Las diez preguntas que todo Agente de cambio debe responder.

1:43 PM Thursday June 18, 2009 The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer Bill Taylor Practically Radical

As leaders, we have no control over how fast markets grow or how wisely banks lend. But we do control our own mindsets and "animal spirits"— the phrase coined by John Maynard Keynes in the depth of the Great Depression. If all you've got is a spreadsheet filled with red ink and dire forecasts, it's easy to be paralyzed by fear and resistant to change. But if you can summon some leadership nerve, then hard times can be a great time to separate yourself from the pack and build advantages for years to come. Indeed, when it comes to creating the future, the only thing more worrisome than the prospect of too much change may be too little change — especially in an economy where there are too many competitors chasing too few customers with products and services that look too much alike. Now is the time to rethink long-held strategic assumptions inside your company, to challenge decades of conventional wisdom in your industry, and to push yourself to learn, grow, and innovate. As Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." Or, in the spirit of some unknown Texas genius: "If all you ever do is all you've ever done, then all you'll ever get is all you ever got." It's time to do — and get — something different. Here, then, are ten questions that leaders must ask of themselves and their organizations — questions that speak to the challenges of change at a moment when change is the name of the game. The leaders with the best answers win. 1. Do you see opportunities the competition doesn't see? IDEO's Tom Kelly likes to quote French novelist Marcel Proust, who famously said, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." The most successful companies don't just out-compete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world of me-too thinking. 2. Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas? One way to look at problems as if you're seeing them for the first time is to look at a wide array of fields for ideas that have been working for a long time. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge the prevailing assumptions that have come to define so many industries. 3. Are you the most of anything? You can't be "pretty good" at everything anymore. You have to be the most of something: the most affordable, the most accessible, the most elegant, the most colorful, the most transparent. Companies used to be comfortable in the middle of the road — that's where all the customers were. Today, the middle of the road is the road to ruin. What are you the most of? 4. If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would miss you and why? I first heard this question from advertising legend Roy Spence, who says he got it from Jim Collins of Good to Great fame. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as a guide to what really matters. 5. Have you figured out how your organization's history can help to shape its future? Psychologist Jerome Bruner has a pithy way to describe what happens when the best of the old informs the search for the new. The essence of creativity, he argues, is "figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think." The most creative leaders I've met don't disavow the past. They rediscover and reinterpret what's come before as a way to develop a line of sight into what comes next. 6. Can your customers live without you? If they can, they probably will. The researchers at Gallup have identified a hierarchy of connections between companies and their customers — from confidence to integrity to pride to passion. To test for passion, Gallup asks a simple question: "Can you imagine a world without this product?" One of the make-or-break challenges for change is to become irreplaceable in the eyes of your customers. 7. Do you treat different customers differently? If your goal is to become indispensable to your customers, then almost by definition you won't appeal to all customers. In a fickle and fast-changing world, one test of how committed a company is to its most important customers is how fearless it is about ignoring customers who aren't central to its mission. Not all customers are created equal. 8. Are you getting the best contributions from the most people? It may be lonely at the top, but change is not a game best played by loners. These days, the most powerful contributions come from the most unexpected places — the "hidden genius" inside your company, the "collective genius" of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who surround your company. Tapping this genius requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to know you don't have all the answers. 9. Are you consistent in your commitment to change? Pundits love to excoriate companies because they don't have the guts to change. In fact, the problem with many organizations is that all they do is change. They lurch from one consulting firm to the next, from the most recent management fad to the newest. If, as a leader, you want to make deep-seated change, then your priorities and practices have to stay consistent in good times and bad. 10. Are you learning as fast as the world is changing? I first heard this question from strategy guru Gary Hamel, and it may be the most urgent question facing leaders in every field. In a world that never stops changing, great leaders can never stop learning. How do you push yourself as an individual to keep growing and evolving — so that your company can do the same?

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5 consejos para la compra de un Notebook.

June 17th, 2009 (7:00am) 5 Tips for Netbook Buyers Samuel Dean

Netbooks have become a hugely popular hardware category, and I've been using them for more than a year, including trying many of the new models. Making compromises is part of the design of netbooks, so it's important to evaluate them in a hands-on way when you go to buy one. In this post, you'll find five tips for better netbook shopping.

Don't buy solely online. Buying online can be a great way to get many kinds of systems at the best prices, but I wouldn't recommend shopping solely online when buying a netbook. They're designed to make compromises like the ones discussed below, so it's important to have your hands on the device before you decide that a particular model is right for you. Keyboard size is critical. Many netbooks are kept small and lightweight by compromising on keyboard size. Especially if you have big hands, a tiny keyboard can be a major annoyance. The Dell Mini 9 netbooks have good-sized keyboards and are reasonably priced, and the Acer Aspire One systems have nearly full-size keyboards. Many of the Asus netbooks have smaller keyboards. Pointing devices matter. Quite a lot of shipping netbooks use trackpads, which annoy some people. Compounding that, the trackpads on some netbooks are set to behave in a hyperactive way, where you can sometimes barely touch them and your cursor will fly somewhere that you didn't intend it to go, or the page you're on will start scrolling unexpectedly. Put in some time playing with a netbook's pointing device before you buy. How much battery life? Battery life varies widely among netbooks, but you actually can get some units where the battery will last much longer than notebook batteries do. The new Asus Seashell line claims a whopping 11 hours of battery life. My experience with two previous Asus netbooks, though, is that I get about four hours of battery life if I'm doing tasks that don't involve video and audio, and about 2.5 hours if I am doing video and audio. Think about the applications you use most when evaluating battery life, read reviews, and remember that you can maximize battery life if you turn the brightness down. Display size. Netbooks originally came out with tiny 7-inch screens, but the displays have gotten much larger in many cases. However, the displays are typically not very large vertically, so make sure that the display on the netbooks you're evaluating will suit the tasks you want to perform. Related Posts GigaOM: The Netbooks Are Taking Over! GigaOM: Intel's Netbook OS Plans Hint Smartphone Aspirations WebWorkerDaily: 4 Things to Remember When Netbook Shopping

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Una "nueva" forma de hacer publicidad.

