#strategy (87 links)
- Why do we keep lying about growth? alexmhsmith.substack.com
Great mini-essay on business and market growth.
- We should all be using dependency cooldowns blog.yossarian.net
TL;DR: Dependency cooldowns are a free, easy, and incredibly effective way to mitigate the large majority of open source supply chain attacks. More individual projects should apply cooldowns (via tools like Dependabot and Renovate) to their dependencies, and packaging ecosystems should invest in first-class support for cooldowns directly in their package managers.
- Let It Burn - by Zoe Scaman - Musings Of A Wandering Mind zoescaman.substack.com
And the stuff that does go out? It’s going to look less and less like big bureaucratic holding companies and more like ragtag groups of brilliant minds. Strategists and creatives and makers who can be assembled for a project, who can move fast, who aren’t carrying the overhead of a Soho office and seventeen layers of account management.
- Ben Potter - Does your positioning give you the business you need, for the life you want? - The MAP Room shows.acast.com
In this episode, Stuart Brown and Ben discuss the critical importance of agency positioning, exploring common pitfalls, the benefits of specialisation, and the impact of AI on agency strategies. They emphasise the need for clarity in positioning to attract the right clients and improve profitability. The discussion also covers the challenges of repositioning and the journey agencies must undertake to achieve successful outcomes.
- Myths, Mess, and What Actually Matters - by Zoe Scaman zoescaman.substack.com
There is no meaningful path to success today that doesn’t deeply embed AI and data into the core of the business. Not as an add-on. Not as a side initiative. And definitely not as something managed in a silo, away from the day-to-day realities of how the business actually runs. It has to be foundational.
- The profitable startup - Linear Blog linear.app
Profitability isn't unambitious; it's controlling your own destiny. It means you don't have to rely on investors for survival. It means you can focus on your unaltered vision and mission. And it means you as a founder decide the pace of growth. And once you experience it, it's hard to imagine doing things any other way.
- Decoupling OKRs: It’s Time to Let Go eleganthack.com
If you’ve hired great people and given them a clear strategy, you shouldn’t need to approve every little thing. In No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings talks about Netflix’s approach to trust. When you hire incredible talent and make sure everyone understands the strategy, you don’t need heavy-handed control. You can just let go. And if something does go wrong? You deal with it when it happens.
- Successful iteration requires going beyond agile uxdesign.cc
UX methods are cheaper, faster, and better at gathering data than “build, measure, learn” — but they don’t work inside agile development.
Most agile is incremental delivery of a pre-selected way.
Good, brief JTBD primer.
Or, if you want to put it into more practical language: simply spend 3x more on design and branding than any of your competitors.
- TBM 257: How to Make the Case for Slowing Down to Speed Up cutlefish.substack.com
How can we make the case for slowing down to speed up when we are already going slow, and when shutting things down and starting over is not an option?
This sounds obvious, but it's amazing how many things billed as strategy within an organisation don't bear any relation to the business strategy. Sometimes this is impossible to do because there isn't a business strategy, or there isn't one that makes sense in the real world. People just... do stuff.
- A Lego-lover’s guide to preparing for the AI age economist.com
In a recent McKinsey survey, they say, about 90% of companies had some kind of digital strategy, but they captured less than a third of the revenue gains they had anticipated. Moreover, the success rate is more uneven within industries than it is between them. The best retailer may be more digitally productive than an average high-tech firm, and the worst retailer may be as bad as the worst government entity.
I really enjoy these strategy documents.
- On being lost medium.com
- Amazon Has a Secret Weapon Known as "Working Backwards"--and It Will Transform the Way You Work inc.com
Over the past 25 years, Amazon has transformed itself. What began as an online bookseller has become one of the world's largest retailers. Beyond that, Amazon…
- Shopify and the Power of Platforms – Stratechery by Ben Thompson stratechery.com
<blockquote>One of the mistakes I see entrepreneurs make is they move to business model before locking down strategy. The way I like to think about this is get the product right first, then lock down the strategy of the business, then figure out the business model.</blockquote>
One of the best articles I've read so far this year.
<blockquote>My definition of a good solution to a complex problem is one that solves the immediate problem, is built to last and generates more potential than it uses.
The more I think about complex problems, the more I get convinced that the built to last part is critical. Almost all failures are caused by not aiming for durability.</blockquote>
- Organic Startup Ideas paulgraham.com
The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?
- Game Mechanics - the new black - Jon Carder joncarder.com
"Over the next decade we’ll see game mechanics become ubiquitous amongst companies. Consumers will migrate in droves to companies who properly deploy game mechanics because doing business with them is more fun, rewarding and even addictive." Makes me feel slightly queasy.
