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Showing posts from June, 2008

Mutual Benefit Contracts

This post is in response to a question about contracts in a comment to my article The Customer Drives the Car . The text is an excerpt from a book I am writing about Clarity, a software development method based on systems thinking. This book is on the back burner at the moment.  I am currently writing a book about strategy and organization with Strategic Navigation. This book will stand on its own, but it will also provide a much needed framework for the Clarity book. The reason is that originally, Clarity, like other agile methodologies, took a bottoms up approach to methodology development. Partly because of my work on Clarity, partly because of my involvement with The Theory Of constraints, Strategic Navigation, and Systems Thinking, I have become convinced that a top down approach will work better. Therefore, Clarity will be redesigned, and thoroughly tested, before I publish a book about the method as a whole. Here is Clarity's (current) take on contracts: A contract is an ag

Strategic Principles - Apple, iPhone and John Boyd's Maneuver Conflict

Time to scratch the webcast itch again. This time I am talking about principles of business strategy. Some time ago, I Googled out more about Apple's iPhone strategy. More than a million hits, yet I found nothing about the strategic principles Apple uses. As it turns out, almost every move Apple makes can be interpreted in terms of Maneuver Conflict, a military strategic doctrine created by the late col. John Boyd, U.S. Air Force. Boyd's ideas has had tremendous impact on military strategic thinking the past twenty years. His ideas are slowly trickling over into the business community. There will be more videos on Boyd's ideas, and on Strategic Navigation, a business strategy method that combines Boyd's Maneuver Conflict and The Theory Of Constraints.

Steve jobs Announces iPhone 3G

Steve jobs has just announced iPhone 3G at WWDC 2008. The new iPhone has 3G and GPS. Standby time has been improved to 300 hours. Talk time is up to 10 hours with 2G, 5 hours with 3G. You can expect to watch video for 7 hours, or listen to audio 24 hours on a charge. Price has been cut to $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB model. Why am I interested? I have taken an interest in Apple lately. Working on a webcast on business strategy with Apple and iPhone examples. Check back here in a day or two.