Last month I received a review copy of NOBLE ENTERPRISE: The Commonsense Guide to Uplifting People and Profits by Darwin Gillett. I had my doubts about the book when I received it..the cover art and use of the word ‘spirit’ sprinkled on the front and back covered just gave me a bad feeling about the … Read more
McKinsey has recently released a report titled “IT’s unmet potential: McKinsey Global Survey Results” that shows that there is still a lot of work to do to align IT and business. The survey attempts to answer the following high-level questions: How IT can serve as a tool to help build competitive advantage What risks arise … Read more
Jim Champy’s new book titled “Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can’t” is an interesting book. It’s short and easy to read…and full of some very interesting stories about building competitive advantage. For those that don’t know, Jim Champy is the author of classics like “Reengineering the Corporation” and “Reengineering Management” and is the … Read more
Read an interesting article on GigaOm yesterday titled “Google’s Infrastructure is its Strategic Advantage” (go read it if you haven’t). This post, and Google’s strategy, is a great example of using Resource Diversity and Immobility to build an advantage in your market. If you’ll recall from my previous posts (here, here and especially here), using … Read more
As a follow up to my previous post titled Competitive Advantage – The Human Capital Approach, I wanted to take a second to talk a little bit about the Resource Based View of the firm that I mentioned in the previous post. Before I continue, if you are interested in this topic, definitely take a … Read more
I was asked recently to describe how an organization can use its human capital to create competitive advantage. I fell into the trap of using Porter’s descriptions and other schemes of describing what it is and how to achieve it and while I was talking I saw eyes glazing over and people losing interest very … Read more