martes, 28 de enero de 2014

Mucho más que 30 años (Fernando García)

En definitiva ese Apple ][ representaba la quintaesencia de la unión de mentalidades de Steve Wozniak y Steve Jobs. El diseño y la facilidad de uso de este último (la carcasa de policarbonato de diseño elegante fue responsabilidad suya) y el entorno abierto y “hackeable” de Wozniak, del que su famoso sentido de humor también llegó a los manuales. En la guía de referencia del ordenador –que contenía su esquema y el desensamblado de la ROM– si se examinaba el glosario al final se encontraban estas dos definiciones:
Bug: Ver Feature.
Feature (Característica): Un bug visto por el departamento de marketing.

¿Hacia la izquierda o hacia la derecha?

Vía @adomon RT de Twitter / Fascinatingpics: http://t.co/p7KlZEqTQc


domingo, 26 de enero de 2014

The 30-Year-Old Macintosh and a Lost Conversation With Steve Jobs - NYTimes.com

The 30-Year-Old Macintosh and a Lost Conversation With Steve Jobs - NYTimes.com

‘You know we’re constantly taking. We don’t make most of the food we eat, we don’t grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.’”
-Steve Jobs

sábado, 25 de enero de 2014

Historia del Sushi

Historia del Sushi – Las Indias


Haciendo balance, lo que ha hecho posible que el sushi sea hoy uno de los bocados más apreciados de la cocina global es el desarrollo del comercio: desde los mercados de las primeras ciudades a las reuniones de negocios internacionales de los primeros atisbos de globalización que siguieron a la guerra mundial. No es ningún secreto, son los mercaderes, los que en su nomadismo, impulsaron siempre la única cultura que no necesita adjetivos, que no es local ni nacional, ni siquiera global, sino sencilla y deliciosamente, humana.



miércoles, 22 de enero de 2014

Reindustrializaciones tecnológicas: la fiebre del oro (gris)


En Academic research and industrial innovation, un estudio de la Universidad de Pennsylvania publicado por Edwin Mansfield en 1990 que se ha convertido en un clásico sobre la economía científica, llegó a estimarse que una décima parte de los productos industriales comercializados entre 1975 y 1978 no se habrían producido sin la investigación académica y estimaba el retorno de la inversión en ciencia durante el mismo periodo en un 28 por ciento.

…os países y las regiones también deben tener un criterio ambicioso sobre el tipo de cepa industrial con que desean repoblar su territorio. …

La industria de alta intensidad tecnológica es aquella que produce bienes para el mercado a partir de procesos industriales que exigen porcentajes muy elevados de inversión en investigación y desarrollo. No debe confundirse la industria de alta intensidad tecnológica con la industria digital. Toda la industria digital es de alta intensidad tecnológica, pero no toda la industria de alta intensidad tecnológica es industria digital.

Por ejemplo la intensidad tecnológica de la industria aeroespacial es de 10.2, la de la automoción de 3.5, mientras que la de la industria del cuero es de 0.3. La idea es bien sencilla, hay actividades industriales que consumen una gran cantidad de investigación científica y técnica, consolidando en torno suyo un poderoso entramado de oportunidades profesionales para personal altamente cualificado y generando otros rendimientos positivos para el territorio que van mucho más allá de lo económico.

La episteconomía se interesa mucho por el amplio sistema de conexiones y correspondencias existentes entre lo científico y lo económico, por el análisis de los medios y las condiciones a través de los que el conocimiento intelectual puede transformarse en una poderosa fuente de riqueza económica, con un especial énfasis en los aspectos geográficos y en todo lo relativo al territorio y la localización de las economías del conocimiento.

El Human Genome Project (HGP) es otro de los gigantescos fenómenos episteconómicos del mundo. Fundado en 1990 supuso la integración interdisciplinar de un equipo internacional de biólogos, químicos, físicos, informáticos, ingenieros y matemáticos con el objetivo de determinar la secuencia completa de pares de bases que componen el ADN humano.

