Marketing Nirvana

This is probably the first in a series of posts where I share articles or blog posts I’ve read in the course of the day (rest assured; none frivolous) that I think you may find interesting. I’ll start them off with the appropriate category so you can manage your time better. Here goes:

1. Topic: Corporate Mergers that work

Brooks Barnes of the New York Times describes why the Pixar-Disney merger works so well in the midst of awful corporate marriages of inconvenience and failure!

“Most acquisitions, particularly in media, are value-destroying as opposed to value-creating, and that certainly has not turned out to be the case here,” said David A. Price, author of a newly published book from Knopf, “The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company.”

2. Topic: Workplace of the Future

Staying with Pixar here, Bill Taylor of The Harvard Business Review writes of Pixar’s corporate management secrets and “draws parallels between the flat, decentralized corporation of the future and the ad-hoc collection of actors, producers and technicians that come together around a film”!

That helps to explain why the Pixar University crest bears the Latin inscription, Alienus Non Diutius. Translation: alone no longer. “It’s the heart of our model,” Randy Nelson says, “giving people opportunities to fail together and to recover from mistakes together.”

3. Topic: Hiring in the Future

I’m looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book on the Workplace of the Future which I was reminded of through a recent presentation he did at the New Yorker Conference. In it, he talks of the challenges we face in hiring the brightest  – a topic he will expound upon in the new book (Out November 08, I guess).

Listen to Gladwell offer a sneak peak of the book (This is a 20 minute video. So you may want to bookmark it and watch it when you get home)

(via Guy Kawasaki)