A quick skim covering innovation, marketing, and complexity

A quick skim through several important blog posts you should read right now.

John Quelch of Harvard Business School covers eight principles for marketing during a recession.

Glenn Gow of Crimson Consulting Group explains clearly that while great companies should perhaps "eat their own dog food," they should certainly become expert consumers and users of their competitors' products.

Roberto Verganti, visiting professor at Harvard, has a paper covering, among other topics, why cutting-edge design companies don't use focus groups and why innovation followers have more product variety than leaders. (See here and here for earlier posts for discussion of earlier Verganti work.)

In the Cognitive Edge guest blog, Boudewijn Bertsch relates a powerful story of how a company--which had tried and failed to improve workplace safety using directives and processes--finally made progress by using stories to give it "a human face." (Boudewijn's other superb posts are also required reading: "The forgtten whole and the flawed focus on the 'lonely' parts of the organization" and "'Improvement must be focused on what you want, not on what you don’t want.' Russell Ackoff.")

(Photo by zela via stock.xchng)

innovation, marketing, complexity, learning, narrative