El Center for the American Progress, la fundación de estudios del partido demócrata, estimó que con una inversión en el Proyecto Genoma Humano de un 0.005 por ciento del PIB de Estados Unidos durante los quince primeros años del proyecto, sus resultados acabaron produciendo en 2010 un impacto favorable del 5.4 por ciento del PIB estadounidense. Así, mientras se calcula que el esfuerzo financiero necesario para propiciar la revolución genómica ascendió a 3.800 millones del dólares, el retorno fue de 796.000 millones y la creación de 310.000 empleos.

En un sentido lato, la ciencia es el fenómeno económico de mayor impacto que ha conocido la humanidad. Para empezar, su código fuente, el dinero, no es sino es una herramienta de abstracción matemática. Sin ciencia no habría agricultura, ni industria, ni civilización digital. Al final todas nuestras actividades de explotación económica, tanto da que sean primarias, secundarias o terciarias, se acaban reduciendo a un esquema inicial cuya fuente siempre es una innovación intelectual en forma de conocimiento científico. Esta afirmación puede ser corroborada de forma bastante consistente desde la paleoantropología, que es quién mejor puede mostrar que sin scientia la economía humana se reduce a las formas de vida material anteriores al homo sapiens.
Los hechos muestran que en muy pocas partes del mundo se han puesto con seriedad a explotar el filón de las economías científicas y tecnológicas. Casi todos los gobiernos del mundo demuestran concienzudamente, presupuesto tras presupuesto, que consideran la ciencia como un capítulo idóneo para la desinversión.
Lo que ponen de relieve las políticas de descapitalización de la investigación es un tipo de desconocimiento que hunde sus raíces en la ignorancia misma y que vuelve a llamar la atención respecto a unas élites políticas y empresariales peligrosamente desalfabetizadas. La mayoría de las sociedades contemporáneas viven de espaldas al alcance económico de la ciencia de igual modo que en la mayor parte de las sociedades de la prehistoria ignoraban el poder práctico de la rueda. Lamentablemente España no es ninguna excepción sino un buen botón de muestra.

Un somero estudio comparativo de los capítulos relativos a las estrategias de crecimiento territorial de las regiones españolas en el contexto de las economías del conocimiento deja un resumen concluyente: la mayor parte de los stakeholders públicos y privados no va más allá de simples esfuerzos retóricos y de una vacua terminología. Expresión genérica de voluntades y deseos, junto a una grandilocuencia imposible de concretar.

La primera misión es ordenar con rigor las prioridades. Un simple ejemplo de actualidad puede bastar. Con la deuda generada por la radiotelevisión pública valenciana (1.200 millones de euros), se ha construido en el sur de Francia, en Cadarache, la infraestructura internacional Iter.…

La mayoría de los territorios asumen, retóricamente al menos, la prioridad de reindustrializarse y de contar con sistemas consistentes de integración entre la industria y la investigación. Sin embargo existe una gran desorientación respecto a las raíces reales de las oportunidades. Casi ningún territorio ha hecho su propia introspección estratégica para comprobar la forma en que podría introducirse en este suculento mercado.

When Marketing Is Strategy - Harvard Business Review

Interesantísimo artículo… como suele pasar con el "sesgo cognitivo" tanto más interesante cuánto más refuerza tu pensamiento, jjjjj 
When Marketing Is Strategy - Harvard Business Review
Consider a consumer’s purchase of a can of Coca-Cola. In a supermarket or warehouse club the consumer buys the drink as part of a 24-pack. The price is about 25 cents a can. The same consumer, finding herself in a park on a hot summer day, gladly pays two dollars for a chilled can of Coke sold at the point-of-thirst through a vending machine. That 700% price premium is attributable not to a better or different product but to a more convenient means of obtaining it. What the customer values is this: not having to remember to buy the 24-pack in advance, break out one can and find a place to store the rest, lug the can around all day, and figure out how to keep it chilled until she’s thirsty.

Companies are still organized around their production and their products, success is measured in terms of units moved, and organizational hopes are pinned on product pipelines. Production-related activities are honed to maximize throughput, and managers who worship efficiency are promoted.

