January 31st, 2007 by 
Montie Roland
Process may be king in our industry, but vision is the treasury behind the throne room. Product developers can find detailed processes in books, or even from internal ISO procedures. Executing that process is one of the difficult parts of managing product development.
Vision, is almost a dirty word at times. Vision can blind you. Vision can guide you. Vision can lead you to the most successful product your organization has ever had.
Balancing vision and process is extremely important for long term success. The attached podcast (17 minutes, 9 seconds in length) discusses this issue. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. You can leave them here, or send an email to montie@montie.com.
Have a Great Day!
Montie Roland
President - Montie Design (www.montie.com)
President, Carolinas Chapter of the PDMA (www.pdma.org/carolinas)
Home of the NC Product Design Directory
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January 23rd, 2007 by Tom Vass
What Happens Inside The Company Is Not As Important As What Happens Outside the Company
In her BusinessWeek.com article Don’t Look to New Ideas for Growth (Insight January 17, 2007, ) Jeneanne Rae makes a counterintuitive point about the value of ideas that come from within a company’s bureaucracy. “Idea management” (inside the company) is fine, but it shouldn’t be the starting place for innovation,†she states.
“If the primary pipeline for innovation is insider-generated ideas, you are guaranteed to have too many ideas to act upon successfully. A suggestion box approach is too easy to ignore. Exploration dollars get spread too thin to understand any level of corporate implication for the plethora of candidates, while the big ideas can remain hidden and underfunded if treated like all the rest.â€
Posted in Economics and Technology, Technology Investment Strategy | No Comments »
January 15th, 2007 by Tom Vass
Investment Strategy Comment:
           Today marks the beginning of what pundits call the “earnings reporting season.†Like the annual wailing and moaning that begins at Halloween about retail store sales for the upcoming Christmas season, the quarterly earnings report season is full of wisdom about what the earnings reports mean to an investment strategy.
           A good example of the reporting is the article, Double-Digit Profits Take a Dip, by Nat Worden in TheStreet.com. Worden makes the fundamentally sound insight that the rate of profit increases can not sky rocket forever. Profits are related to underlying economic conditions, and if those underlying economic conditions contained weakness, then the current and future earnings may reflect those drawbacks.
Posted in Economics and Technology, Technology Investment Strategy | No Comments »
January 9th, 2007 by Tom Vass
Economic Commentary:
           The financial press is all a-twitter about the so-called Goldilocks economy: not too hot, not too cold, just right for a little girl lost in the forest among a community of Bears. Some proponents of the so-called soft landing predict that the Fed will lower short-term rates to give the economy a nudge in June or July.
           Other pundits, and well-educated folks, who should know better, suggest that the Fed has it’s long knife hidden in it’s pants to cut off the ugly head of inflation, should that ugly beast arise, by raising rates in June or July.   Â
           This is all just so much poppy-cock. The U. S. economy is in trouble for a lot of reasons, most of which are related to the poor investment decisions made in the late 1990’s, which squandered a huge amount of capital and did not perform the essential economic function of creating increased aggregate demand in the next 10 years.
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January 2nd, 2007 by Tom Vass
Economic Commentary:
           We are going to witness two spectacular events in 2007. The first is the rapid melting and break up of the polar ice cap. Not to worry. Real estate speculators and developers will show up in the Artic with every new fissure and start building homes on the newly uncovered land. Polar bears and toaster ovens will be given away as bait for the unwary homebuyer.            The other event is a spectacular train wreck in the capital markets. In his Forbes Sneak Peek 2007, (12.31.06), Brett Nelson warns about one part of this train wreck. “The private equity market will implode, initial public offerings crater and venture capitalists go on an Excedrin diet.â€Â           Nelson sees the potential for one fast moving train of private equity coming into the switching yard at full speed. There are at least 4 other trains headed there at the same time, all loaded with a witch’s brew of nitro glycerin.
Posted in Economics and Technology, U.S. Economic Policy | No Comments »
