"When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet?”
- Ezekiel 34:18
Better late than never: The Green Bible
Dis ya version a no King James version.
I wonder if the Pope will read it? And weep?
More info >>
Prediction: 2009 will get "greenwashing" companies into hot water.
The danger in cause-related marketing is that it causes more harm to a company than good, especially when companies get involved in less than good faith.
This can happen, for example, when a company like P&G gets overzealous in its PR and engineers its own green awards.
And the slope gets slippery when the Sierra Club gets involved with Clorox.
Or when SC Johnson creates its own Greenlist(TM) process - and logo! Does anyone really believe that Windex is a green product?
Or when Dell claims it's carbon neutral.
The simple question for business is can we trust you?
The answer, so far, is no.
After eight years of laissez-faire, we are finally entering into a new phase of corporate accountability. And it's not just about greenwashing.
1. Will Obama fix the mess?
2. Who will replace Steve Jobs?
3. Will someone fix Yahoo?
4. Will anyone find/catch bin-Laden?
5. How many Bush regulations will be repealed?
6. Will Richard Branson start a Virgin Auto Company?
7. Will Google buy Twitter? Squidoo?
8. Netbooks! The $100 netbook is coming to disrupt the PC market... will it be from Google? or a Nokia?
9. How soon will we see a commercial mortgage collapse?
10. Will real unemployment hit 25%? 30%?
The science of shopping?
The article should've been called mind control in your local supermarket.
I agree with this: "despite all the new technology, simply talking to consumers remains one of the most effective ways to improve the 'customer experience'."
Too bad we can't spend the same kind of money on research figuring out the best way to teach Johnny how to read, write and do arithmetic...
Here's "Mind Control" from Stephen Marley:
What appetite drives the proliferation of music to the point where the average American teenager spends 1½-2½ hours a day—an eighth of his waking life—listening to it?
My answer - Steel Pulse's Chant a Psalm:
1.) It will be a big year for applications that can play on big screens.
2.) The big news in the mobile world will be smart phone applications.
3.) The blush is off the China rose.
4.) Flash-based computing will really take off.
5.) Wall computing gets traction.
6.) Carry-along computers will be hot.
7.) LTE (Long Term Evolution) will be the preferred technology for 4G.
8.) The less developed world will finally see widespread availability of broadband.
9.) Voice recognition will finally work right.
10.) The Internet Assistant will be born.
Don't ask me, I'm simply reporting what Mark Anderson's saying.
The one I'm certain about is the "carry-along" computer. I want real laptop computing in the size of a Penguin paperback. Are you listening, Apple?
One of my pet peeves with the Girl Scouts of America is their exploitation of children:
"...they have to sell 40 boxes of cookies at $3.00 apiece just to make $20.00. The other $2.50 goes to the Girl Scout Organization."
What a rip-off.
Instead of selling cookies, the Girl Scouts troops should be selling these. And keeping the PCs.
Why can't www.laptop.org donate or sell PCs to poor schools in the US as well as the rest of the world? C'mon St. Nicholas (Negroponte)!
What should the new President's priorities be? Here are some views from a few CEOs interviewed by BusinessWeek:
It's a cliche, but big business fears Democratic leaders. Turns out that Democratic presidents are better for the economy than Republicans! Details, details...
Jack Welch has his own take on why Obama succeeded: a clear vision, clean execution, and friends in high places.
A far more insightful piece comes from HBR blogger Umair Haque: Obama's Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators. I don't agree with all of his points (Obama did not "minimize strategy," he minimized tactics!) but I do commend Haque for his insights (see this post, for example, on why Obama is the Google of Politics.)
Bill Taylor has a fun post titled: How Obama Became CEO of the USA -- and What It Means for CEOs Everywhere
in which he argues that "being different makes all the difference."
John Quelch says it's all about better marketing.
Barbara Kellerman argues that Obama is a superior manager.
Gill Corkindale calls Obama The World's First 21st Century Leader
For Stew Friedman, it's authenticity.
My own view is that Obama is a true leader. And what we witnessed was the birth of Politics 2.0.
And in the end, it's still about results, and to that end, Obama has already taken the first step.
So what will Obama's innovation strategy look like? Here's a clue or two:
I finally got some sleep. The world has changed.
What a beautiful thing it is:
Steel Pulse teaches us the meaning of product versioning. See previous version here >>
We need a leader, a leader
To march on to Liberty
Get it Together
Vote Barack, Barack Obama...
