Last month our Chief Value Delivery Officer, Sean Gallagher, spoke at the CEO Club of Boston (another link) about how a Market Culture provides the blueprint for profitable companies. We call this the DNA of Profitable Businesses, and this lies at the core of the message we try to bring out.
Our message is simple: Corporate culture is important to business success. It is the core blueprint around which all other building blocks are placed. It is the framework under which company value get passed along. Exec to employee. Old hand to new recruit. Can’t overlook culture.
What we’re doing is bringing a new understanding to this. We have developed a measurement tool for this and will be rolling it out in the new year. (Ssshh, don’t tell anyone I told you!) Once you can measure it, you can compare it. If it’s low, you can improve it. (We offer training services for this.) If it’s high, you can demand more from your organization.
Knowledge is power and in 2008 we will be offering a kind of knowledge you never knew you could have!
Lot of chatter on the Xbox malfunctioning with the Halo 3 game. Class-action lawsuit, cable news coverage and all over the blogosphere. It sounds like there are a few users out there who feel their new game is crashing their system. On the other hand, some feel it’s the fault of the user. They’ve had no problems themselves. (Good comments string on this post.)
The folks behind Xbox have a blog dedicated to fixing the problems associated with the machine. There’s been a lot of chatter about how Microsoft was aware of certain hardware problems and set aside $1 billion this past summer to deal with it. Now, in light of problems with new games (also including Call of Duty 4), that money appears to be an admission of guilt. My favorite submission was under this post which says toothpaste will help fix the discs the machine scratches. I would prefer they give me some idea what they’re doing to prevent their machines from scratching discs in the first place!
I’m also willing to throw MSFT under the bus a little on this one and ask how much research they did into consumer use patterns prior to launch? The first Xbox was fantastically popular and gamers are notoriously dedicated to their craft.
But in the mixed world that is Microsoft consumer value, it looks like they may be taking their game console to the social media realm with tomorrow’s fall update. So they miss on the hardware end, but make up for it with greater connectivity.