A New Way to Spread the Word By ERIC PFANNER Published: June 21, 2009 Internet-Web2.0 See the video in "You Tube" click here. PARIS — Travelers at the Liverpool Street Station in London were surprised one morning last January when several hundred of their fellow commuters, instead of scurrying toward the 11:15 train to Southend-on-Sea, started dancing to the sounds of Lulu's "Shout." A day and a half later the routine, captured by hidden cameras, showed up during a break in the reality television show "Celebrity Big Brother." The seemingly spontaneous performance turned out to have been an advertising stunt for T-Mobile, a wireless telephone network that used it for a campaign built around the slogan "Life's for Sharing." Sharing is exactly what happened next. While the ad, in its entirety, was shown only once on television, word of it spread via e-mail, blogs and social networks, until it was watched more than 15 million times on YouTube. The spot spawned spoofs and imitators who organized similar events, including one that shut down Liverpool Street Station a few weeks later. "It seemed to spread a bit of joy at a time when people really needed it," said Kate Stanners, executive creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi London, the agency that created the ad. The campaign may have cheered up recession-weary Londoners, but it also showed why many people in the media business feel spurned these days. Advertising as it has long been known — television commercials, newspaper ads and the like — is a shrinking part of the marketing equation. What happens elsewhere, mostly on the Internet, is what increasingly matters. Advertisers did not suddenly wake up to the Internet; they have been shifting growing portions of their budgets online for years. But the popularity of social networking and other Web 2.0 phenomena is helping them use consumers to spread the word for them, allowing them to cut down on paid advertising. While music companies, movie studios and publishers, among others, are trying to figure out ways to get consumers to pay for their content online, advertising is moving in the other direction. Marcel Fenez, head of the media practice at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, said that during the current economic downturn, a lot of paid advertising would be lost for good, separating this downturn from previous ones, when ad spending recovered relatively quickly. After a 12 percent plunge this year, global ad spending will not climb back to 2007 levels for another five years, Mr. Fenez said. "It's different this time," he said. "There's obviously some element of cyclical in it, but our belief is that it is largely structural." Not surprisingly, PriceWaterhouseCoopers's forecasts are gloomiest for newspapers and television, which it expects will suffer from ad spending declines of 16 percent and 11 percent this year, respectively. But even Internet advertising will fall by 2 percent, and it will recover only slowly, the company said. Some formerly high-flying Internet businesses like MySpace, owned by News Corp., have been brought to earth by the recession. With advertising in decline, the social networking service recently announced plans to cut 30 percent of its staff. Other Web 2.0 businesses, like YouTube, owned by Google, are still trying to figure out how to monetize the vast amounts of traffic they generate. Amid such a broad-based downturn, the advertising industry has also been hurt, and the mood is sober as representatives from all over the world gather this week in Cannes for an annual get-together. Instead of competing to host the most lavish beach parties, as they have in previous years, agencies are trying to outdo each other with understatement. Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group, the world's largest advertising company, calls 2009 a "write-off" for the industry. While marketers are slightly less pessimistic than they were a few months ago, they remain cautious, and a recovery in ad spending is likely to lag behind improvement in the economy, he added. "While the head and the heart may be better, I don't think that has extended to the hand writing the checks," he said. Ad agency companies have been cutting jobs and costs, but they have been slightly more insulated than many media owners because they get paid regardless of whether advertisers choose to spend their money on newspapers, television, magazines, radio, billboards or the Internet. Also, companies like WPP and Publicis Groupe, which owns Saatchi & Saatchi, have been expanding their capabilities in digital marketing and other areas outside traditional advertising. In the past, ad agencies were often paid on commission, as a percentage of advertising sales, but their compensation is increasingly being fixed at hourly rates, as it is for lawyers or accountants. Because digital marketing campaigns are more labor-intensive to develop than ads in traditional media, executives say, this means higher fees. Advertisers — at least those that can still afford to spend — have also found some benefits in the confluence of a cyclical economic downturn with a structural shift toward free advertising on the Internet. The price of advertising in many paid-for media has fallen, for instance. Simon Clift, chief marketing officer of Unilever, the consumer products conglomerate, said that on average, the company was paying about 5 percent less for ad space and time than it did last year. "We've been getting some real bargains and, even better, some real value," he said. "The overriding message of the Internet is that you can do more with less." How does free advertising look? It can take many forms: Getting a journalist or blogger to review a new mobile phone, placing a video on YouTube, spreading the word via bloggers, and starting a Facebook group dedicated to a brand or product. Free advertising does not mean the end of the paid kind. As in the case of the T-Mobile campaign, paid advertising can help get the process started. For some things, like burnishing a company's image or stimulating consumers' desire for an expensive pair of shoes, there may be few free options. And new technology will bolster the advertising capabilities of traditional media like television, backers say. But in the future, none of these things will exist in isolation. Advertising executives have been talking about "integrating" their campaigns for years, with mixed results, but now consumers are doing it for them. "People have been a bit sloppy with the word advertising," said Richard Pinder, chief operating officer of Publicis Worldwide. "It came to mean spending money on television or newspapers. Actually, I think we're going back to the original meaning of the word, which is to say, I hope that people are aware of my brand and interested in knowing more about it."

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