To be sure, Dell wanted to win the war for storage systems provider 3PAR. In fact, it wanted to win so badly that it chased HP in a bidding war until HP raised the stakes by $1 billion over Dell's original $1.1 billion offer.

But the war is over. Dell has conceded victory and HP will take home the prize.

Have you heard the tale about how one blogger-angry at Maytag for its terrible customer service-attracted 2,906 comments on her blog at dooce.com and reached one million others with her tweets? You can bet that the frustration she had with her Kenmore washer was nothing compared to the headaches her rants caused the parent company. Did Maytag learn from its mistakes? According to Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, officers at Forrester Research and authors of Empowered (Harvard Business Review Press, September 14, 2010), they did: The company now responds to tweets that its customers post online. But they would have caused themselves less grief and negative publicity if they had a strategy in place to empower their employees to reach out to their customers online. According to Bernoff and Schadler, "To succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve customer problems.

 

It was the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who said, "That which doesn't kill us makes a stronger."

I look at project challenges this way. Over the years I have come to appreciate that regardless of the project management methodology, the PPM software, or the training of the project manager, there are some pretty common challenges that need to be addressed by every project leader. It doesn't even really matter the nature of the project, if you neglect the following, the odds are against your success:

 

 

Lucy Kellaway, the caustic and sharp-eyed business columnist at the Financial Times, picked up a complaint that Starbucks outlets in the UK have a vaguely lavatory smell and watched the company response. Of course, it helped that the Tweet came from the political satirist Armando Iannucci, who has 80,000 followers.

Her report:  Within minutes, Darcy Willson-Rymer, the UK head of Starbucks, had replied: "Thanks for your feedback. Which store did you visit?"

John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian, had an interesting take in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the other day on technology and social community, something I have written about  here a few times in the past. Recalling a weekly summer Sunday concert series which a street car company launched in the late 19th century to spur business on an extension of its line, he noted that 6,000 Milwaukee residents would turn out to listen to a local band. This was, he adds, in the era before widespread use of such technology as air conditioning or TV.

The park brought people together as they escaped the heat of their homes for the breeze of a lakeside park.

Think the iPhone gained market share fast? Gurda quotes Robert Putnam ,author of "Bowling Alone," on television's rise from 10 percent market penetration in the US in 1950 to 90 percent in 1959. "Practically overnight, viewing became far and away the nation's leading leisure-time 'activity.' "

I posted today on CFOZone.com about a new partnership that could change the way that vendor finance and peer-to-peer lending sites operate:

Peer-to-peer lending, or community lending, is expected to grow 66 percent over the next three years, according to research by Gartner. Although this still makes it a very small market—at $5 billion in outstanding loans by 2013—it is becoming an increasingly-important funding source for small business and entrepreneurs.

And which one do you use most often?

 

A report by Gartner and the Financial Executives Research Foundation suggests that the CFO is increasingly becoming the top IT decision-maker in many organizations. The study, which is based on a survey of 482 senior finance executives, also found that more IT organizations report to the CFO than to the CEO or any other executive.

Also See the CIO - CFO - Who reports to Who Discussion

Google earlier this week made its fifth acquisition for the month of August. The target this time was SocialDeck, which develops social gaming technology for mobile devices and social networks. The company's games include PetHero, Shake&Spell, and ColorConnect, and it also develops a social-networking platform called Spark that connects players across devices.

SocialDeck announced news of the acquisition on its Web site, with very few details.

I think it's pretty safe to say that most of us believe that sponsors are critical to project success. Let me clarify that. Most of the time a project sponsor is critical to project success. There are some projects that probably don't need a sponsor (like ongoing infrastructure projects) and would probably find difficulty attracting a sponsor anyway.