RGM

At The Booth Company: Smart companies may incur huge losses when they enter unknown territory--new alliances, markets, products, technologies. Failures could be prevented or their cost contained if managers approached innovative ventures with the right planning and control tools. Discovery-driven planning is a practical tool that acknowledges the difference between planning for a new venture and for a more conventional business. Using Kao Corp.'s entry into floppy disks, the authors present a step-by-step approach to help companies think differently about planning. Managers should begin with the bottom line and work their way up the income statement, first determining a new venture's profit potential.

• Posted: Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Tim Askew in a MakingRain post praises the Harvard Business Review April magazine's theme on Failure, and cites Rita McGrath's Failing By Design blog:

"I in no way mean to say that failure, per se, is good. It is so painful and frightening. I’ve been through it a lot. Rita Gunther McGrath sums this up neatly in an essay called Failing by Design in the previously mentioned HBR issue. She says, “[Failure] can waste money, destroy morale, infuriate customers, damage reputations, harm careers, and sometimes lead to tragedy. But failure is inevitable in uncertain environments, and, if managed well, it can be a very useful thing. Indeed, organizations can’t possibly undertake the risks necessary for innovation and growth if they're not comfortable with the idea of failing.”

To read the entire post, click here.

• Posted: Thursday, May 12, 2011

Rita McGrath's blog at Harvard Business Review is entitled Back to the Boneyard — Palm, Flip...and now RIM?. "Things move quickly in technology, which is why technology companies are fascinating to strategists the way fruit flies are for biologists — you can see an entire life cycle in a very short span of time. The latest story to make me think of this is a recent piece in the New York Times that observes that RIM (Research in Motion) has cut its forecasts for its Blackberry products and that it is struggling to offer new ideas relevant to an iPad world where just being able to get your email on a handheld device is a yawn. It reflects a pattern that I often talk about: When a company discovers something that is truly exciting, others copy and follow, to the point that what was once the object of techno-lust becomes a non-negotiable prerequisite. Expensive to develop? Sure. Difficult to deliver flawlessly? Of course. Making a competitive difference? Unfortunately, only if your offer isn't as good as the other guy's and then only in the negative. To read the entire post, click here.

• Posted: Wednesday, May 11, 2011

At Legal Technology Today, Rita McGrath's Harvard Business Review Failing by Design principles are cited as an approach to testing compliance systems.

"[Rita McGrath] cites to the term of intelligent failure which she believes can help companies evolve. This idea of learning from failure struck me as a useful lesson in how a company might test the effectiveness of the components of its compliance system. One area that would seem to be ripe for testing is to set up a test for reporting a compliance violation or incident, either through a company’s hotline or other reporting mechanism."

• Posted: Monday, April 25, 2011

In the latest Harvard Business Review, I made the argument that failures can be useful in that they teach us where our assumptions are wrong, expose dead ends, and generally can give us something of an education. In highly uncertain environments, failures are both useful and unavoidable. It was interesting, therefore, to run across an analysis of Google's failed projects over time, together with a quote issued by the company regarding each failed venture. What is interesting is Google's philosophy of launching early and quickly, and their perhaps too-quick closure of some products. It is also interesting that founders of several hot startup companies (Foursquare and Twitter come to mind) cut their teeth and gained technical exposure by experimenting at Google. To read the entire post, click here.

• Posted: Wednesday, April 13, 2011