Posts Tagged ‘Article’

Gary A. Williams & Robert B. Miller – Change The Way You Persuade

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

While I was gathering theory for my thesis, I stumbled across an article from Harvard Business Review published in 2002. It is almost a follow-up on what I was talking about here.

What was specific about Bramson’s book was that it was more written for a manager who had problems with his/hers employees – even though the book mentioned that it concerned both. The article I found was written FOR employees and and the authors had found five characteristics that seems to applicable on managers.

They are:

- Charismatic; “easily enthralled by new ideas, can absorb large amount of info, and tend to process the word visually.”

- Thinkers; “Most difficult decision-makers to understand, likes quantitative data.”

- Skeptics; “Highly suspicious of every single data point”

- Followers; “Makes decisions based on how they’ve made similar choices in the past.”

- Controllers; “Focus on the pure facts and analytics of an argument.”

Which kind of manager are you? I’d like to think that I’m a Charismatic, but I might as well be a Follower.

Netflix – They will know what you like, without asking you.

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, is interviewed in number 18 of the European edition of Forbes. The article tells us that Netflix have, using a cash prize of $1,000,000, made findings concerning movie grading and peoples’ movie watching habits. They can, more accurately than their competitors, suggest movies to their customers that are similar to those that their customers have graded. This means that a person who likes Action movie A and Chick Flick B will probably like Horror movie C.

To describe the problem, Mr. Hastings says that:

The trick is finding problems in your business that you can package cleanly, where you can provide a sample data set and a very clear evaluation metric.

What the cash prize of $1,000,000 gave the company was a discrete math problem that will predict future movie ratings using past movie ratings. A must add to the prize itself, is that it was given to a group of people, who many of them, had never meet. Someone started out with a solution, posted it on the Internet, got help from someone else. So it continued until they had solved it, and they all got their share of the dough.

Reed also gives a short glimpse at the future and says that they are now working on is to determine the movies that will appeal to a customer who don’t rate movies online, at all.

Imagine that this was your company. What would you use this form of information to?

Could you use it to test whether or not a certain product would be a fail or not, or maybe which demographic it would be best fit for.

How about the way the solution was thought up, using several different people, who might not even live in the same country, know each other, or might not even meet, to help you with your development.