MP3 here >>
Invest a little, learn a lot.
I've always enjoyed his work >>
See also: "How Productivity Killed American Enterprise"
In this month's Harvard Business Review, authors John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison provide a road map for the daunting task of shaping strategy as technology-driven infrastructures constantly change.
The article is called: “Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption” and you can download it here (thanks Deloitte Consulting!) >>
In my view this is a very timely piece of thinking from my heroes JH3 and JSB (and Lang Davison). I'll dig into it later this month on ecosystemwatch.com...
Wait, there's more. Check out the podcast >>
Don't look now, but P&G is trying some direct selling online.
From the Financial Times:
Procter & Gamble is testing its ability to use the internet to sell its toothpaste, household cleaners and nappies directly to US households, in a potential long-term strategic challenge to its retail partners.
...The move brings P&G into direct brand competition with its retailers, underlining the extent to which e-commerce is contributing to changes in the way the two sides have traditionally worked with each other.
OK. The site is called theEssentials.com, but so far it looks like they have very little traffic.
Is this how they intend to fight the private label war? I'll talk about them later this month on ecosystemwatch.com
One of the great things about the late Peter Drucker is that he can be summoned to solve just about any problem.
One of my clients is a web retailer. They're having serious issues with "customer hesitancy."
And of course the headlines are now full of bad news in retail.
So we had a long chat about customer hesitancy. What makes the customer hesitant? Is it really the news on TV? Is it the fact that they might be out of a job?
My first piece of advice to them was straight out of Drucker: Stop selling and start buying for the customer.
Are you buying for the customer? Really?
That line of reasoning led to these predictable questions: so exactly who is your customer? Are there segments you aren't serving that you should? Are there segments you should stop wasting your time with?
We were able to go and look at their historic web-sales data (for the past two years down to the last two weeks) to find out who their customers really were. And surprise, there was no customer hesitancy there!
All they needed was to focus on the right segment. We changed the website to do just that.
Listen to good old (in this case a younger, "1.0 version") Drucker:
Coming soon at www.slackeruprising.com>>
Note: The download is only available to those residing in the United States and Canada. In order to receive the free download on September 23rd, you must confirm that you are a resident of the United States or Canada.
Will this change the movie business? Or better, will it change our government?
Here's Crispin Porter & Bogusky's attempt to "bring back" Microsoft:
It's the first in a series of ads designed to fight Apple's "Mac vs. PC" comedy show. Will $300 million do the job?
C'mon Microsoft! You can't let Apple do this to you:
The scary thing is there's so much more.
The way I see it this isn't about Vista at all. It's about the next wave of competition, about how Microsoft will compete against Goople - Google apps on Apple hardware!
JH3 and JSB have written an insightful piece for BusinessWeek titled: How SAP Seeds Innovation: SAP's collaborative Web sites and discussion forums give its customers ways to learn from SAP business partners as well as from each other.
So why does SAP succeed where others fail?
According to Hagel:
1) SAP generated its ecosystem, which consists of customers, business partners, experts and independent parties by addressing the needs of the participants
and
2) it focused on the needs of individuals, not just companies.
There you have it: people first.
Read the entire article >>
Announcing our new blog at www.ecosystemwatch.com >>
The idea is fairly simple: If you don't understand the ecosystem you're competing in, you can't compete effectively...
The blog will cover the following topics:
- Blogosphere
- Branding Ecosystems
- Business Ecosystems
- Business Models
- Case Studies
- Disruption
- Ecosystem Maps
- Industry Ecosystems
- Influencers
- Innovation Ecosystems
- Political Ecosystems
- Product Ecosystems
- Social Networking
- Strategy
- Value-Networks
This is a natural offshoot of our Ecosystem Intelligence™ service; take a look...
In some companies, you'll hear senior executives spout this tired mantra: "Innovation is everyone's job." When that happens, head for the exit.
Now, the British are going to tell us how to measure innovation. The National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts (NESTA), a nonprofit organization that promotes innovation, wants to create a new index, one that will be industry-specific... blah, blah, blah.
I agree with their premise that traditional methods of measuring innovation, such as the amount of money thrown at R&D, don't tell the entire story.
But their idea of implementing an industry-based "peer review in which company executives both help to define the innovation indicators and rate each other" is a joke.
Let's see. Let's ask the CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, Shell ,and BP to rate their industry on innovative approaches to solving the energy problem. Not funny, is it?
