sari

The competitive disadvantages of decentralization are so immense that it only works if the offered incentives (economic, cultural) outweigh those disadvantages.

How do you get from starting small to doing something great? By making successive versions. Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned.

The only reason why political and legal systems work is that a lot of hard thinking and work has gone on behind the scenes to insulate the decision-makers from extrinsic incentives, and punish them explicitly if they are discovered to be accepting incentives from the outside. The lack of extrinsic motivation allows the intrinsic motivation to shine... See more

When you're talking about customer lifetime value, you basically want to get her when you're in her consideration [stage], and when she's ready to shop you want to be that first brand that comes to mind. Once the baby comes she's not necessarily shopping for maternity clothes any more. It's a limited time window we have to catch her. It's the... See more