IDEO’s Colin Raney on the ‘large market fallacy’
This week, I’m here with a fantastic group of participants in Columbia’s Leading Strategic Growth and Change program, which I direct. This morning’s presentation featured Colin Raney and Joe Gerber from design consultancy IDEO . We had a great morning. Colin and Joe described how IDEO works on design problems and how they use Discovery Driven Planning to model business designs just as they traditionally have modeled product designs. Then, we engaged the whole class in an exercise to rethink Wiley’s “For Dummies” franchise. It was energizing, fun and fresh!
During the course of our time with IDEO, Colin mentioned the “large market fallacy” which is a typical mistake that big companies make—thinking that the road to strategy nirvana is getting relatively small slices of huge markets. It’s something we battle against all the time with big companies. You can read more about Colin’s ideas on sizing markets in this Blog Post.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on November 05, 2009
Event Alert - MacMillan talks about Discovery Driven Growth
Esteemed colleague and co-author MacMillan will be giving a talk in Philadelphia on Nov. 18. Check out the details here..
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- Posted Rita McGrath on November 03, 2009
Heard on the Street - Discovery Driven Planning Changes Leadership Decisions - at Harvard, no less!
One of our dear colleagues at Wharton happened to be teaching at a conference up at Harvard Business School. He was kind enough to report the following exchange to us:
Dear Mac -
I just came back from a long conference at HBS that included a lot of business people and HBS alumni. The discussion came up about best advice for pushing their leadership team, and one of the business people said, “Well, this discovery-driven planning program that I participated in taught me that I needed a new CFO because the one I had wasn’t flexible enough. So I’d recommend that.”
Our friend continues: “As you might imagine, the HBS moderator didn’t follow up that line of discussion.”
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 04, 2009
Plan on paper, not with live ammunition
John Caddell, in a recent review notes that when using Discovery Driven Growth principles, planning should happen on paper, rather than in ways that are expensive and potentially risky. Hear Hear!
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- Posted Rita McGrath on April 21, 2009
Discovery Driven Growth Going to India
In a nice comment on some of the core ideas in Discovery Driven Growth, a blogger from the Hindu Business Line describes a point we make in the book as useful. That is that you are better driving your projects from key decisions points rather than date milestones. The reason it matters so much, we have argued, is that when something is very uncertain, predicting dates can be nearly impossible, You usually can, however, anticipate the next major checkpoint and plan towards that. If people are given permission to replan at such key points, we suggest, there will be less escalation of commitment to failing courses of action and faster progress.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on April 10, 2009