The strategic question that drives business today is not “What else can we make?” but “What else can we do for our customers?” Customers and the market—not the factory or the product—now stand at the core of the business. This new center of gravity demands a rethink of some long-standing pillars of strategy: First, the sources and locus of competitive advantage now lie outside the firm, and advantage is accumulative—rather than eroding over time as competitors catch up, it grows with experience and knowledge. Second, the way you compete changes over time. Downstream, it’s no longer about having the better product: Your focus is on the needs of customers and your position relative to their purchase criteria. You have a say in how the market perceives your offering and whom you compete with. Third, the pace and evolution of markets are now driven by customers’ shifting purchase criteria rather than by improvements in products or technology.



Must Competitive Advantage Be Internal to the Firm?In their quest for upstream competitive advantage, companies scramble to build unique assets or capabilities and then construct a wall to prevent them from leaking out to competitors. You can tell which of its activities a firm considers to be a source of competitive advantage by how well protected they are…
Downstream competitive advantage, in contrast, resides outside the company—in the external linkages with customers, channel partners, and complementors. It is most often embedded in the processes for interacting with customers, in marketplace information, and in customer behavior.
A classic thought experiment in the world of branding is to ask what would happen to Coca-Cola’s ability to raise financing and launch operations anew if all its physical assets around the world were to mysteriously go up in flames one night. The answer, most reasonable businesspeople conclude, is that the setback would cost the company time, effort, and money—but Coca-Cola would have little difficulty raising the funds to get back on its feet. The brand would easily attract investors looking for future returns.
The second part of the experiment is to ask what might happen if, instead, 7 billion consumers around the world were to wake up one morning with partial amnesia, such that they could not remember the brand name Coca-Cola or any of its associations. Long-standing habits would be broken, and customers would no longer reach for a Coke when thirsty. In this scenario, most businesspeople agree that even though Coca-Cola’s physical assets remained intact, the company would find it difficult to scare up the funds to restart operations. It turns out that the loss of downstream competitive advantage—that is, consumers’ connection with the brand—would be a more severe blow than the loss of all upstream assets.

Must You Listen to Your Customers?A company is market-oriented, according to the technical definition, if it has mastered the art of listening to customers, understanding their needs, and developing products and services that meet those needs. Believing that this process yields competitive advantage, companies spend billions of dollars on focus groups, surveys, and social media. The “voice of the customer” reigns supreme, driving decisions related to products, prices, packaging, store placement, promotions, and positioning.
But the reality is that companies are increasingly finding success not by being responsive to customers’ stated preferences but by defining what customers are looking for and shaping their “criteria of purchase.”… And even when consumers do know what they want, asking them may not be the best way to find out. Zara, the fast-fashion retailer, places only a small number of products on the shelf for relatively short periods of time—hundreds of units per month compared with a typical retailer’s thousands per season. The company is set up to respond to actual customer purchase behavior, rapidly making thousands more of the products that fly off the shelf and culling those that don’t.

Those criteria are also becoming the basis on which companies segment markets, target and position their brands, and develop strategic market positions as sources of competitive advantage. The strategic objective for the downstream business, therefore, is to influence how consumers perceive the relative importance of various purchase criteria and to introduce new, favorable criteria.

Must Competitive Advantage Erode over Time?The traditional upstream view is that as rival companies catch up, competitive advantage erodes. But for companies competing downstream, advantage grows over time or with the number of customers served—in other words, it is accumulative.

Network effects constitute a classic downstream competitive advantage: They reside in the marketplace, they are distributed (you can’t point to them, paint them, or lock them up), and they are hard to replicate. Brands, too, carry network effects.…
Indeed, the very nature of network effects is that they are accumulative. But other downstream advantages—particularly those related to amassing and deploying data—are accumulative as well.

