Andrew Pascoe

Instead of organizing in a hierarchical way that focuses on “getting the right people on the bus,” this model is about building concentric circles of talent that flow and resize as needed.

As Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos puts it, “Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.

Digital isn’t a place,” he writes, “It’s not even a pace. It’s an operating system. A method of dealing with the most complex and rapidly changing dynamics we’ve ever experienced.

e conclusion is this: it is hard to imagine the required levels of growth or margins if Facebook does not become ubiquitous or cannot deliver on the promise of a superior sort of internet advertising.

Before turning to the future, remember the immutable laws of finance. Stratospheric growth never lasts. Returns fade. New threats emerge.

We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people,” Andreessen says. “Practically everyone is going to have a general purpose computer in their pocket, it’s so easy to underestimate that, that has got to be the really, really big one.

To be fair, I am not arguing that the benefit of scale is going away. Instead, I am arguing that the benefits of scale are being commoditized. In today’s world, you don’t need to have scale to enjoy scale.

…stop thinking of how to apply social media to your current channels. Instead, take a step back and assess all they ways your audience may be impacted by social media - and develop new content, offers, and experiences that take advantage of the disruption

Similarly, if you can read but have to move your lips to get through the longer words, you’ll still be a pretty bad writer. Also, if you pronounce “espresso” like “expresso.

Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts.

If freed from incessant tweaking, planning could and should become the vital strategic link for companies between the CEO, the marketing department, and product development, and build platforms upon which creativity can prosper.

At one extreme, there are the “grand strategists”, who are intellectual, aim to see the big picture, are a little bit above the fray, and almost economists. At the other are the advert- tweakers, who peer myopically at advertisements, conduct groups discussions, justify creative work to sceptical clients, and are almost qualitative researchers

Chances are, neither your BI teams or your web analytics teams have any idea how to build that data model. One knows warehousing and customer analytics and the other knows web analytics tools. The gap in-between is far larger than you’d expect, and bridging that gap a critical part of a successful analytics warehousing program.

The job of the data scientist isn’t simply to uncover lost nuggets, but discover new ones

For an enterprise SaaS business, these metrics are fairly mediocre (well, the churn metrics anyway, the acquisition numbers would be phenomenal), but thankfully, we’re not the typical enterprise model. Because we have very low costs for customer acquisition (we acquire ~85% of our customers using inbound marketing rather than paid channels), and very low COGS (no account management, sales people, or services costs), our model scales very nicely.

Wieden + Kennedy often hires these so-called da Vincis—many of them talented and ambitious enough to start their own businesses—as part-time consultants so it can benefit from their ideas and expertise.

W+K’s cloud computing cost-assessment company Cloudability launched last year, as did Urban Airship, the agency’s mobile app push notifier.

ts and openings, and the problem is somewhat existential. Agencies seek hybrid workers who can write code as well as write copy. They want graphic designers who are also information architects—and they want them with a few years of experience. True creative technologists, with superior technical and creative talents, are so rare that one recruiter likens them to unicorns.