- THE MOVEMENT: Method Cards methods.themovement.info
The Movement Method Cards are a collection of strategies gathered to inspire, guide, and elevate the creative process. Use the cards to spark ideas, facilitate conversations, categorize strategies, or for designing your own design processes.
- ongoing · Doing It Wrong tbray.org
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
"Partners have little or no incentive even to investigate non-fee-producing options. Therefore, open source or lower cost, more out-of-the-box CMS solutions are rarely if ever offered as possible solutions. In fact, my experience found that more times than not, the Big 5 partner already knew exactly which CMS solution she was going to pitch before she walked through the client’s door. This was something that never ceased to amaze me, but the lesson here is to beware of software recommendations from any Big 5 firm." No shit.
- Seth's Blog: The art and skill of working with bureaucrats sethgodin.typepad.com
Have you noticed that most airports feature the same restaurants? It's not an accident. The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations. In my experience, 40% of the fee goes for the work and 60% goes to pay for the do-overs, staffing, project management and hassle that comes from working from big organizations and committees. A lot of small businesses get burned when they charge just the 40% and the client expects that the other 60% comes for free. It doesn't.
- Engineers Are The Best Deal - So Stock Up On Them techcrunch.com
"Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999." And so say all of us.
- Report Paints a Painful View of Ad Agencies « FUEL LINES Fueling Ad Agency New Business Through Social Media fuelingnewbusiness.com
"Forrester Research believes today’s ad agencies are not well-structured to take on tomorrow’s marketing challenges, needing to move from making messages to establishing community connections." What, really?
- The 6 Dangerous Fallacies of Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Consulting - Convince & Convert convinceandconvert.com
Inexpensive, fast, viral, unmeasurable, optional.
- A Whole Lotta Nothing: This is how Social Media really works a.wholelottanothing.org
"Maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need "social media marketing" after all."
- Getting Real: Have an Enemy (by 37signals) gettingreal.37signals.com
When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be something completely different, the anti-Project.
- Made By Many madebymany.co.uk
- What do you mean by web-presence? | New Music Strategies newmusicstrategies.com
Ultimately, the days of sticking the online equivalent of a brochure up on the internet and calling it your web strategy are over. It’s about presence - and presence requires ongoing activity. Just like going to work, being at a party, or any other kind of social milieu - just physically being there is not enough. You have to be doing something.
- The future of digital agencies « The Dictionary of Specific Generalities davebirss.wordpress.com
- But if they steal it - how can I make money? | New Music Strategies newmusicstrategies.com
Some sensible arguments here.
- citizensound - music strategy for brands, brand strategy for music citizensound.net
An international music marketing collective offering sonic strategies for brands and their agencies, along with brand strategies for musicians, managers and labels.
- Jonathan Coulton » Blog Archive » How I Did It jonathancoulton.com
Since the big NY Times Magazine article a lot of just-starting indie musicians have been writing to ask about how I made all of this happen.
- Tweeting for Companies 101 | ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon horsepigcow.com
"The key to Twitter is the level of listening you do as well as talking. It is definitely supposed to be an interactive program. And, in fact, this is where you build the majority of your Whuffie (aka social capital)." Mixed feelings.
Coudal used to generate revenues almost exclusively from client work. Anyone who’s done client work knows the inherent frustrations that come along with that. But instead of merely accepting these frustrations [...], Coudal searched for another path.
- Inside Innovation with Colin Stewart » Blog Archive » 11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft - OCRegister.com innovation.freedomblogging.com
The following lineup of innovation lessons emerged from a video game conference, an interview, and several experts’ comments.
- The Rise of The Ad Man 2.0 : iain tait | crackunit.com crackunit.com
So assuming that the time is right (and it might not be), what would you do to create a brand new agency, like what they did in the 60s?
- SXSW: Lessons Learned at 37 Signals - ReadWriteWeb readwriteweb.com
- Slashdot | NIN's Music Experiment Sells Big Numbers slashdot.org
Among the various options [Trent Reznor] gave fans, the most expensive was the $300 Limited Edition Ultra Deluxe Package. It took just over a day for that package to completely sell out, earning Reznor $750,000 in revenue from just that option alone.
- Kevin Kelly -- The Technium kk.org
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
"Clients complained that their agencies [...] typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media. In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area." Glad it's not just me.
What they need to do is make the store experience inviting, not so much about pushing product, but about being that Third Place (not home or work) where people can get a respite.