Can You Choose Your Competitors?Conventional wisdom holds that firms are largely stuck with the competitors they have or that emerge independent of their efforts. But when advantage moves downstream, three critical decisions can determine, or at least influence, whom you play against: how you position your offering in the mind of the customer, how you place yourself vis-à-vis your competitive set within the distribution channel, and your pricing.
If you’re in the beverage business and you’ve developed a rehydrating drink, you have a choice of how to position it: as a convalescence drink for digestive ailments, as a half-time drink for athletes, or as a hangover reliever, for example. In each instance, the customer perceives the benefits differently, and is likely to compare the product to a different set of competing products.

Although choosing to avoid competitors may minimize head-on competition, there is no guarantee that you won’t still have to contend with competitors you didn’t want or ask for. But if you’ve done your homework and established dominance on your criterion of purchase, me-too competitors will be putting themselves in an unfavorable position if they choose to follow you.

Does Innovation Always Mean Better Products or Technology?Companies compete ferociously against one another not to prove superiority but to establish uniqueness. Volvo does not claim to make a better car than BMW does, nor the other way around—just a different one. In customers’ minds, Volvo is associated with safety, while BMW emphasizes the joy and excitement of driving.

Where Else Does Innovation Reside?The persistent belief that innovation is primarily about building better products and technologies leads managers to an overreliance on upstream activities and tools. But downstream reasoning suggests that managers should focus on marketplace activities and tools. Competitive battles are won by offering innovations that reduce customers’ costs and risks over the entire purchase, consumption, and disposal cycle.

Reducing costs and risks for customers is central to any downstream tilt—indeed, it is the primary means of creating downstream value.

Is the Pace of Innovation Set in the R&D Lab?The product innovation treadmill is an upstream imperative. In fact, technology innovations are sometimes thought to be the greatest threat to competitive advantage. But such changes in the market are relevant only if they upend downstream competitive advantage. … technological improvements don’t drive the pace of change in the industry—marketing clout does.
Market change can be evolutionary, generational, or revolutionary, and each type can be understood in terms of consumer psychology. Evolutionary changes push the boundaries of existing criteria of purchase: higher horsepower or better fuel efficiency for cars, faster processing speeds for semiconductor chips, more-potent pills. Generational changes introduce new criteria that complement old ones, often opening up new market segments: sugar-free soft drinks, hybrid vehicles, pull-up diapers, once-a-day medications where multiple pills were previously required. Revolutionary changes don’t just introduce new criteria, they render the old ones obsolete: The new video-game controllers from Nintendo Wii changed how people interact with their games; touch screens and multitouch interfaces changed what customers expect from a smartphone…

High failure rates for new products in many industries suggest that companies are continuing to invest heavily in product innovation but are unable to move customer purchase criteria. Technology is a necessary but insufficient condition in the evolution of markets. It’s the downstream activities that move customers through evolutionary, generational, and revolutionary changes.

The downstream tilt has particular resonance for three kinds of companies: The first is companies that operate in product-obsessed industries, such as technology and pharmaceuticals. The possibilities of downstream value creation and the potential for building competitive advantage in the marketplace tend to be eye-opening for such firms. The second is companies operating in maturing industries whose products are increasingly commoditized. These firms are keen to find sources of differentiation that do not rely on easily replicated products or production advantages. The third is companies seeking to move up the value chain. Downstream activities provide a way to build new forms of customer value and lasting differentiation.
The critical locus of both value and competitive advantage increasingly resides in the marketplace rather than within a company.

Las apuestas arriesgadas definen el futuro y permiten hacerlo nuestro, Israel Ruiz (MIT)

…Creo que hay una oportunidad grandísima para la universidad, que es transformarse y que lo que se haga presencialmente sea mucho más localizado. Preparar a la gente para la vida laboral asumiendo que ciertos contenidos, los desarrolle quien los desarrolle, van a estar online. Lo que no hay que hacer es reinventar la rueda. No hace falta coger y crear una plataforma propia y volcar masivamente todos los contenidos.

