Photo: The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, designed by Frank Gehry Bent Flyvbjerg studies spectacular mega-project flameouts. I study (often) spectacular innovation mis-steps. Who knew the process that produces both has so… Read more »
innovation
Counting down Our Top Ten List of Discovery Driven Planning misses – Part 2 (5 through 1)
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 »
Startups in distress – we’ve seen this movie before
Wired magazine offered an article on the state of things in startup-land and discovered, astonishingly, that “The Bad times are Coming for Startups.” But not every startup, of course, mainly the ones that blithely ignore entrepreneurship… 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 »
You can’t avoid the digital dimension of your business, even if you wanted to!
Asking what your digital strategy is today is a lot like asking what your electricity strategy was at the turn of the last century. Seems absurd. Yet both questions reflect how a shift in an… Read more »
Say what???? The optimistic launch and ignominious end of CNN+
The announcement that after an expenditure of something like $300 million, CNN was going to pull its CNN+ streaming service after just a month in operation sent shock waves through the media and entertainment ecosystem…. 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 »
Knowing when to pull the plug – Part 2
With any corporate venturing program, one of the most important factors that will determine financial returns is the ability to stop investing in projects that simply won’t work out at all, or will be inconsequential… Read more »
Knowing when to pull the plug – Part 1
With any corporate venturing program, one of the most important factors that will determine financial returns is the ability to stop investing in projects that simply won’t work out at all, or will be inconsequential… 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 »
It worked great, until it didn’t: The surprising, but perhaps foreseeable, shutdown of Drinkworks
Two companies needed a new growth vector. One was great at branding alcoholic beverages. The other was great at making home appliances that customers could use to create self-serve beverages. A match made in heaven!… Read more »
Happy 2022 – Building New Skills for the New Year!
Grateful to you in ‘22! It was a joy to be able to spend time virtually – and in precious rare cases – in real life – with you over the past year. I appreciate… Read more »