Links for Oct 13 2013
- “It Won’t Work. We Tried That”
Quote: Bottom line: bad marketing science is dangerous. And we should demand that it at least get itself a half-decent disguise – with data and control groups and stuff – before we accept it as real science. “We tried that,” just doesn’t cut it.
- Napoleon’s Fatal Mistake
Quote: He did not like to delegate, and therefore the men he promoted under his command tended to be those who carried out his orders with precision, rather than men with their own minds. The weakness was central to the failure of the empire, for Bonaparte used his marshals and generals not only to command distant armies, which he could not supervise in detail, but to govern provinces and kingdoms, run embassies, put down rebellions, and deal with all of the crises that, from time to time, swept across territories of nearly eighty million souls.
- Agile Development: The Next Phase — CIO Dashboard
Quote: CIOs are under tremendous pressure to pick up the pace of change. Quote: Their current IT systems and work styles are holding them back and slowing them down. More pliable, organic models and mindsets are called for in today’s dynamic environment. CIOs shouldn’t think of themselves as keepers and protectors of solid structures. Rather, they are orchestrators of alive, bustling environments with the ability to grow from marketplace blows.
- Employee Turnover is a Useless Metric
Quote: You know where turnover absolutely IS a cost and indicator of problems? In machines. When cogs break, the line is shut down while we replace them, and that costs the business money and productivity. Got cogs breaking on a regular basis? Something is definitely wrong. That shouldn’t be happening. But employees are not cogs, and organizations are not machines (as much as we want them to be). If you’re a leader in a human organization, there are plenty of things that need your attention before you look at turnover rates. If you pay attention to those things, and focus on learning and systems thinking and growing a strong culture, I’m betting you’ll be fine without measuring employee turnover at all.
- How to Use the Four Ms of Influence Marketing for Better ROI – Danny Brown
Quote: Influence marketing as defined today needs to change. Public scores and amplified messages may present one way to look at influence; but without action being taken that goes beyond blog posts and social shares, and into what drives a customer to make a purchase, is it really influence or simply a hit and hope tactic?
- Better medicine, brought to you by big data — Tech News and Analysis
Quote: Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning or natural-language processing, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that data is the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.
- The cloud’s heavy hitters talk about the death of the CIO | VentureBeat
Quote: “The CIO that doesn’t embrace change … they’re dead,” said Mac Devine, IBM’s cloud CTO. “The ones that do, they’re successful.”
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