Como pasaba en los inicios de Internet, que se trasladaba lo analógico al mundo digital y no funcionaba bien. Al cabo de unos años se repensaron los procesos con el medio de Internet en la mente, como Amazon, por ejemplo. Todavía estamos en ese periodo: quieres un curso en Internet y un profesor dice: pues lo filmo. Y no funciona bien. Hay que hacer una rearquitectura del contenido, repensar todo el curso. Una vez que te metes, cuesta mucho más de lo que creíamos si pretendes ofrecer calidad.

En el MIT escucharás muy poco la palabra yo. Incluso un premio Nobel lo primero que te va a hacer es reconocer a su equipo, al entorno. El papel del individuo, ser un genio, es lo que marca la diferencia, pero el equipo sin el entorno no tendría el mismo impacto. Y este es uno de nuestros secretos.

…el ciclo político y el ciclo empresarial crean esta disfunción. Nosotros tenemos un grupo de gestión del día a día, pero constantemente hay un equipo de dirección pensando cuál es el camino a 10, a 20 o a 30 años.
Lo que ocurre ahora es que te vienen políticos de cualquier país, visitan el Media Lab y te preguntan: ¿cómo hago yo esto en mi país? Pues mañana no lo tienes. Si hablamos a 20 años, quizá hay una oportunidad. Y entonces desconectan.

En España, la innovación y la emprendeduría han cambiado a mejor, pero faltan años para que vaya a funcionar.

sábado, 4 de enero de 2014

Stateless Mindset

Stateless Mindset : zenhabits
In programming, there is the concept of statelessness. It means that each request is treated anew, without memory of previous requests.
This is extremely limiting in some ways, but in another way it’s a great way to deal with a ton of requests.
Imagine if you as a person dealt with millions of requests a day from a thousand or so clients

This is what our lives are like. We are constantly holding information, frustration, ideas, tension, requests, needs, of a thousand different requests each day.

Imagine they were gone, and you had a blank slate.
What would this blank slate feel like?
What would it be like to deal with the next task, talk to the next person, walk to the next place, without anything weighing you down? Without anything pulling on your mind?
Just this task. Just this person. Just this action. Just this moment.

This is the stateless practice. You’ll fail. Let that go too.
Start anew, with all the possibilities of emptiness.

Leading by Asking

El poder de la duda y las preguntas adecuadas, combinado con la fuerza de la escucha activa, para ayudarnos a dirigir mejor.



Leadership Mantra: Leading by Asking ~ Future of CIO
An effective leader shall not only ask a deep “WHY” -to diagnose the root cause of problems, but also ask the positive “Why NOT?' -The refusal to be bound by constraints and limitations, and a pursuit of possibilities rather than impossibilities seems to be a hallmark of great leadership achievements.
A true leader has vision and insight to ask “What If & How”. A truly great leader would ask “What if we do things in the new Way” or 'How can I make things better for the whole?'. The one with insight sees what everyone would want to see, if only you had his/her eyes. A good leader asks the questions anyone would want to ask, if only you had his/her perspective. A great leader provides the vision to achieve the results that all would want to go, if you could define the challenges.
Effective leaders navigate their leadership through continuous asking: “Who, Who not, Where, Where not, What, What not, When, When not, Why, Why not, How, and How not” 

viernes, 3 de enero de 2014

Differentiating Organization & Tribe | Holacracy

Differentiating Organization & Tribe | Holacracy
Holacracy doesn’t try to improve people, or make them more compassionate, or more conscious. And it doesn’t ask them to create any specific culture or relate to each other in any particular way.

Holacracy is fundamentally focused on the organization and its purpose—not the people and their desires and needs, however positive these may be. Holacracy's systems and processes continually help the organization find its own unique identity and structure to do its work in the world, while protecting it from human agendas, egos, politics, etc. Instead of those driving the organization, Holacracy allows it to be more driven by its own unique purpose

But Holacracy wasn’t removing all of their hard-won connectedness and trust, just moving it into a different space and liberating it from the organizational matters at play.At some point it really clicked for David (Allen), who put it into his own words:
“What you’re saying is that it is an inappropriate use of love and care, to use love and care to get something done.”

