You would think that after funding and supporting people to develop innovative new ideas, that the parent corporation would want to take advantage of launching them. Nope. Markets are full of concepts that didn’t fit… Read more »
strategy
Taking a discovery driven approach to internal projects
The first step of discovery driven planning lies in specifying what success looks like. For for-profit projects, this usually takes the form of a level of growth or enhanced profitability. But there are many kinds… Read more »
What’s the difference between a methodology and a terrorist?
We took the Valize team on the road to attend this exclusive, high-level event. Here are a few snippets. You can negotiate with a terrorist! Ivar Jacobson was referring to the tendency for… Read more »
When Business Cases Teach the Wrong Lessons
Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his great book “The 7 Rules of Power” declares that “success excuses (almost) everything.” Success also determines which stories about the origins of that success get told and which headlines are buried. … Read more »
How’s your teaming going?
The traditional model of how teams progress goes by stages – forming, storming, norming and performing. While it’s easy to remember, teams today don’t necessarily follow that model. They’re dispersed, virtual, temporary and potentially remote…. Read more »
How LEGO used Agile Principles to Accelerate Innovation
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCXMx7RcZ5I Agile methods – in which work is done in parallel by cross-functionally staffed teams – has been the subject of a lot of hype. How refreshing, then, to discover examples of firms… Read more »
Flywheels vs. Relationships – Why your business architecture matters to your initial marketing plan
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 »
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 »
Boris Johnson, How the Powerful Escape Consequences and Jeff Pfeffer’s Fantastic Book
One of Pfeffer’s 7 rules of power is that “Success Excuses (almost) Everything: Why This is the Most Important Rule of All. Which perhaps explains why Britain’s Boris Johnson was able to hang onto power… Read more »
Eyes glaze over when we talk about inflation? You’re not alone. But what you don’t know can hurt you.
Chart credit: https://www.macrotrends.net/2497/historical-inflation-rate-by-year For anybody born after about 1985, meaning most folks under 40, all this talk about inflation seems kind of old-timey. Indeed, as Public Radio host Kai Ryssdal (citing a story in… 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 »