"The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It's to make meaning," writes management consultant John Hagel. Out: Bottom-line-pragmatists and financial wizards. In: philosophers and ethicists.
The world may have thrilled to the potential for a Google Phone, but what Google actually unveiled is its plan for a new smartphone world order.
• Photos: Unboxing Nexus One
faq Worms, Trojans, and SMS attacks are risks for mobile phones, but the biggest practical threat to users is losing the device.
Tim Leberecht and Adam Richardson both work for Frog Design, a consulting firm specialized in designing innovative products and services for Fortune 500 clients. On the Matter / Anti-Matter blog, they engage in a debate around questions they face day-to-day in their work, using convergence/divergence as a lens through which to look at the pressing issues in business, culture, and technology. What makes a successful convergent product or a successful divergent innovation? Is convergence a myth that users don't really care about, or is the current state of convergence just not satisfying enough for them to embrace? How much divergence of innovation is good, and when does it just become confusing? How do you stay on top of people's ever changing needs and wants?
They are members of the CNET Blog Network and are not employees of CNET.
Add this feed to your online news reader
- by ITRebel January 4, 2009 7:07 AM PST
- Although I voted for Obama, I am not sure yet if it was a wise choice. Leaders who present themselves as Chief Meaning Officers must deliver. The expectations are much greater for this type of leader, but can they deliver?
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(3 Comments)I am most interested in the performance of these idealistic and spiritual movements when reality starts to take shape. A good example is the open source movement in software. It is a movement based upon idealized and almost spiritual notions about the freedom of software. They thought that they could have profitable software companies based upon revenues from service alone. That model has failed miserably. Open source software is now paid software in business applications. The problem is that these open source products often perform very poorly against proprietary products in basic benchmark measures such as speed because the proprietary products have the advantage of closed innovation. When a business model like open source has been built on a spiritual message like "free software" and when that message is switched, the credibility of the movement leaders and the movement evaporates. At the end of the day, a business leader has to make sure that the product that they deliver has better value than all other possibilities. There is nothing spiritual about this; it is the way that business has always been done.