Clayton Christensen says the same thing in this article about creating new value networks.
So what should we measure? How about looking at results?
Can we identify disruptive entrants in an existing industry ecosystem? (Shameless plug: yes, we can - with Ecosystem IQ)
Hey, at least the British are trying. Better than our lame Department of Commerce.
BTW, BusinessWeek does have a Global Innovation Index worth looking at, but again, they're looking at the establishment, the industry giants that are investing in innovation.
What I want to see is the game-changers. Where's the next successful car company coming from? Is it Tata or Tesla?
Two perspectives - one for Tom Davenport:
and the other from Google's Marissa Mayer:
The "open-culture" thing is key. I wrote about this a while back in a not-so-subtle entry titled: "Google's Product Development & Management Process Revealed" .
Back in 2000 I was the leading an interesting experiment at one of the world's largest software companies. The idea was simply this: if we build "communities of interest" around a specific topic (e.g. "database management," or "innovation," or "quality of experience") we'll be able to attract a significant number of our "target" audience and convert them to paying customers over time.
In a year and a half, we built seven distinct communities each supported by an ecosystem of vendors and partners. For four years we tried to make these communities work, and we did, with various levels of success. Along the way we learned several key lessons and I mention them here because while they seem basic, few companies ever seem to get them right:
Communities build Brand Equity
Unaided brand recognition for our company went from 12% to 84% within two years. Our "agency" did the survey and couldn't believe the findings. Like most agencies, this one was focused on producing "creative" work rather than figuring out how to be useful to the consumer. Of all the sites we built, this was the only one which received "full funding" and was strongly supported ($) by the sponsoring business unit. It became a major hub in the ecosystem we were competing in, and we literally had about 50% of the "target audience" "opted-in" to our email newsletter. Furthermore, in terms of online referrals, this community accounted for as much as 40% (yes, forty percent) of referrals to the online store.
Communities are Self Segmenting
We learned we didn't have to target or segment anyone. The content did the work for us. Because each community was "vertical" and concentrated on a specific subject, the only visitors we got were people interested in the topics we wrote about. In fact, the some of our more successful sites became the hub in the marketspace we were targeting.
Stop Selling, Start Learning
We didn't push products on the sites. In fact, we tried hard not to sell. Instead, we focused on educational content from the world's leading experts. The result, we had "stickiness" numbers even I couldn't believe. On our best site, the average user spent over an hour per visit. And this number held up every month, for three years in a row. While we tried our best to teach, we also spent a considerable amount of time learning. I'd spend afternoons poring over site statistics - trying to figure out what was going on.
The 90/10 Rule applies
As we studied visitor behavior, we looked at content and author popularity, the clickthroughs and conversion rates, and resilience - which articles or discussions stood the test of time. Surprisingly, we noted that 5% of our authors drove 95% of our traffic. And 5% of our readers drove 95% of our sales. This was the pareto-principle on steroids (Richard Koch was right)!
Communities Drive Demand Generation
10X better than traditional online techniques like SEO and PPC. Our cost per lead was so low, our EVP of Sales couldn't believe it. He became one of our biggest supporters.
Corporate Marketing is the Enemy
Don't ever sell "communities" to a marketing department that thinks in terms of quarters and campaigns. As our communities took off, we experienced all sorts of difficulties, not from the outside, but rather from the corporate marketing staff. My boss believed that companies must drive traffic to their branded company URL, and not to a myriad of niche sites with funky names like linuxvalue.com (the site no longer exists, but it did work). Luckily my boss got zapped before I did, and I was able to keep the experiment going over four years and three different corporate marketing regimes. To this day, they don't get it.
Forget the Wisdom of the Crowd, Focus on Thought Leadership
Communities are not necessarily social networks. We learned early on to allow the leading experts in the field to write about their pet peeves and passions. Sometimes they would come to "virtual blows" - one expert against the other - each presenting their views with wit and learning (and the occasional threat).
Manage the Ecosystem
After a year of slogging, we suddenly noticed that we didn't have to worry about keywords or search engines ever again. We had become Google favorites. Almost anything we wrote about on any of the sites rose to #1 in Google and stayed there for years. Why? Because we had built a strong enough ecosystem- not a business ecosystem, mind you, but a consumer ecosystem. Our readers loved us. The experts loved us. Google loved us. What a game! All we had to do was focus on quality content. Our ecosystem became impenetrable. We had built a firewall against all competition. One example is particularly striking. Even after we stopped updating the site in question, we remained at #1 in Google for a highly competitive key phrase - not for a month or two, but for straight three years, after we had stopped touching the site at all!
