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Showing posts from November, 2018

Week 8 and 9 - Guest Lecturers - Complete

In September 1995 Christopher McCormick launched LL Bean's website. A better image than mass market catalogs they also scrapped their CD Rom. They were the first company to sign on to IBM's Net.Commerce a secure way for customers to place orders online. One of the earliest adopters of the new media channel of the internet.   Chris Wall - Copywriter with specialization in computer and tech accounts at an ad agency Ogilvy Listen Here A best clip is at 1:26:40 All the ads he shows as examples are cut due to copyright, but I found some of them here Notes from lecture: The whole notion of technology was what his ad agency created for IBM and then sequentially Motorola, DuPont, and other science and technology companies. The culture was that you wanted to be seen as embracing the technology because you believe that the future is going to be better. Technology is faith based and therefore is hard to articulate and make interesting.

Week 10 - Building and Managing a Virtual Organization - Complete

Readings Henderson, Rebecca. "Managing Innovation in the Information Age." Rebecca Henderson makes the case of pharmaceutical companies that have managed to survive and thrive unlike other companies that have been around since the 40's. She states a managerial competency of specialized knowledge used in a way that doesn't fix the organization in the past. They are able to respond and grow with the ever changing competitive environment. They are able to innovate continuously instead of relying on the same ways that they have always done things.  The most successful companies: used sophisticated resource allocation procedures hired the best people encouraged cross functional and cross disciplinary communication continuously changing the innovative capabilities of the organization managers actively managed the companies' knowledge and resources  kept abreast of changes in the scientific community allocated resources across a wide range of projects Nad