a blog post on what he learned from Steve Jobs during his days at Apple. He lists a dozen learning about experts, customers, design and products. But the one on experts is the true gem. (Yes, there is a smirk on my face!) Experts are clueless Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” [...]

The Zappos Way

Zappos has grown from almost zero sales to $1 billion sales in 10 years culminating in a billion dollar acquisition by Amazon. HBR has an excerpt from its CEO’s new book that gives an inside view to the culture that drove this success.