Business and management articles | Cooler Insights

The Premium on Corporate Coherence

March 6, 2011 • Blog, Business and Management • disabled comments

I was listening to HBR’s Ideacast recently and came across an interesting idea by Booz & Company’s Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi urging companies to “have the discipline to focus intensely on what they do best”. Titled the “Coherence Premium”, the central thesis of Leinwand and Mainardi is that “sustainable, superior returns accrue to companies that focus on what they do best”.

Gaining the Coherence Premium can be done if a company aligns and interlocks internal capabilities (or core competencies ala Hamel and Prahalad) with the right external market position. This can be graphically represented as follows:

Image source

Off to London for Business

February 28, 2011 • Blog • 3 comments

I’ll be flying off to UK for a work trip tomorrow morning, to visit some of their leading art museums and galleries, learn how they run their institutions, and explore collaborative possibilities. There’re quite a lot that we can learn from the Brits who are world leaders in the art, science and business of running museums, art galleries and cultural institutions.

On the cards are an eclectic mix of meetings that we’ll be scheduling with both private and publicly funded mueums and art galeries. They include the world famous Tate Modern which showcases international modern and contemporary art…

Courtesy of News-Poland

How Much Should You Charge?

February 26, 2011 • Blog • 2 comments

Courtesy of Rentoid

In an age where anything and everything is trending towards FREE, companies face many increasingly thorny dilemmas on the issue of pricing. What should one charge in order to make a profitable and sustainable living? How can one stand out from other similar businesses using price as a lever? Is there a trade-off between the number of users/subscribers/fans and actual paying customers?

Answering these questions isn’t easy. One can either choose to go with one’s gut (ala Malcolm Gladwell’s the Law of Thin Slices) or perhaps embrace a more methodical approach.

The Strategic Value of Nuancing

February 24, 2011 • Content Marketing • disabled comments

The world of art, like Pierre Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, are full of subtle nuances

We’ve all been there before.

You spend weeks working hard on a purportedly kick-ass strategy or a revolutionary new product launch.

Braving the (Relaunched) Battlestar Galactica

February 21, 2011 • Blog • 5 comments

Suspended and screaming riders of the Battlestar Galactica

At the kind invitation of the PR folks from Resorts World Sentosa, a couple of blogger friends and I had the chance to be the first to try out the newly relaunched Battlestar Galactica roller coaster ride. It was certainly one of the most adrenaline pumping, nerve wrecking, and scream-tastic time of my life!

Futuretainment – A Fabulous Forecast

February 18, 2011 • Blog • disabled comments

Courtesy of Mike Walsh

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. Well, Futuretainment by “digital anthropologist” Mike Walsh with art-direction from Vince Frost proves that age-old adage wrong, scoring on both looks and content (you may want to check out its website too).

Walsh, the CEO of consumer innovation research agency Tomorrow, doesn’t just know a lot about consumer trends in entertainment, he looks like an entertainer (the rockstar variety) too!

The Three Key Drivers of Motivation

February 11, 2011 • Personal Branding • 1 comment

Photo by Kris Krug

If you don’t already know it, paying people more money – at least beyond a certain point – will not result in better performance. In fact, the old carrot-and-stick approach to management is broken.

That’s what bestselling author and careerist Daniel Pink claims. According to the motivational speaker and writer, higher financial incentives only work for traditionally mechanistic roles – manufacturing tasks, book-keeping, software programming and the like.