There were a few more lessons we learned as well, but I think I've done enough jabbering for today. The end game for me was Double Loop Marketing™ and Ecosystem Intelligence™ - both direct offshoots of my time spent figuring out how to make communities succeed.
Interesting analyses. We are going to see many more such mergers.
India and China are buying up brands.
We are going to see many more such mergers. These are "learning-acquisitions."
Let's see what Tata can teach Jaguar, and vice-versa. Value-engineering? Haven't heard that terms since the 1980s...
From GE to Target, from IBM to Best Buy, companies of all stripes and sizes are struggling to quantify the effects of Web 2.0 on their companies. What are the blogs saying? Are they positive or negative? What's happening on Second Life? Where are our customers congregating? Who are the influencers in the marketspace?
The result of this anxiety is a new booming business in "marketspace analytics"—companies that profess to track your brand over time and alert you to news (bad or good) in real time.
Given some of the new findings about buzz in the blogosphere (positive online buzz for cars and trucks doesn't necessarily translate to volume sales) you have to ask, are they wasting their time?
My take on this is somewhat biased. I view all of these brand monitoring products as the online equivalent of the traditional press-clipping tracking function the PR companies used to cling to as a way to justify their existence.
That said, online brand building is a critical competence for today's marketer. What matters is not online buzz which is a temporary spike in attention, but what that buzz does to your position in your online ecosystem.
Your competitive position in your ecosystem determines your destiny:
• How do you and your competitors compare in terms of return on marketing investments and relative share of the ecosystem?
• How are the leaders making money, and what is their approach in the ecosystem?
• What is the full potential of your business position in the ecosystem?
• How big is your marketspace—the size of the ecosystem you want to compete in?
• Which parts of the ecosystem are growing fastest?
• Where are you gaining or losing share in the ecosystem or sub-ecosystems you compete in?
• What capabilities are creating a competitive advantage for you in the ecosystem?
• Which capabilities need to be strengthened or acquired to help you compete in the ecosystem?
Because we couldn't find anything to help us with these questions, we decided to build it ourselves. That's how our Ecosystem Intelligence™ service came into existence:
(i) to help measure a company's position in the ecosystem(s) it competes in, and
(ii) to help improve that position in the marketspace over time
Now let's check out some of the competing brand monitoring vendors:
Biz360: provides customer opinion measurement from thousands of expert and consumer product review websites, shopping sites, blogs and message boards
Cymfony: rated highly by the tech analysts, they claim to "quantify your amount of coverage as well as get expert qualitative interpretation of how effectively your message is being picked up in traditional and social media."
Skygrid: a search tool that sifts through hundreds of web and mainstream media to show you just one thing: whether the balance of the news on a public company is good or bad, and how the “mood” is changing.
BrandIntel: collects, processes and analyzes online consumer content and applies human analysis to the results in context.
Factiva: monitors your competitors, customers, and industry, with in-depth research and company financial data reports.
MotiveQuest: "sees" the "peaks of passion" in online conversations to understand customer motivations. Again, a combination of proprietary software and human analysts to explore what drives customer behavior.
Nielsen Buzzmetrics: measures consumer-generated media to help companies understand consumer needs, reactions and issues. They use a data-warehouse approach to index customer sentiment.
Scout Labs: allows users to track brands and reactions to those brands. In essence, the company helps companies make sense of positive and negative brand sentiment in blogs, user generated videos, and images.
Umbria: analyzes social media—including blogs, message boards, Usenet, and product review sites. Umbria also adds human insights to their data reports.
And there you have it, all variations on the press-clipping theme.
And unfortunately most companies (including the ones above) don't get it.
It's not about tracking buzz, it's about starting a conversation.
Seth Godin gets it.
Positive online buzz for cars and trucks doesn't necessarily translate to volume sales, period.
Here's the story in AdAge: "What Web Buzz Does for Car Sales: Not Much"
Turns out that BrandIntel has been monitoring 450,000 comments over the past year. Comments made by "enthusiasts" in consumer discussion forums on auto-information sites such as Edmunds.com, newspaper and magazine sites, and blogs.
Let's look at the print/paper analogy. This is the equivalent counting the number of press-clippings in the trade mags. As a measure of PR efficacy of getting stories published, it worked great. As an indicator of sales, it didn't.
