Talking about digital transformation has a way of freaking people out. They then do the exact wrong thing, which is to throw money and effort at anyone who can promise that – Poof! – digital… Read more »
Thought Sparks
How Not to Blow Your First Marketing Campaign: 3 Factors
Most new product launches fail. One big, and unnecessary reason is focusing too much on the product or service offering and not focusing enough on how the thing will be brought to market. New! New!… Read more »
Thought Sparks Wrap Up – August 2021
Dear colleagues, Welcome to the monthly newsletter, with a wrap-up of my weekly Thought Sparks and some things to watch out for in September. If you’d like to get the weekly Thought Sparks delivered right… Read more »
Discovering Perfectly Predictable Mistakes – Before You Make Them
There are no failures in Thoughtland – that mystical place where great ideas for new products and services are first born. But if you want to travel to the real world, you’ll need a different… Read more »
The Discipline that Turns Vision into Reality
In the heady days of coming up with what you think is a breakthrough idea, it’s easy to get carried away by assumptions. Forcing yourself to create a deliverables specification can create powerful discipline. Entrepreneurs… Read more »
We need to talk about five mechanisms to avoid future catastrophe.
Humans are surprisingly adaptive creatures – many of the changes wrought by the pandemic would have been unthinkable in an earlier era. And yet, we’re also remarkably blind to changes happening right under our noses. … Read more »
You asked, We Answered: Questions on Innovation
Drop in on the Q&A portion of a recent innovation conference, sponsored by my colleagues at Visagio. I gave the keynote speech about Seeing Around Corners and the criticality of innovation. Here is an excerpt… Read more »
Inflection Points Shift Key Metrics – Are You Paying Attention?
A potentially game-changing inflection point shows up when the key metrics underlying your business have the potential to change on a 10X scale. Here’s where to look to see if that is happening. As I… Read more »
Thought Sparks Wrap Up – July 2021
Dear Colleagues, Welcome to the monthly wrap-up of my weekly Thought Sparks newsletters. A no-nonsense guide to measuring innovation mastery (July 6, 2021) What is it like to work in an organization that has attained… Read more »
Key Ingredients of a Killer Prototype
We often think of prototyping as something only a gifted designer or developer can do. But there are lots of examples in the real world of how ordinary people can pull it off. If you… Read more »
The Lesson of the Direct to Consumer Revolution: Strategy 101 still matters
Every so often a new business model, often enabled by technology, takes the world by storm, attracts a lot of hype, eventually proves unable to live up to the headlines and disappears or becomes a… Read more »
3 Ways to Completely Mess Up Customer Surveys
Customer surveys are everywhere – and most of them aren’t going to offer one ounce of insight. Instead, learn to use them properly and for the right reasons. Customer surveys are inescapable these days. They… Read more »