In recent years, I have become somewhat competent at cooking. I never paid much attention to my culinary capabilities in the past, but a change in my life circumstances made me try my hand at cooking. And it has turned out quite well. I receive lots of compliments about my cooking. So what’s my secret? Simple. Treat cooking as an engineering problem. Apply simple engineering principles and you can become a pretty good cook. Here are some pointers: 1. Follow a Process: As in

My new book just got published in Europe. I co-wrote this with two Italian co-authors – Emanuela Prandelli and Gianmario Vernona. They are both at Bocconi University in Milan. The book is called Collaborating with Customers to Innovate: Conceiving and Marketing New Products in the Network Age. The book synthesizes the work that the three of us have been doing on collaborative innovation and distributed innovation with customers in viertual environments. We discuss the power

What Could Be The roads that we don’t walk Do they still continue to exist? The songs that we don’t sing Do they still play on our lips? The books that we don’t read Do their words still speak? The people that we don’t meet Do they still live in our midst? The dreams that we don’t dream Do they still haunt our sleep? The feelings that we don’t express Do they still touch us deep? The kisses that we don’t give Do they still caress our lips? The prayers that we don’t offer Do t

Memory Lane Today I walked down memory lane Thought I’d visit with myself in the past It had been a long time As I rummaged through my mind Dusting off cobwebs from what was I uncovered a scene that lay forgotten Faded and dimmed by passages of time As I began to play it back in my mind It slowly came into focus I slipped effortlessly into in the past I was back in the moment I began to feel like I had felt And to think what I had thought It is as if a dam had been broken I w

I was in Mexico this week to deliver a public seminar on Marketing. My host was Seminarium Mexico – they organize top-quality seminars featuring faculty from leading business schools. In my conversation with the host and participants, it became obvious to me how quickly the financial markets crisis affected the Mexican economy, and how bad things are likely to become. The Mexican Peso has lost more than a third of its value since August 2. Companies hare hurting badly despite

I gave a keynote last week at the Teradata User Group Conference in Las Vegas. The subject was “Collaborative Analytics”. To me, it seems logical that two key trends – the rise of Collaboration and the interest in Analytics should come together to create the concept of Collaborative Analytics. I define Collaborative Analytics as a process whereinter-organizational teams organize, analyze and interpret federated customer and operations data to make better joint business decisi