Posted on Jan 31, 2011 in Gartner, Inc. | 11 comments
Gartner’s Original Research process Part 1. I was influenced during Gartner Group’s first year (March 1979-April 1980) by reading two public documents: the book “the Tao Jones Averages: A Guide to Whole-Brained Investing” by Bennet Goodspeed, and an article written by David B. Montgomery and Charles B. Weinberg ‘Toward Strategic Intelligence Systems’...
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My Failed Initiatives: Coaching a Financial Report Business
Posted on Jul 29, 2010 in Innovation | 3 comments
In mid 2003, I suggested to my stepson that he apply his entrepreneurial interest and talent to a project we called Topline Analysis, LLC. This was a new and rather structured report format which I designed, specifically to publicize small public firms to those Wall Street “buy-side” investment firms which invested in listed companies but received virtually no research “coverage” from ...
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Posted on May 22, 2010 in Non-Gartner Advisory | 19 comments
Murray Gell-Mann is one of the world’s standout intellectual legends, where he’s known for developing key aspects of the modern theory of quantum physics, but is renowned in many other fields as well. Admitted to Yale at 15, he earned his PhD from MIT at 21; in 1969 he received the Nobel prize (unshared) in Physics. But he has also become an international adviser on the environment,...
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Posted on May 4, 2010 in Non-Gartner Advisory | 67 comments
Some day the Advisory Industry may look different than today, and an example of what’s possible may be the manner in which vendor and user clients compensate their Advisory providers. It seems worthwhile for segments of our industry to study this alternative compensation model, as it has been implemented successfully in the Wall Street Research space over many decades, being both useful...
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Gartner Innovation During Its Formative Years
Posted on Apr 10, 2010 in Innovation | 8 comments
During the 1960′s at IBM and 1970′s on Wall Street, I was a subscriber or reader of research from several firms which were predecessors to the current Advisory Industry. The firms included IDC, Computer Intelligence, Dataquest, Yankee and Input. While on Wall Street, I joined the IBM user groups “Share” and “Guide”, The CCIA (Computer and Communications Industry...
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Posted on Mar 15, 2010 in Gartner, Inc. | 66 comments
Soundview: The early years Recall that I spent 9 years on Wall Street as a technology analyst just before Gartner Group (Gartner Inc.) was founded in March 1979. True, our Gartner charter was to sell from the very start into three different markets: IT vendors, users, and institutional investors. But we didn’t raise enough cash to build sales teams in all three markets, so to deal with...
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Was Saatchi & Saatchi One of the Great Entrepreneurial Firms?
Posted on Mar 11, 2010 in Entrepreneurism | 7 comments
“Charles and Maurice would tell the prospective sellers anything they wanted to hear, and invent an ideal version of what life would be like after the deal was signed. After that, they’d just do whatever the hell they wanted.”
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Entrepreneurial Case Study From My Wall Street Days
Posted on Mar 3, 2010 in Entrepreneurism | 26 comments
There could be no logical basis for thinking I would be successful on Wall Street. I had no financial experience whatsoever, and was hired by E.F. Hutton because of my IBM experience where I analyzed IBM’s competition. I was lucky that soon after I was hired, IBM announced its Copier 1, and people wondered whether this might impact Xerox, one of the “nifty fifty”, the name for...
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