The success of Adele’s “25” is all the more remarkable given how the landscape of music retail has changed since 2000, when some 700 million CDs were sold annually through a network of chains like Tower, Sam Goody and HMV, as well as in big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City that devoted considerable floor space to music.
.. Last year just 141 million CDs were sold in the United States, according to Nielsen. An additional 106 million albums were sold as downloads.
.. But Adele’s success may also be because of her following among a demographic group that the youth-obsessed pop music world does not often focus on. According to Nielsen, which has studied the demographics of the fans of various pop acts, the typical Adele fan is a college-educated woman aged 25 to 44, who watches “Family Guy” on TV and likes to shop at Target, Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works.
A Harvard Professor Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on ‘Disruption’
Uber has indisputably interrupted the normal activity of the taxi business, and is likely rendering it unable to continue in the normal way. According to standard English usage, then, it is disrupting the taxi business. Christensen, Raynor and McDonald, though, have other ideas:
According to the theory, the answer is no. Uber’s financial and strategic achievements do not qualify the company as genuinely disruptive — although the company is almost always described that way.
By their taxonomy, an innovation is only disruptive if it starts in a “low-end foothold,” serving less-demanding customers, or a “new-market foothold,”
The Cebrity Pastor Factory
There is an Evangelical Industrial Complex that helps create and relies upon celebrity leaders. Have you ever wondered why you don’t see pastors from small or medium sized churches on the main stage at big conferences? Or why most of the best-selling Christian authors are megachurch leaders?
Here’s the answer we like to believe:
The most godly, intelligent, and gifted leaders naturally attract large followings, so they naturally are going to have large churches, and their ideas are so great and their writing so sharp that publishers pick their book proposals, and the books strike a nerve with so many people that they naturally become best-sellers, and these leaders become the obvious choice to speak at the biggest conferences. As a result they ascend to celebrity status.
.. In the place of a church hierarchy we’ve built the Evangelical Industrial Complex where we expect publishers, conference directors, and radio producers to be the gatekeepers. We trust them to filter out the immature, ungodly leaders, and for many years the managers of the EIC were willing to serve this function. Those days are over. Chaos in the publishing world has put incredible pressure on the EIC to sell books and fill conferences profitably. Managers within the Evangelical Industrial Complex are remembering that they were not appointed to shepherd us, but to sell to us. Those who had functioned as evangelicalism’s bishops for decades have taken off their vestments to reveal their business suits once again.
Andy Grove: Introduction to High Output Management
A manager’s skills and knowledge are only valuable if she uses them to get more leverage from her people. So, Ms. Manager, you know more about our product’s viral loop than anyone in the company? That’s worth exactly nothing unless you can effectively transfer that knowledge to the rest of the organization. That’s what being a manager is about. It’s not about how smart you are or how well you know your business; it’s about how that translates to the team’s performance and output.
As a means to obtain this leverage, a manager must understand, as Andy writes: “When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.” This insight enables a manager to dramatically focus her efforts. All you can do to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train. There is nothing else.
.. He teaches meetings from first principles, beginning with how to conduct a one-on-one.
.. In my experience, managers who don’t have one-on-ones understand very little about what’s happening in their organizations.
.. Finally, he reiterates his thesis that there are only two ways in which a manager can impact an employee’s output: motivation and training.
.. Upon seeing him, I was so excited that I immediately blurted out how much I loved the book.
.. I either had to throw away some books or buy a bigger house. Well, that was an easy decision, but which books to throw out? Then I thought, the management books! But I had a problem. Nearly every management book that I’d received was sent to me by the author and was autographed with a kind inscription. I felt badly about throwing away all those nice notes. So, I went through each book and tore out the inscription page then threw away the book
.. “CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
.. “In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
.. When I suggested he write something on the topic, his response was: “Why would I do that? It would be a waste of time to write about how to not follow human nature. It would be like trying to stop the Peter Principle*