Tag Archives: Grapevine
Legos: A Key to Your Childhood, but also a Great Company!
The new book released about Legos brings back childhood memories for many of us. What did you make with Legos? Towers? Trucks? Railroads? How tall did they get? What happened if someone knocked them over?
This book is about the company. Its’ title is Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry.
The author, David C. Robertson, is someone whom you may not know much about. How about these credentials? He is a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School where he teaches Innovation and Product Development in Wharton’s undergraduate, MBA, and executive education programs. From 2002 through 2010, Robertson was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at Switzerland’s Institute for Management Development (IMD), which received the #1 worldwide ranking by the Financial Times for its executive education programs. At IMD he was Program Director for IMD’s largest program, the Program for Executive Development, and co-Director of the Making Business Sense of IT program, a joint program between IMD and MIT Sloan. Prior to IMD, Robertson was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a consultant at McKinsey & Company for five years, and an executive at four enterprise software companies. David received his MBA and PhD from MIT and BS from the University of Illinois.
You can read the review of the book in the Wall Street Journal by clicking here. I am waiting to see if this book hits the best-seller list in the New York Times. If it does, I will select it for presentation at a future First Friday Book Synopsis in Dallas. Continue to monitor our e-Mails for information.
And, if you live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, you can be a kid again! Go to Legoland at the Grapevine Mills mall. Click here for complete information.
Sure, this book is about a company, its leadership, its successes, and so forth. But, there is no way you will read it without also remembering how you held Legos between your thumb and finger, trying to press it into another Lego already on your table.
Remember that? Let’s talk about it really soon.
Social Media Doesn’t Make the Cash Register Ring
As with many of you, we have a presence on Facebook for the First Friday Book Synopsis. Many of you are members of the group that we established. It is fun to interact with you through that group every day.
It is important to remember that Social Media has limits as to what it can produce. It is what it is – it is “social,” and its intent is to share information, reactions, opinions, and presence. Many have tried to use Social Media for other purposes, and in fact, seminars are plentiful that purport to show you how to build business by maximizing and tweaking your presence with the various tools.
Click here for access to a full article published on February 21 in the Dallas Morning News about business results from Facebook. They are not impressive, and the trends below may surprise you, as they run counter to common-sense publicity about social media. Here is an excerpt from the article:
“Last April, Gamestop Corp. opened a store on Facebookto generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered. Grapevine-based Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc. , Plano-based J.C. Penney Co. and Nordstrom Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook Inc.’s social networking site. Facebook, which this month filed for an initial public offering, has sought to be a top shopping destination for its 845 million members. The stores’ quick failure shows that the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social network doesn’t drive commerce and casts doubt on its value for retailers, said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”
These results do not surprise me. If you count on Social Media to build sales, that is neither its intent, nor a probable outcome.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Social Media. I access Facebook and Twitter several times a day. In fact, my MBA class on research methods at the University of Dallas is studying it during this term.
But, I am aware of what it is supposed to do, and what it can do. It is what it is. It raises awareness, but it doesn’t make the cash register ring. Don’t be disappointed when it doesn’t do something it is not.
What do you think? Let’s talk about this really soon.
