Our March ‘07 Spotlight column in ESOMAR’s Research World magazine.

Being prepared and empowered to take risks is fundamental to true innovation and progress.

Anyway, I’ll leave the final word to Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo! senior VP, who recently issued the infamous ‘Peanut Butter Manifesto’ to address his employer’s poor performance: “…the employees that we really need to stay [are] leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate….”

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Interview begins @ around 25:49

Series:AdTalk
Series:MarketingTalk

Over 99% of the interesting stuff we come across during our sessions traversing the newsosphere (blogs etc.) don’t make it to this blog because we deliberately decided to focus on posting mainly podcasts and the odd article so as not to crowd things too much.

If you’re not reading this on the website then take a few moments to pop there. Because we’ve added a new box, top right, where we’re sharing interesting links from our cyber travels. As usual the coverage is broad, reflecting the diversity we try to cover on ResearchTalk, so this may not suit everyone.

But for those who are interested, come visit us often (list updated multiple times daily). Alternatively, given our RSS-enabled world, you can choose to subscribe to the link-blog feed here. And do let us have your feedback, good or bad.

Merci.

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5mins | Produced @ AQR Trends ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Dr. Nick Southgate, Planning Partner, Grey Advertising
• Chloe Fowler, Razor Research

Well, that headline certainly got your attention But Nick doesn’t feel it’s an exaggeration, as he explains in this short chat with Chloe.

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10mins | Produced @ ESOMAR Congress ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Caroline Hayter (Whitehill), Co-founder and Strategist , Acacia Avenue (host)
• Geert van Kuyck, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing Management, Philips

Geert van Kuyck of Philips is a seasoned marketing executive, having previously worked at very senior levels in Starbucks and Procter & Gamble. Here he chats with Caroline about the overwhelming need for a more authentic understanding of consumers, among both the research and marketing communities. It may surprise you to learn that he believes there’s such a big gap here (between rhetoric and reality). Have a listen to his take, and on why he regards engagement and humility as key qualities for success.

Thanks to BrainJuicer for making the video possible.

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The [Google] Adwords business was about monetizing the contextuality. Now it’s starting to happen and I don’t really like it, people want to monetize your intimacy

13mins | Produced @ ESOMAR Congress ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

 STARRING 

• Tariq Krim, CEO, Netvibes

We were about to film the chat when Tariq mentioned his computer, with the presentation he was about to give, had crashed. He only had around an hour to recreate it and we stole about 15mins from that, but he was cool and that’s pretty impressive for a guy who founded and has built the Netvibes web 2.0 personalized home page into one of the world’s most popular blog readers and so has quite a weight of expectations on his shoulders.

This chat is probably more interesting for you web 2.0/research 2.0 folks out there. We touch on

• The attention economy
• Behavioural data, privacy, data portability
• Widgets and Netvibes’ business model
• Netvibes’ short-term road map
• The neutral hub to organise your social life
• Ensuring business models don’t stifle innovation
• Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs
• The long/short game (shamelessly nicked from Lindsey)
• Notable mentions: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, OpenID, RSS, Yahoo

Thanks to BrainJuicer for making the video possible.

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Like Russell, we’re big fans of Peter Day’s In Business and Global Business (BBC).

In the latest Global Business, Peter chats with Professor Gary Hamel, a leading management author and thinker, about some of the themes in his new book, The Future of Management.

His key message to leaders is to shift from a culture of control to one that embraces personal creativity, posturing that this is the only path to future innovation, growth and prosperity.

The chat contains some really stirring stuff and strikes a perfect resonance with the zeitgeist (unleashing personal creativity, wisdom of crowds, bottom-up innovation, global talent etc.). We liked it so much that we spent the time to pick out some choice quotes:

“You can buy obedience and diligence and even intellect almost anywhere in the world for next to nothing.”

“We’re going to have to get people to bring to work their initiative, their creativity, their passion, and those are human capabilities that cannot be commanded. Those are gifts that people either choose to bring to work or not.”

“The existing management model was built to drive alignment, enforcement and control. What management tried to do over the last 100 years was to regularise the irregular, to drive the variety out of processes…we happen to live in a world today where it’s irregular people with irregular ideas who create all the new economic value and the wealth.”

“Organisations are less human than the people who work there. [people are inherently creative and innovative] but somehow when we get to work that adaptability, that innovation literally gets bleached out of people between 9 and 5.”

“The ability to aggregate human capability via the web, that’s not going to go away.”

Management innovation at W. L. Gore & Associates: “Every employee is free to say yes or no to any request. Most managers would have a very hard time imagining how you can get things done in an organsation where you can’t use any of your positional power (because you have none); people have to be persuaded. People are annually evaluated by 20 peers on the value they create [rather than via a hierarchy based on following strict instructions].”

Management innovation at Google: “The folks who run that they don’t primarily see themselves as the authors of strategy, they see themselves as editors of strategy…ideas bubble up.”

Pop here for the episode (hopefully it will stay archived).

Series:AdTalk Series:MarketingTalk

17mins | Related to ESOMAR Congress ‘07 | More podcasts in this series

One of the most moving presentations at this year’s Congress
covered the trials and tribulations of doing research in Afghanistan and Iraq, essentially an update to last year’s story.

Matthew Warshaw of D3 Systems Inc., one of the speakers and MD of the agency in Afghanistan (ACSOR-Surveys), gave us the video below, produced by non-profit The Asia Foundation, to share with you.

It takes us through some of the more pedestrian measures they take to get at the information and is not nearly as horrific as some of the events recounted last year.

As an aside, if you happen to meet Matthew Warshaw or his colleague Karl Feld, get them to recount some of their intriguing and fun stories from over the years. Let’s just say that Afghanistan isn’t their only experience of working in some of the more gritty or risky parts of the world

Series:Events Series:ESOMAR Series:Congress07

Just back from ESOMAR’s superbly organised and networking-friendly Berlin Congress and the first order of the day is to congratulate the award winners, pretty much all of whom have featured on RT.

So, congrats to…

• Best case history: Mike Cooke and Phyllis Macfarlane, GfK NOP (review)
• Best methodological paper: Orlando Wood, BrainJuicer (review). Orlando is a rising star - incredible gravitas for one so young
• Best overall paper (Fernanda Monti award): Mark Earls, Herd Consulting. No surprise to us, we were fans of Mark’s herd work before it rose to its current level of popularity
• ESOMAR excellence award for standards of performance in market research (John Downham award): DVL Smith, DVL Smith Group. David’s known for having given back more than most to the industry

We shot a bit of video while there and will endeavour to get it up over the next few weeks. It includes conversations with some of the keynotes

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