Occam's Razor

Managing Intangible Assets

The new report on " l'economie de l'immateriel" from Levy (Publicis) & Jouyet (Inspection des Finances)  is now online (but in French...) : Téléchargement rapportlevyjouyet1.pdf

CGS Dinners are Back

UPDATE: WE HAVE MOVED THE DATE TO TUESDAY DEC 12 (same time, same place)

CGS dinners are back on Tuesday Dec 12 at 20:30 following the Web3.0 gathering  next week. You can register on this post using the comments, I'll circulate the final attendee list + menu + logistic later. Seating will be restricted to 30 for room 1 and 30 for room 2 (counting with 20% no-show / overbooking, this allow for 75 people to register)...

Bistrot Vivienne ,  4 rue Petits Champs 75002 PARIS, +33 1 49 27 00

Current Participant list (8 seats still available as of dec 8, and I'm working an getting us more space for the dinner using the two floors of the restaurant, which should allow for 60 people to attend... more new on this later here  I have increased the seating capacity to 30 seats for room 1 and 30 seats for room 2 => WE STILL HAVE SPACE ;-) ) :

• Room 1:
• Jeff Clavier ; Marc Goldberg ; Rodrigo Sepulveda

1. Alexandre Casassovici
2. Aydin Senkut
3. Benjamin Carlu
4. Carlos Diaz
5. Cedric Maloux + 1
6. Denis (from Jiwok)
7. Esme Vos
8. Ivan Communod
9. John Vars
10. Jamin Rubio
11. Jacques Froisant
12. Lucie Anne Radimsky
13. Leila X (from the WSJ)
14. Mathieu Nouzareth
15. Mayel de Borniol
16. Nico Guyon
17. Olivier Maurel
18. Ouriel Ohayon
19. Paul Elosegui
20. Pascal Boiteux
21. Richard Menneveux
22. Scott Rafer
23. Sebastien Martin
24. Stephanie Beaujard
25. Thomas Blard
26. Thomas Owadenko

27. Eran Lagon

• Room 2
• Eric Plantier; Colette Ballou Lamotte ; Yves Michali

1. Marc Oiknine 
2. Leafar
3. Philippe Monteil
4. Darius Modaressi-Tehrani
5. Philippe Pinault
6. Julien Andre
7. Louis van Proosdij
8. Franck Perrier
9. Patrick Ferran
10. Manuel Diaz
11. David Grunberger
12. Florent Boutellier
13. guido van nispen
14. Christian Jegourel
15. Laurent Esposito
16. David de JobMeeters
17. Jacob Share
18. Loic Moisand
19. Thibault Hanin
20. Eric Dos Santos
21. Stephane Lee
22. Netanel Jacobsson
23. Stefanos Vasdekis
24. John Nousis
25. Remi Poittevin
26. Jean Batiste Rudel
27. Adriaan Verstijnen
28. Willem Vos
29. Franck Poisson

Measure it, Manage it!

Great post on how and management by metrics, with some smart comments by Ed Sim on the same topic:

When you can accurately predict your results in each operating unit, it means less risk and a greater opportunity to scale your company without blowing your capital (missed quarters get more and more expensive as you grow!). Being able to make accurate predictions also means that:

• You have an operating model (not just a collection of people), which allows you to scale better,
• You understand the key drivers of output in your operating model,
• You are consistently managing the unit to your operating model,
• You have a set of early warning signs (your key drivers) that you can focus more attention on when they get below certain thresholds (i.e., it helps you to know where to spend your time),
• You have a set of measures that you can benchmark against other companies to understand where you have opportunities to move to best practices, and
• You know when you need to add staff or other resources well before you get caught short.

Finally, the understanding of the above gives you a solid platform for experimenting with new approaches and accurately evaluating the effectiveness of the new approaches (thereby allowing you to kill the approaches that don’t work and expanding the approaches that do work).

Most technology driven businesses tend to be under-managed, with board meetings organized as social gathering and public reading  of  very thick board pack that lack the simple data about the top 5 metrics and trends from one quarter to the other (furthermore, one interesting metric seems to be that the more confused a project is, the larger the board-pack is (NB of pages = function  of square of (confusion))).