A dazzling array of speakers opened a day of hearing from entrepreneurs, researchers, businesspeople, and others convened for Princeton’s Keller Center’s Innovation Forum. I was delighted to be part of a panel, each person discussing… Read more »
Insights and ideas
Remembering Brian Dovey and his book “The Idea is the Easy Part”
I was deeply saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Brian Dovey, a partner at Domain Associates and a family friend on August 27. Imagine my surprise at receiving a signed copy of his… Read more »
Using behavioral insights to better segment customers
This week, we’re launching a new guidebook series at Valize, designed to share core ideas about strategy today in a convenient online format for using with your team or on your own. The first one… Read more »
Creating value or extracting it? An existential question.
A board and governance level issue that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is whether firms are being run as value creators or value extractors. As economist William Lazonick points out, absent real pushback, it is… Read more »
The Rise, and Fall, of the Direct-to-Consumer Model
There was a brief period in the early 2010’s when a new business model – dubbed “direct to consumer” emerged and threatened to upend established incumbents. A decade or so in, the assumptions underlying the… Read more »
We Never Seem To Learn – Bubbles Bursting, WeWork Edition
Every bubble produces its own poster children. One of the more astonishing is WeWork – a company that promised to defy the gravity of conventional real estate transactions by leasing long-term and renting short-term. At… Read more »
The Methods Most Managers Aren’t Taught – Our Leading Strategic Growth and Change Curriculum – Part 2
To recap and continue: Competitive advantages have life cycles – born in innovation, scaled up with launching, making a profit by operating and eventually transforming to the next advantage. Unfortunately for leaders in today’s fast-paced contexts, we… Read more »
The Methods Most Managers Aren’t Taught – Our Leading Strategic Growth and Change Curriculum – Part 1
Competitive advantages have life cycles – born in innovation, scaled up with launching, making a profit by operating and eventually transforming to the next advantage. Unfortunately for leaders in today’s fast-paced contexts, we tend to only… Read more »
Big Food, the Diet Industrial Complex and now, miracle drugs?
Three-quarters of all Americans are overweight or obese. Despite the diet industry’s ballooning revenue at some $80 billion, whatever they are doing clearly is not working – which is a great business model but a… Read more »
Pick mine, pick theirs, but pick a tool and stick with it!
The utilization of management tools, ideas and frameworks has a strange cyclicality to it. The boss reads another book and suddenly we’re all required to calculate Net Promoter Scores! It’s worth taking a critical eye to the… Read more »
Management Tools: Cycling through the concepts
Everybody wants to be the author of a popular management tool. But at the end of the day, it’s useful to realize that many have a lot in common – what makes the difference, as… Read more »
Thinking Wrong: How to Trick our Brains into Being More Innovative
Once we’ve learned how to do something, we become “unconsciously competent” at it. In order to break with the predictable path and move forward, what my good friend and colleague, Greg Galle, suggests is that… Read more »