Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Bigger, wealthier rivals can and will stack the deck against you. And they will involve lawyers.

When faced with trying to accomplish a big goal, one of the most daunting questions is: Where do I start?

David Novak of Yum Brands isn't just known for creating Cool Ranch Doritos: he's a renowned leader in charge of overseeing a company of 1.4 million employees at KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell worldwide. As CEO of Yum Brands , David Novak oversees the restaurant company with the most locations in the world.

This month's The Muppets movie tries to reverse decades of brand mismanagement. table p {font-size:15px !important;line-height:1.3em !important;padding:8px !important;} THE FAULTTHE FIX Selling out Some fans balked in 1996, when their beloved Miss Piggy started shilling for Baked Lays, and then again in 2006, when she appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial to sing suggestively about "Cheesy Bites." Kermit's bizarre Ford Escape Hybrid ads didn't fare much better.

Call it a barometer of the Herman Cain brand: Calls to a slew of Godfather's franchises across the country suggest Cain's celebrity has failed to stimulate sales of Sicilian or pepperoni slices. Can Cain move voters if he can't move pizzas

Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan is is the legislative equivalent of Subway's $5 footlong campaign or Domino's 5-5-5 deal. It's sharply marketed to the fast food nation (just don't look too close at what's inside).

We all can learn a lesson or two on how to correct a negative image. Here's what Domino's is doing right.

[youtube _z1bwFD9bug] A number in the "very high six figures." That's how much it cost TabCo to run its recent eye-grabbing campaign, pitched to reveal a revolutionary innovation in the tablet PC market, according to Jonathan Bloom CEO of McGrath Power, the firm that ran it. That amount is a measure of the bet the tablet is placing on its new product, and also a guide to the complexity of the entire process--but that's just the start of it

In the new book The Innovator's DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen discuss the three things that set companies steeped innovation apart from the thousands of other companies doing business. Drawing on a sample of companies that lead both lists, we dove deeply into the practices of some of the world's most innovative companies

The Fast Company reader's essential rundown of who's breaking into and shaking up your tech space--updated all day. Google's Reputation-Management Tool New Dashboard tools streamline alerts about personal information that crops up on the web--wanted or not. This will be especially valuable to businesses wary of negative comments or outright lies.

Congratulations. If you've clicked this link, you're probably running a fast-growing company—a fortuitous position for any business owner. However, if your company grows too fast and without the correct infrastructure to let it grow, it can quickly spiral out of control

Everyone in New Orleans has a Katrina story, and those tales are typically tinged with loss, frustration, and grief. Five years after the storm, you still hear them, of course, and you still see evidence of the devastation that killed over 1,800 people and left more than one million homeless.