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 »
business strategy
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 »
Rewriting the employment contract, courtesy of COVID
As we begin to slowly emerge from the pandemic, some of the contours of what post-pandemic life will be like are starting to come into focus. As employees leave their old roles in droves and… Read more »
A heartwarming customer service story
The state of customer service across most of the economy is dreadful. A recent delightful experience at Patagonia proves that it doesn’t have to be that way. The sad world of customer service As I… Read more »
If your organization operates as a multi-layer bureaucracy, it’s headed for extinction
Image credit: https://elearningindustry.com/reasons-why-talent-development-is-important Happy New Year! Ram Charan and I co-authored an article just out in this month’s Harvard Business Review about how technology is creating the conditions for what we call the “permissionless” corporation…. Read more »
Early warnings of a fading competitive advantage
As the world begins to open up and I’m back on the speaking circuit, a question I get asked again and again is how one can tell when a once-robust competitive advantage is starting to… Read more »
A few reflections from the Global Peter Drucker Forum
I’ve always had an affection for the writing of the late Peter Drucker. His legacy is honored by the annual gathering of the Global Peter Drucker Forum, and there are always some nuggets of wisdom… Read more »
Lying – or at least not telling the whole truth – as a business model comes to haunt Meta
When a major inflection point passes through, institutions and the environment take a long time to catch up. But when they do, the consequences can be swift. Facebook’s current troubles illustrate this principle. Source: https://thewire.in/film/the-social-dilemma-netflix-media-review… Read more »
We had the Jetsons in 1962 – and autonomous driving is still out of reach
Gradually, then suddenly. That’s the line that I borrowed from Ernest Hemingway to describe the progress of strategic inflection points. They brew along for a long time – sometimes decades – before finally breaking through…. Read more »