We’re not dismissing or limiting a culture of love and care by installing Holacracy—in fact, we are making the domain of human connection more sacred, because we are installing a system where we no longer need to lean on our connections and relationships just to be able to process organizational tensions.

In an operating system that’s dysfunctional, you need to focus on things like values in order to make that somewhat tolerable, but if we’re all willing to pay attention to the higher purpose, and do what we do and do it well, the culture just emerges. You don’t have to force it.” What he and his team were discovering is that far from suppressing the personal and interpersonal dimensions, Holacracy actually releases them to be more fully themselves and more fully together, without muddying those spaces with business agendas and organizational politics.

A healthy relationship requires clear boundaries
In this way, Holacracy creates a healthy separation of different domains that are often fused in traditional organizations and sometimes even more so in progressive organizations. My business partner Tom describes this as differentiating the “personal space” and the “tribe space” from the “role space” and the “organizational space.” I love this distinction, and what it points to. These very different spheres of human experience often get blurred – and understandably so, as they all coexist together within any organization. The personal and tribe spaces are where all the wonderful richness of being human come into play; the former is about you and your values, passions, talents, ambitions, and identity, while the latter is about how we interact together and our shared values, culture, meaning-making, and language. The role space on the other hand is where we operate role-to-role to get things done for the sake of the organization’s purpose, and the organizational space is the realm of governance, where we actually shape the structure of the organization to allow the purpose to flow through it effectively. Holacracy doesn’t devalue the personal and interpersonal domains, as some people fear at first—in fact, I believe it instills a deeper honoring of them, much more than many organizations that focus entirely on that. It does so by clearly differentiating these four spaces and holding appropriate boundaries between them, which allows them to co-exist together without any dominating the others – it moves them from an unconscious fusion and the blurred boundaries that result, to a healthy marriage, distinct yet integrated.

jueves, 2 de enero de 2014

Marketing e innovación

Compartiendo con @RafaelOliverTDC ideas… hace poco le decía a mi mujer cómo había pasado todo el 2013 buscando respuestas e iba tomando forma una nueva "visión". Una parte de ella era la vuelta del marketing a mi escala de valores…
  • El marketing al que he considerado el diablo por "crear necesidades que no existen" no lo es tal, el marketing es igual para las necesidades que sí existen. El marketing trae los ingresos, define los productos, dice el cliente, como bien dice Rafael no es sólo "marcom", aunque eso sea básico 
  • En 2010 pensaba que lo mas importante eran los ingenieros…hoy los comerciales (los buenos) han recuperado el sitio que les corresponde. Y el departamento de marketing –si no hay "go-to-market" el producto no tiene sentido–
  • La innovación se puede dar en distintos niveles, no sólo ha de serlo de producto sino también de modelos de comercialización (¿negocio?). La innovación abierta, la polinización cruzada –en cierto sentido la cultura del compartir– puede ayudarnos aquí. Escribí hace unos días sobre Apple:
…lo habitual suele ser innovar en las tecnologías de los dispositivos y se puede innovar en muchas otras cosas, como los procesos de comercialización, la intermediación, el control del usuario y su experiencia de uso, es decir en los modelos de negocio… por ejemplo. Por ejemplo, Apple también innovó en la comercialización de sus productos, a través de la creación de las tiendas Apple…
  • En un coloquio en que me invitaron a participar dentro del máster de EBT ya comentaba que sugería, o pensaba yo al menos, que era más importante innovar cada día que proteger con patentes (he trabajado en PI y todo es cuestionable, sólo ganan los abogados). Tiempo después Enrique Dans publicaba "El síndrome del mal innovador", fue muy gratificante leer un artículo suyo en ese sentido
Y ahora ha venido Rafael y ha plasmado en esta breve entrada algunas de esas ideas magistralmente, lo que me enorgullece y admira (por la capacidad de síntesis, que yo me enrollo cosa fina). No dejéis de leer Marketing e innovación, no hay nada más importante en las empresas (P. Drucker) | Dirección Comercial Blog