The Strategy that Works - Larry Downes

Met an incubator - Build a company in 90 days, take it public in 180 days. IPOs made day traders into VCs

Moore's law was faster than companies could adopt - he wanted them to speed up; he found they had overshot technology and tried to keep up with market.

Business cycle does not match the technology cyle - never. Value shows up eventulaly, but not where expected. Moores law is still running. Information revolution is still going, and other ones are too. Next generation growth is happening now, and what you do now will be part of it.

Currently fuzzy subjects like marketing and CRM will become scientific as more data is available.

When the going gets tough, short the future - all speculative stuff gets cut first, whereas the opposite needs to happen.

3 crazy ideas:

1. Zero out your IT budget
Or rather, merge it with the R&D budget - no difference between them. As information flow gets richer will be enveloped in information. develop IT wiht the products and services.

2. Manage your business like a portfolio manager
Tie yourself to the mast like Ulysses so you can't cheat yourself out of the future in bad times. Weight your investments in short term, mid term and long term. Cut carefully. Buy low and sell high - at least buy low.

3. Invest in next generation of technology infrastructure especially if you are broke.
BP invested in a new IT platform, then bought their competitors and put them on the same more efficient system.
Make sure you have:
Open Standards - don't choose too soon, but make sure all choices are open.
Component based architecture - OO techniques are a key part.
Separation of process, interface and data. Dont slap everything into HTML.

Getting big ideas is the easy part. The hard part is execution.
The new ideas never get through.