THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! went the music and WAH! WAH! WAH! went my baby daughter. A party a few doors down was getting out of hand. It was 1.15 in the morning and time to take action.

“Wimbledon police station?” I asked, after dialling the number in the phone book. “Well, we handle their calls,” a man answered, slightly mysteriously. (Great: a call centre, just what I needed.) But no, sorry, they didn’t deal with this sort of thing. Try the local authority and its environmental health department instead.

I did. I pressed “3” to opt for help, and was put through to a tired-sounding person on the night shift. “Let me take a few more details from you, and somebody will call you back,” he said. “Can’t you deal with this?” I whined. “That’s not how it works.”

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Managers dream of discovering the new new thing. Innovation is on every business leader’s lips.

“We plan to launch more new products than at any time in our history,” wrote Jeff Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, in this newspaper last week. That’s 130 years of rather impressive history he is hoping to outdo.

The most fashionable concept in the world of innovation is the network – an outwardly focused group of people that helps to bring ideas into the organisation. Keen innovation networkers seek things that are “not invented here”.

But what if the answer to your quest for innovation lies closer to home, within the organisation? As Bain’s Chris Zook has argued for many years, some companies “may already hold most of the cards for a winning hand” but cannot see it.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Ok, so we don’t actually have any sort of world exclusive with anyone from Google (although today’s news that Google is releasing an operating system is, in management terms, a huge story and it would be a great time to have an interview with the company) but I borrowed the headline from the cover of the August edition of Wired UK magazine. I added the exclamation mark at the end to show just how much better our “world exclusive” is.

It’s an odd claim given that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has been interviewed a few times on FT.com, and that there doesn’t seem to be anything especially new in this piece. But any interview with the people (Wired also spoke to Sergey Brin) who are at the forefront of a technology revolution at one of the world’s most interesting companies is worth reading.

Continue reading "World exclusive interview with Google!"

John Gapper reviewed Free: The future of a radical price, the latest book by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired (US edition) in today’s paper.

And over on John’s blog, we have been engaging in our first ‘interactive review’ - opening up our pages to the author to respond and exchange ideas with the critic.

The discussion threw up some interesting ideas and, being the FT, they were discussed in a suitably civilised way.

I’m sure a lot of readers have thoughts on this so feel free to pitch in with your comments (registration is required but this isn’t too onerous).

The great financial crisis intensified at ultra-high speed thanks to super-fast broadband connections and increased computer processing power. Time to switch the machines off? No. But it is surely time to manage the flow of information better.

This will not be easy. Research led by the husband-and-wife-team Professors Andrew and Nada Kakabadse (he is based at the Cranfield school of management, she is at the Northampton business school) has revealed the depths of managers’ addiction to new communication technology. Around a quarter of the 1,200 professionals surveyed spend three or more hours a day on their e-mails and sending text messages. More than half the younger and middle-aged respondents never turn their phones off at all.

Three quarters of younger workers admit to being addicted to technology. Alcohol, tobacco, shopping: none of these temptations matches the appeal of fancy new gadgets and high-tech kit. The only good news is that, while confessing to their addiction, the majority of respondents deny that their use of technology is out of control.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Italy’s Alessi is a master at using imaginative design to transform everyday objects such as kettles and toilet brushes into beautiful luxury goods.

Alberto Alessi, the design house’s CEO, applies a mathematical model to figure out whether a prototype will succeed in the marketplace.

In an interview with McKinsey (registration required), he says the first component of the formula is the degree to which a person would say “oh, what a beautiful object”.

The second is the extent to which customers could make use of the object to communicate their definition of themselves to others (i.e., show off).

The third and fourth components of the formula — and he rather glosses over these, it must be said — are function and price.

The formula doesn’t work for everything. But when we have a long history with a product, it works perfectly. If I have to evaluate a pot or a coffee maker or a kettle, for example, the score indicates exactly the number of pieces that we can sell.

The system certainly seems to produce new products that have a long shelf life: Mr Alessi says half are still on sale a decade after their introduction.

Further reading: Mr Alessi discusses how to compete with China in an FT interview.

How can western companies thrive when they are having to cut spending and their customers are doing the same? They should look east to China, says Professor Peter Williamson of the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School.

In a new FT Management podcast, he argues that the best Chinese companies are models of “cost innovation”. This doesn’t mean expertise in cheap manufacturing alone. Rather, their skill is in entirely rethinking product and market definitions by doing more with less.

This might involve making high-end technology available in low-end products, or exploding an elitist niche market into a mass market, he says.

You can listen to our conversation — and my concerns about whether this is something western companies truly can emulate — on the FT’s podcast player or download the interview (and also subscribe to future episodes) via iTunes.

• How a surfeit of growth strategies can hurt a business;
• Going from zero to one: the art of launching new products (such as the first electronic calculator) explained by one of Casio’s founders;
• Eight reasons why General Motors failed as a marketer (no.6: “no global brand”);
• The ideal farewell speech - a time to settle old scores?