Entries by Charles H. Green

Marketing Myopia and Selling Revisited

One of Harvard Business Review’s all-time best-selling articles is Ted Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia.” It sold 850,000 reprints from its 1960 publication to Levitt’s death earlier this year. Re-read today, it looks more like strategy than marketing. His claim that the railroads failed to see they were in the transportation business is bigger-picture than what most […]

Trust and Risk—Ronald Reagan Redux

Ronald Reagan, speaking of diplomacy and the Soviet Union, famously said, "trust—but verify." The statement never made sense to me (except as politics). If you’re going to resort to verification, you’re not dealing with trust, but with risk management. Trust without risk ain’t trust. Something related comes to us from a fascinating interview with Stanford’s […]

Paint by Numbers Management

Ten days ago, the Wall Street Journal headlined HP’s boardroom clash between no-longer-chairman Patricia Dunn and Director Tom Perkins. It’d be a great made-for-TV movie. There’s venture capitalist and Silicon Valley legend Tom Perkins (as in Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield), an early HP employee himself, used to getting his own way, his reputation apparently exceeded only […]

Faking Trust

Today’s issue of The Wise Marketer suggests that corporate honesty will be the number one key alternative marketing trend for 2007. Here’s how they put it: "While marketers are constantly watching for alternative methods that can give them a competitive edge in over-crowded markets, Drew Neisser, CEO for Renegade Marketing explained to us the ones […]