I’m very much looking forward to a breakfast session next week that I’ll be running as part of a partnership between Columbia Business School and WOBI in New York. We’ll be talking about how you can… Read more »
Thought Sparks
Sustainable advantage, Transient Advantage and Organizational Change
In an insightful blog that is part of a series HBR is running on the intersection between Strategy and Innovation, editor Sarah Cliffe interviews colleague Don Sull, who argues that you can think of the… Read more »
Continuous reconfiguration – commended paper by Emerald Insight
Emerald Insight commended the research behind a recent paper, Continuous Reconfiguration in the Transient Advantage Economy. In a nutshell, what I found was that firms that were capable of delivering consistent performance over a relatively… Read more »
What do The Weather Channel, Apple’s iPod and future banking services all have in common?
These players often created entire categories of new consumption – from just-in-time and on demand weather updates, to a transformative way to listen to your own content whenever you felt like it to new kinds… Read more »
Say it isn’t so…my beloved iPod has gone into erosion
In my book The End of Competitive Advantage, I point out that even extremely potent advantages are subject to erosion. Even when they were once hugely popular, transformative and much loved, like the Apple iPod… Read more »
Postponed – CBS Sunday Morning Show March 23 9am with Rita
CBS Correspondent Martha Teichner and I had a stimulating conversation about disruption that will be part of CBS “Sunday Morning’s” annual Money program. We chatted about businesses that have become vulnerable to disruption and why it… Read more »
Organizational agility: The CEO’s top concern?
Last week at the Managing Partners’ Forum held on March 12 in London, Caspar de Bono of the Financial Times opened this high-level conference for leaders of professional services firms with an observation about the… Read more »
Davos CEO Session: Organizational Agility and Learning in a Complex World
The World Economic Forum has introduced a well-received innovation in their program lineup, what they call the CEO Series. These feature CEO’s as panelists and the audience consists of only CEO’s and similarly high-level folks… Read more »
Davos session: Future of International e-tailing
While in Davos, a panel on the future of international e-retailing was convened with representative CEO’s from major international logistics, supply chain and retail providers. The panel opened with the question of why international e-retailing… Read more »
Is your firm ready for a world of transient advantage? Please contribute to a new benchmark devised by Rita McGrath
I’ve been working with Richard Chaplin, Founder of the Managing Partners’ Forum, on an MPF survey that measures the extent to which different sectors are ready for a world of transient competitive advantage. The survey… Read more »
CVS and the decision to drop tobacco sales – savvy strategic repositioning?
CVS’s decision to stop offering tobacco products is an example of a company shifting its resources from cash-flow-generating, but declining businesses into higher growth markets. Tobacco, although a cash cow for many retailers (and a… Read more »
MarketDrivenGrowth: Driving Organic Growth and Innovation
Bob Cooper, Academic Director and Senior Fellow at the Kellogg School of Management reviews The End of Competitive Advantage (“fabulous book”) and discusses the five internal barriers that leads to growth stagnation here.