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 »
Seeing Around Corners
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Maybe the answer to the back to work puzzle is to look beyond the office
Offices are much maligned, much beloved and at the center of a new(ish) tussle between people who hire people and people who take those jobs. A cottage industry of would be experts has emerged to… 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 »
The Facebook Inflection Point Materializes
When your business model depends on profiting from your users’ ignorance, eventually the gig will be up. So it seems to be for Facebook, or Meta, which had a historically horrible day last week and… 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 »
Secretive Pricing, poorly served patients and unintended consequences – will insulin go the way of hearing aids?
Some settings create ripe conditions for a business-model destroying inflection point. Unhappy customers, favoring one stakeholder group at the extreme expense of others and operating in such a way that even your allies can’t defend… 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 »
Uncertain about the future? A well-defined strategy can help
The word “strategy” has come to mean anything in an organization that is important. But great strategies drive real purpose and decision-making. Define one that is meaningful, and you can guide real-time choice-making across your… Read more »