Have you ever had a flash of insight in the shower, when you’re brushing your teeth, or even just before you fall asleep? If you want to know more about this serendipity, then you should learn about “strategic intuition.”

The heart of strategic intuition mostly has to do with your mind combining existing ideas in new ways to solve a problem that you might be facing.

At a recent conference, I caught up with Columbia Business School professor William Duggan to talk about his new book, Strategic Intuition. The book recently received a very favorable review in The Wall Street Journal.

In this podcast, Professor Duggan offers advice to anybody who is trying to improve any process or trying to do anything creative. Check it out …

Great Artists Steal! – a podcast with Professor William Duggan

About Professor Duggan

William Duggan is the author of three recent books on strategic intuition as the key to innovation: Napoleon’s Glance: The Secret of Strategy (2002); The Art of What Works: How Success Really Happens (2003); and Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (forthcoming, 2007). He also has authored three previous books.

Duggan has 20 years’ experience as a strategy adviser and consultant. He teaches strategic intuition in three venues at Columbia Business School: MBA courses, Executive MBA courses and Executive Education sessions. He also sometimes teaches the core MBA course Strategy Formulation.

Is pay per click losing momentum? Is growth in the channel waning? In a recent blog post, Steve Rubel wrote “I am calling a top to this market now. There are five reasons why a pay-per-click advertising recession looms!”

To further explore pay per click’s future, we turned to Steve and to Alan Rimm-Kaufman. Alan leads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, a direct marketing services and consulting firm, and he’s a fan of pay per click. Steve, senior vice president in Edelman’s me2revolution practice, has his doubts.

We dove into such questions as:

• Are people numbing to pay per click ads as they have to banner ads?
• Is the pay per click channel maturing, and what does that mean?
• Is pay per click more, or less, trustworthy than public relations?
• Can combining channels help drive your pay per click results?

Enjoy …

Pay Per Click: Boom or Bust?

Now, kind listeners, it’s your turn. Please let us know whether you’re thumbs up or thumbs down on pay per click by leaving a comment on this blog! Or, toss out another topic you’d like us to explore. And thank you for listening.

About Alan

Alan Rimm-Kaufman leads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, a direct marketing services and consulting firm founded in 2003. He is a regular speaker at industry events, including Jupiter Media’s Search Engine Strategies; the DMA’s Annual, Catalog, Net.Marketing, and NCDM shows; NRF’s Shop.org; eTail; NEMOA; and DMD NY conferences.

Rimm-Kaufman writes the internet retailing column for Catalog Success. He co-wrote the online marketing chapter of Katie Muldoon’s The Catalog Strategist’s Toolkit. He has been quoted on internet marketing in DM News, Internet Retailer, Catalog Age, Direct, Business Week, and The New York Times. He serves as a contributing reviewer for online marketing for the academic journal Management Science. He has also taught for Marketing Profs.

Also check out Rimm-Kaufman blogs.

About Steve

Steve Rubel is a senior marketing strategist with over 15 years experience. He currently serves as senior vice president in Edelman’s me2revolution practice. Edelman is the largest independent global PR firm.

Steve is charged with helping Edelman identify, test, incubate and champion new forms of communication. He also explores this on his well-read Micro Persuasion weblog and in a bi-weekly column for AdAge Digital.

Steve is often sought out as a speaker and appears frequently in the press. He has been named to several prestigious lists, including: Media Magazine’s Media 100, the AlwaysOn/Technorati Open Media 100 and the CNET News.com Blog 100. Prior to joining Edelman in 2006, Rubel spent five years at CooperKatz & Company.

Also don’t forget to check out Steve Rubel’s Blog.

In a recent blog post, Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at Cymfony, wrote about a study that provocatively proclaims “Spending on Conversational Marketing will Outpace Traditional Marketing by 2012”. To find out if that’s even possible, I got together with Jim and Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president at Nielsen Online Strategic Services. Like Jim, Pete is wary of the “conversation” hubbub.

What ensued was a very lively debate about whether marketers are prepared to support conversational marketing, and the answer isn’t very pretty. As Jim and Pete point out, not only are marketers not using Web 2.0 tools to create a conversation. To even listen effectively, they need to overhaul their infrastructures, big time.

We invite you to listen to the debate and then tell us what you think by leaving a comment on this blog. Enjoy …

Conversational Marketing: Irrational Exuberance or Next Big Thing?

About Jim

Jim Nail has an extensive background in integrated marketing through his 22-year career that spans online marketing, market research, brand advertising and direct marketing. Jim was an analyst at Forrester for eight years, focusing on how marketing strategies and tactics must adapt to technology-driven changes in consumer media consumption habits. Prior to joining Forrester, he helped launch Web advertising network AdSmart, where he served as director of marketing. He spent 15 years planning and managing integrated marketing campaigns at leading advertising agencies including Ogilvy & Mather Direct, Draft Worldwide, Bates USA and Hill Holliday.

About Pete

Pete Blackshaw, whose professional background encompasses politics, interactive marketing, and brand management, is Executive Vice President of Strategic Services for Nielsen Online, a new entity combining Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a firm Pete helped co-found, and Nielsen NetRatings. Pete’s primary focus revolves around how to help brands interpret, manage, act upon consumer-generated media (CGM). A former interactive marketing leader at P&G and founder of consumer feedback portal PlanetFeedback.com, Pete co-founded the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). He is a frequent speaker at interactive marketing industry events, serves as Ad-Tech advisory board member, authors a regular marketing column with ClickZ, and authors several blogs including ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com (www.consumergeneratedmedia.com). He is author of an upcoming book by Random House entitled “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World.”

Also, another good reference point on the ugly side of this debate can be found here.