Last week I chaired a conference on Strategic Law Firm Management organized by Ark Group. While there was disappointingly little on law firms’ high-level strategic positioning and how that may shift over coming years, there were a wealth of insights into more general management issues. Clearly, people and culture are at the heart of managing […]
Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein is using wikis, blogs, instant messaging, and other collaborative software tools to supplant email, according to an article in this week’s issue of BusinessWeek titled Email is So Five Minutes Ago. J.P. Rangaswami, Dresdner’s CIO, an ardent critic of email, says that in some cases use of these tools is […]
Ketchum PR, one of the top few public relations agencies in the world, has just posted on their company intranet an interview with me on major trends in PR. They’ve kindly allowed me also to post it here on my blog. The key themes they distilled from our original wide-ranging interview are on the role […]
Microcredit (also known as microfinance) is the business of making very small loans, sometimes as low as $50 or less, to poor people who can invest the money to help them make a living. Recipients of loans may buy sewing machines or other simple tools that allow them to earn money, pay off the loan, […]
Blogs, wikis, and other social software tools are rapidly gaining traction in the business sector. In particular, they are being applied to issues that were previously addressed with other tools and approaches. Last week executives from IBM Lotus, which arguably provided the first enterprise collaboration platform back in the early 1980s, stated that they see […]
Following on the previous story on Sony digital rights management, Sony has announced it will stop making CDs using this DRM technology, after the first virus that uses Sony’s copy-protection software to hide had been discovered. At a public event yesterday, Stewart Baker, the assistant secretary for policy at the Department for Homeland Security made […]
The big story this week has been how Sony BMG has way overstepped the mark by how they have used digital rights management (DRM) technology to prevent copying of its music CDs. This could shift the course of the debate and public perception of DRM. For those who haven’t read about this yet, Mark Russinovich, […]
Investor relations is the art of managing relationships with your investors. It used to be easy: tell them whatever you felt like telling them. Shareholder activism, new regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and the internet have dramatically changed the landscape, giving far more power to investors. A great example was the Save Disney campaign. Roy Disney […]
One of the issues I’ve spent much time on over the last decade is how financial markets buy-side/ sell-side relationships (usually those between investment banks and fund managers) are changing, and what the implications are for investment banking sales and research. My case has largely been that financial markets salespeople need to build “knowledge-based” relationships […]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the most active and powerful organization aiming to protect civil liberties in the digital world, has just announced that it has cracked the secret codes printed by the Xerox DocuColor color laser printer, as a first step to bring color printer secret codes into the open. The U.S. Secret Service […]
