Link of the Day - News 2.0
"...Three years ago, under Mr. Edwards's guidance, LUN installed a system whereby all clicks onto its website (www.lun.com) were recorded for all in the newsroom to see. Those clicks - and the changing tastes and desires they represent - drive the entire print content of LUN."
This is fascinating stuff, because it speaks to the most pressing managerial question of the day: how do we make better strategies in a turbulent environment?
Technology can help - but it's only slowly emerging exactly how. This is a great example - leverage very simple tech to create a massive learning capability. This capability creates a competitive advantage in an environment which values flexibility and responsiveness over scale and price.
Zero-intelligence is where I think management needs to be - to let the market become the decision-maker (as Prahalad has implicitly argued). The reason this hasn't happened in the past is because extracting information about future preferences is notoriously difficult. Designing cars by focus group creates Detroit style crapmobiles.
But massively distributed and networked machines - whose output is instantaneous aggregate revealed preference at low cost - can let decision-makers get a much clearer read on what the market wants in the future, valued at now. Now what we have to do is build a set of tools that actually does this.