Upcoming Webinar on Business Model Innovation - Complimentary to readers of my blog
I’m pleased to invite readers of my blog to an interactive webinar with myself and Professor Paul Ingram, faculty director of the Columbia Senior Executive Program, to discuss my recent interview in Harvard Business Review on identifying when business models are in trouble and how to develop innovative new ones.
The webinar, taking place February 15 at 2 p.m. (EST), will offer opportunities to exchange ideas and ask questions both during and after the webinar. It should last about 30 minutes.
Register for this complimentary webinar.
If you have additional questions about the event or program, please contact Anthony Madonna at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or 212-854-6016.
We hope you can join us February 15.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on February 10, 2011
Loved Scott Anthony’s Analysis of On the Brink Disrupters
Scott Anthony is one of the principles of consulting firm Innosight, a very innovative consulting company founded to capitalize on the insights into industry disruption pioneered by Clayton Christensen. Like myself, he maintains a blog over at the Harvard Business Review site. He recently published a post that I thought was marvelous on multiple levels, a two year follow up of companies he listed as on the brink disruptors. This is great on multiple levels. How often does a management thinker have the guts to show how well their predictions worked out in practice?
Almost never. In fact, it gets pretty hilarious when you do - the number of esteemed people whowere just flat out wrong is considerable, and yet they never fess up! I'm thinking of a pretty heavy duty consultant who published an article on how all of us should emulate banks because they had learned to eliminate risks in their businesses. Or another pretty well regarded guru who waxed lyrical about Enron. Or another...well you get the idea. If you want to know the gory details, email me. Or if you just want to learn about why we are so often wrong about such things, I can recommend Phil Rosenzweig's book The Halo Effect.
Anyway, back to Scott. What he found when he did go back and revisit his list, was the following:
Had you split $100,000 in these seven companies on January 16, 2009, you would have close to $260,000 today (compared to about $175,000 if you had invested in comparable indices). Six of the seven companies individually exceeded the overall market, by wide margins.
Remember, this was not done retrospectively - he and his colleagues made the predictions two years ago and had the courage to follow up now. Which supports an idea that both Scott and I share, which is that when companies get the theory and practice of innovation right, it stops being this mysterious thing that only super-gifted people can pull off, but can even become something one can harness more or less routinely. And that's pretty encouraging.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on February 05, 2011
Fantastic story about learning from failure at Best Buy
My friends over at Strategy + Innovation published a remarkable - and very honest - story from Brad Anderson, the former CEO of Best Buy. In the article, he describes the misbegotten acquisition by Best Buy of a chain of music stores known as Musicland. It's a cautionary tale of how wrong one can be when making assumptions, but also how even devastating disappointments can create productive learning. Onward with "intelligent" failing - which will be the subject of a forthcoming article to be published in the Harvard Business Review.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 31, 2011
Profit from the Core - A growth theory is put to something of an empirical test and OUCH!
One of the more popular books on growth in recent years has been Profit From the Core, a book that suggests firms should focus their efforts on core and adjacent markets to find growth opportunities. I've found it to be thought provoking and intelligently written. I've never taken the trouble to double-check the research, however. Blogger Thomas Thurston, however, did. In an interesting blog post he describes a small empirical test he did using business units to try to replicate the results reported in the book.
His conclusions?
Firstly, that the categorization of businesses into various types of adjacencies was highly subjective and dependent on the rater doing the classification. About as robust as one could get was "core" or "not core".
Secondly, that the prediction that adjacent ventures would do better than non-adjacent ventures did not hold up. About the only predictable result was that core initiatives did better than either adjacencies or non adjacencies in terms of survival. There was no difference in his sample between the other two types of venture.
I found that interesting!
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 07, 2011
BBQ Parties for guys? Release your inner Avon!
Among the sites I enjoy visiting is Springwise, a web site dedicated to spotting interesting new ideas from all around the world. This week they discovered a doozy - Barbecue parties targeted at men, at which the guests can buy cooking gear and meat. Apparently, there are guys out there who felt deprived of the joys of the in-home sales party.
The business is called Man Cave and was founded last year near Minneapolis. It's web site is: www.mancaveworldwide.com. Who knew the world needed another way to get men into shopping?
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- Posted Rita McGrath on December 22, 2010
