What Matters in a Veep?

Over at DecisionWorld, I have created a decision model designed to help Obama and McCain determine what really matters when considering who to name as their running mates.

Everyone can take part in the excercise…it takes about five minutes. Make it happen!

Go here!

Hasbro’s Blowin’ It!

Question: What would you do as the head of a company who’s decades-old product has suddenly seen a significant revival in interest amongst a whole new generation of users? How would you respond if over a half a million people were became actively engaged in playing an online version of your game? How would you capitalize on this sudden, exciting trend and convert this unexpected spike in interest into new sales and branding opportunities? C’mon, your dusty old game is hip again!

Here’s the wrong answer: You’d fight to shut it down and piss off a half million potential customers. It looks like Hasbro’s following through with their demand that Facebook take down Scrabulous, one of the only things keeping me coming back to Facebook. This is incrediblly short-sighted. Since when does the desire to protect intellectual property trump all business opportunities? Protect the brand and maintain sales status-quo, or embrace the new online paradigms and exploit the opportunities they present?

Has Hasbro decided to maintain their position as Has-beens.

UPDATE: Technomarketer has some great advice for how Hasbro should have proceeded (and still can). I couldn’t agree more with his statement that they need to get the lawyers out of the marketing department. Lawyers and marketers rarely mix well. Thanks to Shel Israel for the head’s up. Shel’s been all over this issue…he likes Scrabulous as much, or more, than I do.

UPDATE #2: Mashable! has a poll up asking what Hasbro should do.

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DecisionWorld: A New Blog

Cross-posted on DecisionWorld

I’ve started a new blog with Andri Haraldsson of Expert Choice Software, where we hope to explore real-life and theoretical concepts in decision-making and collaboration. Andri and I have had some very interesting conversations, and we came to the conclusion that we should take these conversations to the blogosphere. We hope to build a conversation about how we make personal decisions regarding things like careers and college, as well as decisions and collaboration within the enterprise. What tools can be used? What processes work best? What pitfalls exist that lead to bad decisions?

Andri’s an expert in decision-making. I’m not. I hope that this signals where we want DecisionWorld to go. We’ll be adding regular and guest contributors, and we aim to strike the right balance of academic and layman, theoretical and practical. I’m involved in leading a new web start-up, and there’s lots of decisions to be made. If you think about it, making decisions is the most important role of an executive, and often the most difficult or mystifying. This holds true in life as well.

Onward!