search driven research Archives

What CEOs care about – and how to get them what they need

One of my theories on how to be a good CEO is to keep things simple. I focus on four areas of the company, and I have no more than three priorities at any one time. This makes sure I deal with the critical issues, both strategic and tactical, and put great people, process and delegation in place to run the operations of the business.I was reminded of the four areas when I put together a presentation on how to use intelligence for a CEO recently. I believe the important [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:27:40-08:00March 27, 2008|Leadership|2 Comments

Motorola’s management churn foretold today’s troubles

Motorola's troubles just keep getting worse - as reported today in the WSJ. At least the new CEO, Greg Brown, is predicting "no quick fixes".Looks like a quick fix was tried last summer, though prior to Ed Zander's departure. We track management turnover and you can see from the MOTO chart that there was a major reorg in July. [Red are departures, blue internal moves and green hires - dark are execs, light are managers]. That July spike looks like it was a reorg to take management from ICS - [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:30:42-08:00January 23, 2008|My Personal Journey|0 Comments

Defining IP in search-driven research

Intellectual property in a business like ours typically refers to software technology. Code, algorithms, patents, methodologies – all required to recreate and build the product and protect it under IP laws.In the business of search-driven research, it turns out that models are as significant a part of our IP as the traditional software code is. We have an excellent search engine and surrounding systems, but more importantly we have models of what’s interesting to the professional user. For every “topic” that’s to be detected we build adaptive market models which [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:33:31-08:00December 4, 2007|My Personal Journey|0 Comments

The dangers of a CEO blogging

Two fascinating examples of the advantages, and pitfalls of CEOs going online in internet forums.First Jonathan Schwartz - the CEO of Sun Microsystems. His blog is famous and voraciously read by our users. Meaty, good content, and giving insight to how he sees his industry.Now - cut to his blog posting on Nov 8, 2007 - 3 days after Sun's earnings call. Jon comments on the quarter and how he feels about it and, for the most part the data is the same. However, it is not identical - and [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:50:22-08:00November 12, 2007|Leadership|0 Comments

Why Investment Research is a Long Tail problem

Since the term “Long Tail” was first coined by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine three years ago, many articles have been written about new businesses developing using technology to solve the problem. Examples abound in internet companies, the movie industry, simulation systems, network traffic to name just a few. In the case of the internet companies Amazon, eBay, Google, Netflix - these businesses release value in their markets by giving consumers access to products (in these cases books, auction products, general information or movies) that live in the long tail [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:54:28-08:00July 15, 2007|My Personal Journey|0 Comments

Solving the “last mile” problem with human-powered search

Yesterday’s New York Times article Human Touch May Loosen Google's Grip covers a topic near to my heart – the difference human-powered search can make in quality of results.Professional search users – in our case portfolio managers and analysts – require very high relevancy in their research results. Relevancy means delivering articles that match only the companies and topics of interest. So, if an investor is not interested in Microsoft Office, but is interested in the adoption rates for Vista, the system needs to only return the latter. If the [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:55:26-08:00June 26, 2007|My Personal Journey|0 Comments