The last few years have seen a resurgence of what Steve Blank and other startups folks call ‘innovation theater‘. On January 10, I’ll be chatting with Steve and transformative CEO of HarperCollins, Brian Murray, about what… Read more »
Innovation
Growth insights in a 45 minute Facebook live session!
No Powerpoints, no notes, just the team at Harvard Business Review, terrific and astute questions from viewers and a white board. Check out this free Facebook Live session that has already garnered over 132,000 views. In more news –… Read more »
Innovation and Jobs-to-be-Done discussed in my latest newsletter
My latest newsletter offers observations and ideas that were discussed at two CEO Summits sponsored by Innosight and featuring keynotes by Clayton Christensen and myself. We discussed Clay’s terrific new book, Competing Against Luck, some… Read more »
Preparing for the 8th Annual Drucker Forum
A few years ago, I started attending the Global Peter Drucker Forum, which has become a real who’s who of management conferences. It takes place each November in Vienna and features luminaries and thought leaders… Read more »
What a startup can learn about customer needs from a medieval practice
In a recent article over at Fortune, I explore what Transferwise, a fast-growing new startup has rediscovered: an enduring customer need that is currently featuring in the migrant crisis, Hawala. The practice of Hawala originated centuries… Read more »
Implications of the Unicorn Economy
In my most recent newsletter, I suggested that businesses would do well to anticipate the consequences of a valuation bubble bursting in Silicon Valley with so many private companies valued at more than a billion… Read more »
Ideas for a new business model for F. A. O. Schwarz
Well, no sooner had the digital ink dried on my piece about F. A. O. Schwarz closing their famous Fifth Avenue shop, when I received a communication from the company saying that I had it… Read more »
Looking forward to the mach49 Mothership Blitz on Friday
As someone who has spent much of my life watching organizations fall victim to what I call the ‘transient advantage‘ economy, I’ve always been puzzled that despite its obvious importance, large organizations do a lot more… Read more »
Don’t listen to what your customers say, watch how they behave
I am often asked by companies with whom I work whether focus groups, surveys or customer panels are useful in learning what customers want and more importantly, what they will pay for. Sure, these techniques… Read more »
What trends fuel the disruption list for 2014?
It was really fun to be part of CNBC’s advisory panel to choose the most disruptive 50 companies of the year. The full list for 2014 can be found at this link. Some of the… Read more »
How do we get our middle managers back into a growth mindset?
It’s been five or more years since the Great recession walloped economies all over the world, with the result that for many companies it has been a time of doing not very much but cost-cutting,… 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 »