News & Opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
ChangeThis: Issue 93
By Porchlight
Nine Things I Learned from Alan Mulally by Bryce G. Hoffman “I spent many hours sitting across the table from Mulally in his corner office on the twelfth floor of Ford’s world headquarters. I learned a lot about how to change cultures and streamline organizations, and I believe these principles will prove as valuable to your organization as they have to Ford.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
Reverse Innovation
By Porchlight
Following up my recent post on Jugaad Innovation, which detailed Western companies that looked at non-Western innovation as inspiration, today I'm reading Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble's Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere. What's interesting about this book, is the authors are calling companies to actually innovate from within non-rich countries, and then tweak that innovation to adapt to richer nations. If this sounds over-ambitious, consider Gatorade, and example from the book, whose fundamental recipe began in Bangladesh to treat victims of cholera.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
When You Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
By Sally Haldorson
As I was writing this blog post, the Michael Jackson song, Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' (click on the link to be transported to 1987), popped into my head. Let me explain: Being a business that sells business books can be kinda meta. By meta, I mean that the very product we sell informs how we promote and sell it, and our company.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
Jugaad Innovation
By Porchlight
Innovation continues to be a concern for Western business, as manufacturing struggles and local movements continue to push toward supporting regional companies and products. The issue lies in how either of those efforts can gain more leverage by innovating processes and products. Navi Radjou, Jaideep Parabhu and Simone Ahuja encourage companies to discover new innovation practices by looking East, in their book Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
World Changers and Fortune
By Porchlight
John A. Byrne, former executive editor of BusinessWeek, editor in chief of Fast Company, and associate editor at Forbes, put out a great book in December with Portfolio called Game Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It. It's a really intriguing read, especially great for those who love biographies and personalities.
Categories: news-opinion, narrative-biography
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Blog / News & Opinion
The Art of Marketing: Chicago
By Porchlight
Attention locals! The folks at The Art Of are putting on a big event in Chicago that you won't want to miss. Six of the most highly influential social media and marketing speakers today--Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mitch Joel, Randi Zuckerberg, Keith Ferrazzi, and Avinash Kaushik--, are on deck for this year's The Art of Marketing conference at The Chicago Theater on Tuesday, April 24th.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
The Welcomer Edge
By Porchlight
When we have a bad experience with a company, we get upset, we're apt to tell someone else about it, and we never return to that business. Most of the time, though, we interact with people, give them our money, get something in return, and move on our way without really thinking about it. But once in awhile, we have a great experience, a genuinely positive interaction, one that we not only want to tell others about, but one that we we're attracted to have again and again.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
The Milwaukee Leatherworker
By Porchlight
I don't have a book for you today, but a video. From Milwaukee filmmaker Brian Artka, it profiles David Mitchell, the owner of the Mitchell Leather Factory and retail shop on Water Street here in the Third Ward of Milwaukee—just a few blocks away from us. A part of downtown once known for its factories (the building we're in was once a hosiery manufacturer), David is the last representative of the neighborhood's manufacturing culture.
Categories: news-opinion, narrative-biography
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Blog / News & Opinion
Net Smart
By Porchlight
Regular readers of this blog know that we're very interested (or at least I'm very interested) in how the internet is changing not only how we socialize, shop, and work, but how we think and function as human beings—individually, culturally, and as a society. Going back to 2007 when Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur went up against David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous, and continuing through last year when Nicholas Carr's The Shallows was released around the time of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus, we've been fortunate that publishers have put out books by great thinkers that take opposing sides of the issue that we can compare and contrast. It always sparks a lively conversation.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
Practice Makes Perfect Practice
By Sally Haldorson
Listen to just about any interview with top-flight athletes, and you'll hear them say, regarding the motivation it takes to stay so focused, so intensely committed to their daily training, some version of: "It's not the results; it's the process. " Loving the process gets the figure skater to the cold rink at 5am before she has to get to school by 8am. Loving the process gets the star baseball player through his rehab assignment back down at Triple-A.
Categories: news-opinion
