Through Valize, Ron Boire and I have been working with clients to use the tools we have developed to bring Discovery Driven Planning / Discovery Driven Growth to life. Although we’ve got years of experience… Read more »
Discovery Driven Planning
Congratulations on the official publication of Lead from the Core, Jay Steinfeld!
“We weren’t there to sell blinds. We were there to become better than we ever thought we could be”. This mantra, expressed by Jay Steinfeld, founder of Blinds.com underscores what it looks like when leaders create a… Read more »
The latest for the Flops File – Zillow Offers
It takes a special combination of ingredients to land in my “flops” file. You have to lose your parent company at least $50 million. You probably started out with big ambitious goals, all-at-once funding, leaders… Read more »
The Principles of Learning from Prototypes: 5 Lessons
Prototypes are a great way to get customer feedback about elements of your proposed innovation before you have to invest a ton of resources in them. But there is a bit of science to how… Read more »
Digital transformation, the discovery-driven way
Talking about digital transformation has a way of freaking people out. They then do the exact wrong thing, which is to throw money and effort at anyone who can promise that – Poof! – digital… Read more »
How Not to Blow Your First Marketing Campaign: 3 Factors
Most new product launches fail. One big, and unnecessary reason is focusing too much on the product or service offering and not focusing enough on how the thing will be brought to market. New! New!… Read more »
Discovering Perfectly Predictable Mistakes – Before You Make Them
There are no failures in Thoughtland – that mystical place where great ideas for new products and services are first born. But if you want to travel to the real world, you’ll need a different… Read more »
The Discipline that Turns Vision into Reality
In the heady days of coming up with what you think is a breakthrough idea, it’s easy to get carried away by assumptions. Forcing yourself to create a deliverables specification can create powerful discipline. Entrepreneurs… Read more »
Key Ingredients of a Killer Prototype
We often think of prototyping as something only a gifted designer or developer can do. But there are lots of examples in the real world of how ordinary people can pull it off. If you… Read more »
The BareBones NPV tool: When you need to quantify, but really don’t have the information
Trying to figure out what a new initiative might do for you? A traditional approach is the net present value calculation. This nifty little tool offers an alternative with just 9 input metrics. The net… Read more »
Hello, Uncertainty!
Like so many of us, I had a well-crafted plan for what I’d be doing right about now. In between traveling, speaking, and teaching at Columbia, I’d work on picking a sector of the economy… Read more »
There is such a thing as a repeatable startup methodology
Among the many myths that corporate types have about startups (whether standalone or of the corporate variety) is that there is some kind of alchemy involved. Sort of “Steve Jobs arrives on a clamshell and… Read more »