In developing an initial marketing plan, it is crucial not to be confused about what kind of business architecture you are building in order to establish your initial metrics for success. Geoffrey Moore has a great… Read more »
business strategy
From Funnels to Flywheels
Traditional sales organizations used the concept of a sales “funnel” to describe the process through which potential customers move, ending up with sales at the end. Winners today have abandoned that way of thinking in… Read more »
7 Ways to Take Smart Career Risks: Lessons from Sharon Price John, CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop
Fear is one of the great barriers to career advancement. Sharon Price John’s fabulous career is full of lessons on how to get past those fears and get out of your own way. Being afraid… Read more »
You can’t tackle complex systems with linear thinking
As Daniel Kahnemann has pointed out to us, while the human brain is a remarkable organ, it also has its limitations. One of these is that it is built to conserve energy. What that in turn… Read more »
Pandemic – and reopening – surprises
When an inflection point comes to a head, human beings are remarkably ingenious in adapting to its requirements. It may not be fun, but we figure it out. But when the changes wrought by the… Read more »
Counting down Our Top Ten List of Discovery Driven Planning misses – Part 1 (10 through 6)
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 »
Bright Promise and Dashed Hopes – The AT&T Media Strategy Saga
Big, expensive unions of large and unwieldy companies almost never work out well. The sudden termination of CNN+ is but the latest casualty in a long history of things that began with a lot of… Read more »
When terrible things happen to good innovation projects…
OK, we have finally realized that innovation and transformation are not optional for the long run well-being of a large enterprise. But that is a far cry from having the capability to do something with… Read more »
Assumptions we need to question now
My area isn’t geopolitics. I’ve been hesitating to opine about the horrible situation in Ukraine. It took a lot of people by surprise because Russia’s invasion flew in the face of so many assumptions we had… Read more »
A secret ingredient for competitive advantage? Good jobs.
Call it a great resignation, a great inspiration or a great rethinking, it’s clear that with respect to work life for many people things are never going to be the same as in the ‘before… Read more »
The essential art of smart politics
All too often, when we think about dealing with politics at work, it conjures up toxic and negative feelings. But if you want to make big ambitious changes happen, you’re going to have to get skilled… Read more »
Crazy, Unloved but Potentially Transformational – What’s in your Loonshot nursery?
Author Safi Bahcall introduced the term “loonshots” to describe ventures with game-changing potential that nobody thought would work and whose champions were ridiculed. Which raises the question of how you keep the crazy ideas alive… Read more »