What matters in print and online is the credibility of the messenger and the size of the audience. A story in Rupert Murdoch's WSJ or the NY Times may have a dramatic impact compared to the same story in your local rag.
Online, credibility and audience-size still matter, but so does findability. How easy is the story to find? Does it come up high in Google and to a lesser extent Yahoo? If there is buzz, is the buzz on a hub or a backwater site? Is it getting attention or play through links from other noteworthy sites?
How does one measure that? There is a way - ecosystem relevance - which measures the position and rank of a site within its industry/category ecosystem.
A viable, sustainable economic model is crucial for the future of the planet. Tell 'em, C.K.!
I was talking to Bill Dunk this morning, and we got to the topic of trust as an issue in global business.
I told him I'd seen a video in which Jeff Immelt said something to the effect that in China the concept of win-win is an issue, whereas India is much better at partnerships.
Immediately, Bill dug up this article for me - an interview with Nani Beccalli-Falco, GE International's chief executive.
From the article:
This is a difficult challenge and it is one that Beccalli-Falco speaks of with surprising candour. He talks of the problems of striking deals in China, where, he says, the values of equity and fairness implied in the West's 'win/win' approach to business are replaced by a more naked self-interest. "In China, they have a tendency to think 'win for China, OK for you'," he says. "It makes forming partnerships difficult."
If you want to get a global perspective on business, you must subscribe (for free) to Bill Dunk's Global Province >>
And yes, I finally dug up the video:
Watch Immelt's interview with Rajat Gupta, and listen carefully as Immelt talks about India versus China - right at the very end of the video:
"China has a hard time with win-win. That's a problem over the long term.India's much better. There's a much better sense that India can be a real ally..."
Wow.
China's got the Olympics this summer... wonder if they'll let anyone else win a medal...
Seth Godin helps you wake up... you can't be average anymore.
- Design...
- Don't be safe...
- Don't be boring...
- Skip the BMW ad...
- it's Otaku time!
The December 2007 HBR had an interesting article by Kevin Coyne called Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box. There's far more to this article than just the 21 questions, so I urge you to go grab it here!
The approach Coyne and friends describe supposedly works better than brainstorming or strict quantitative analysis >>
“De-average” buyers and users
Which customers use or purchase our product in the most unusual way?
Do any customers need vastly more or less sales and service attention than most?
For which customers are the support costs (order entry, tracking, customer-specific design) either unusually high or unusually low?
Could we still meet the needs of a significant subset of customers if we stripped 25% of the hard or soft costs out of our product?
Who spends at least 50% of what our product costs to adapt it to their specific needs?
Explore unexpected successes
Who uses our product in ways we never expected or intended?
Who uses our product in surprisingly large quantities?
Look beyond the boundaries of our business
Who else is dealing with the same generic problem as we are but for an entirely different reason? How have they addressed it?
What major breakthroughs in efficiency or effectiveness have we made in our business that could be applied in another industry?
What information about customers and product use is created as a by-product of our business that could be the key to radically improving the economics of another business?
Examine binding constraints
What is the biggest hassle of purchasing or using our product?
What are some examples of ad hoc modifications that customers have made to our product?
For which current customers is our product least suited?
For what particular usage occasions is our product least suited?
Which customers does the industry prefer not to serve, and why?
Which customers could be major users, if only we could remove one specific barrier we’ve never previously considered?
Imagine perfection
How would we do things differently if we had perfect information about our buyers, usage, distribution channels, and so on?
How would our product change if it were tailored for every customer?
Revisit the premises underlying our processes and products
Which technologies embedded in our product have changed the most since the product was last redesigned?
Which technologies underlying our production processes have changed the most since we last rebuilt our manufacturing and distribution systems?
Which customers’ needs are shifting most rapidly? What will they be in five years?
Finally, if you want to hire Kevin Coyne, he's available here >>
Microsoft and Yahoo need to listen to this carefully...
The Economist tells us that Hyundai almost yanked its Super Bowl advertising due to economic concerns. At the last minute, they decided to stay put.
Yank it, I say. And spend the money advertising on the Internet!
The article goes on to tell us that: "Marketing spending is one of the first things companies decide to cut when faced with slowing sales."
This is true, but only when companies don't understand marketing. Which means despite what Maurice Lévy at Publicis Groupe and Sir Martin Sorrell at WPP are saying, look for a crash in marketing spend.
