by Ted Cuzzillo
Here’s a morsel with possibly no practical value at all. It’s from last Sunday’s New York Times on what CEOs read:
“I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports … “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”
by Ted Cuzzillo
I comb through a lot of business intelligence-related press releases and articles, so I was surprised to hear that the new book Made to Stick is popular among PR people.
In fact, the fact that the book is more popular among PR people than any other profession is co-author Chip Heath’s main disappointment. Last Wednesday night at his Global Business Network talk, he said he’d hoped to reach more HR and engineering types. Marketing and PR people already know the principles the book spells out, he says.
How many of them know those principles?
If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s worth reading.… Read the rest “More BI writers need “Made to Stick””
by Ted Cuzzillo
A friend of Datadoodle recalls this story: He stood before a room full of IT people who worked on mainframes and asked them, “‘How many of you feel responsibility for the quality of the data?'”
Not one raised a hand. He said to them, “OK, now you’re the CIO and I’m a salesman. And I say, ‘You know how those guys are always telling you that you can’t get your data off that old clunky thing? Well, they just want to keep their jobs. You need to get your data off that old-fashioned thing.'”
One day the mainframe is gone in favor of a $10 million replacement.… Read the rest “That old clunky thing”