Peter Here's my European media diet. TV: Practically none. Only watch DVDs with the kids on the TV. Have a Premiere (Pay TV) subscription but it doesn't work since storms earlier in the year. Never got it fixed. Don't miss it. Must cancel it. Magazines: The Economist and academic business monthlies/quarterlies (HBR, SMR, JMarketing, J Marketing Research,etc). Read the Economist from cover to cover within a day. Read interesting articles from the others. Love the on-line service of HBR & SMR Newspapers: Browse the local Kölner Stadt Anzeige over breakfast. Radio: In the car when driving. Listen to local Radio Köln for local news, particularly traffic reports and the BBC World Service for world news. Internet (PC): In use continuously for work and play. Watch 60+ blogs per day through Newsgator Online service, including yours. Couldn't do without it. Internet (Mobile): Still trying to get my Nokia E61 to work properly. God-awful user interface (for an ex Palm person). Haven't had time to take it to a T-Mobile shop. Dreading the experience. Would use it more if it worked and if prices were more reasonable. Graham Hill Independent CRM Consultant Interim CRM Manager

Pete I think the messages have got a bit mixed up with the metaphors! I agree with your suggestion to move on from the 'who owns what' discussion and to create our own viewpoints for broader discussion. I agree with you fully that Reinventing the Marketing Organisation is a complex and difficult matter. There are many formal structures in common use for marketing within organisations. And there are even more informal networks that sit under the formal organisation and that actually get things done. These structures & networks are starting to expand out of the marketing department to other departments (through collaboration networks), to other companies (through e.g. open innovation) and to broader markets (through, e.g. customer generated media). And then there is the enormously difficult process of changing from one structure to another and all the interlinked changes that requires to a company's marketing capabilities. All of these need to be brought into a thought piece about Reinventing the Marketing Organisation. I will pull my thoughts together, share them with you and let's go from there. This should be an interesting discussion. Graham

Pete That's not the point. The point is that you promote your thinking in public whilst keeping the contents private. The public has no way to assess whether what you write is good or not, without committing to buying the report. Yes, the work belongs to Forrester. But so does other material that proudly sits on its author's non-Forrester blog. My wish is simply to bring your work out into the open to stimulate a bigger discussion about organising for customer-facing business. Reinventing marketing is far too importnat to be left inside the walls of Forrester. Graham

Peter How on earth can the majority of your readers comment on your Reinventing the Marketing Organisation paper when it is not in the public domain? As it happens, I have seen a Powerpoint presentation of the article. If I look back at my own experience as an organisational development consultant, it strikes me that your paper hugely oversimplifies the complex process of developing an organisation's customer-orientation and the organisational structure required to sustain it. Is this oversimplification a problem? Well, only if you have seen the paper and intend to act upon it! Why not persuade Forrester to put the paper onto your blog (there are other examples of Forrester allowing this on the Internet) so that we can dissect and discuss it a litle more publicly. Graham Hill Independent CRM Consultant Interim CRM Manager

Peter This is a difficult area. Or maybe not. If you create something that is really ground-breaking in its originality, a business paradigm-shift you might say, you might well be angry at the perceived theft. You might even engage a lawyer to seek recompense. But you would probably end up generally poorer-off (in all sense of the words) after the experience. But how many of us are capable of such originality? Sadly, very few of us. The rest of us take others' ideas, mash-them up with our own, spice them up with a few carefully selected facts and rush to print. Often we are not even aware of others' ideas that we have borrowed. Rarely do we give credit in all places where credit is really due. We are as guilty of intellectual theft as those you describe in your post. If you really feel angry. Sit on it for 24 hours before writing to the offending authors to insist upon credit. Or that they take the offending article down. On the other hand, you could smile to yourself that your ideas have reached a wider audience, that others will benefit from your thinking and that Google will likely lead interested readers back to you anyway, oh, and that you haven't fallen into the trap of becoming a "digital narcissist". Graham Hill