The NY Times tells us "Forecasters Say Madison Avenue Will Escape a Recession, Just Barely."
I say they're wrong.
We know that the research tells us that recessions clearly reward aggressive advertisers and destroy timid ones.
In a study of U.S. recessions, McGraw-Hill Research analyzed 600 companies covering 16 different SIC industries from 1980 through 1985. Results showed [hat tip to MacTech] that business-to-business firms that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-1982 recession averaged significantly higher sales growth, both during the recession and for the following three years, than those that eliminated or decreased advertising. By 1985, sales of companies that were aggressive recession advertisers had risen 256% over those that didn't keep up their advertising.
Sales for the companies studied were relatively even before the recession, but varied sharply during and after. Companies that cut advertising during both of the recessionary years maintained flat sales during the period and only modest sales growth in the following two years. In contrast, the companies that maintained their advertising experienced significant sales growth throughout the four-year period.
According to the study and contrary to popular belief, cuts in advertising during a recession decrease net income over the long haul. Companies that maintained advertising during the recession enjoyed measurably higher net income gains not only during the recession, but even more so, two years after the recession. This in stark contrast to those companies those companies that cut advertising both years and significantly reduced their profits during the recession, and for years following.
On top of that, my friend Sundar Bharadwaj insists that "the impact of branding on firm performance outweighs both the impact of the competitive environment and resource allocation."
But that, ladies and gents, was before the Internets.
Now, we're going to see something we've never seen before. The end of advertising as we know it. If the Olympics go south, as they just might especially given the lame coverage we've seen in the past, I expect that TV will be hit hardest, followed by print - magazines and periodicals.
Radio will stay flat, and the biggest (and only) gainer will be online advertising.
I'm convinced we're going to see a boom in marketspace analytics.
Smart money will focus on ecosystems. They'll know exactly where to advertise to get the best response to drive quarterly results.
Ask yourself:
- Are we in the right ecosystem to begin with?
- Who are we competing against really? (versus who we believe we are competing against)
- Where do we stand vis-à-vis our competitors?
- Who else is in our ecosystem? Are they neutral, friends, or enemies?
- What are the microtrends? Are we gaining or losing on the competition?
- What are the keywords being used to dominate our ecosystem?
- Are there any potential partners in the ecosystem we want to compete in?
- Is our target demographic well represented in our actual ecosystem?
- Do we need an offensive or defensive strategy to challenge the competition? Can we do both?
- Where does the traffic for our ecosystem come from? Is it global?
- What must we do in the short-term to compete? What about the long-term?
- Where should we be advertising?
- Can we dominate our industry ecosystem?
Welcome to ecosystem marketing.
This is what happens when green-design meets the automobile industry >>
What's holding up production? I need one of these right now!
And why can't regular car companies do this?
Being stalked? Just go ahead and camouflage yourself as a Coke machine.
Martin Fackler's NYTimes article Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place gives us a look at the peculiar world of Japanese innovation.
Writes Fackler:
[Japan is] home to a prolific subculture of individual inventors, whose ideas range from practical to bizarre. Inventors say a tradition of tinkering and building has made Japan welcoming to experimental ideas, no matter how eccentric.
“Japanese society won’t just laugh, so inventors are not afraid to try new things,” said Takumi Hirai, chairman of Japan’s largest association of individual inventors, the 10,000-member Hatsumeigakkai.
In fact, Japan produces so many unusual inventions that it even has a word for them: chindogu, or “queer tools.”
A chindogu manifesto is available online for all you budding inventors. The ten tenets are:
1. A Chindogu cannot be for real use.
2. A Chindogu must exist.
3. Inherent in every Chindogu is the spirit of anarchy.
4. Chindogu are tools for everyday life.
5. Chindogu are not for sale.
6. Humor must not be the sole reason for creating Chindogu.
7. Chindogu are not propaganda.
8. Chindogu are never taboo.
9. Chindogu cannot be patented.
10. Chindogu are without prejudice.
And here are a few examples of chindogu from the King of Chindogu - Kenji Kawakami.
Finally, here's more from the International Chindogu Society. Check out the "portable zebra crossing" >>
Why do so many global strategies fail—despite companies’ powerful brands and other border-crossing advantages?
Seduced by market size, the illusion of a borderless, “flat” world, and the allure of similarities, firms launch one-size-fits-all strategies.
But cross-border differences a
