Lorne Michaels. Ralph Lauren. Alice Waters. George Lucas. Larry Ellison. Miles Davis. And a dozen others. Business leaders and creative icons with tremendous track records who all have something else in common: they helped develop… Read more »
Business Strategy
Ideas for a new business model for F. A. O. Schwarz
Well, no sooner had the digital ink dried on my piece about F. A. O. Schwarz closing their famous Fifth Avenue shop, when I received a communication from the company saying that I had it… Read more »
Why the failure of Google Glass Might be a Boon to Google
It’s official. The nerdy glasses with augmented reality and all kinds of image capturing technologies have been pulled from the market. Already, the pundits are dissecting what went wrong. It is indeed a juicy story,… Read more »
Say it isn’t so…my beloved iPod has gone into erosion
In my book The End of Competitive Advantage, I point out that even extremely potent advantages are subject to erosion. Even when they were once hugely popular, transformative and much loved, like the Apple iPod… Read more »
Organizational agility: The CEO’s top concern?
Last week at the Managing Partners’ Forum held on March 12 in London, Caspar de Bono of the Financial Times opened this high-level conference for leaders of professional services firms with an observation about the… Read more »
CVS and the decision to drop tobacco sales – savvy strategic repositioning?
CVS’s decision to stop offering tobacco products is an example of a company shifting its resources from cash-flow-generating, but declining businesses into higher growth markets. Tobacco, although a cash cow for many retailers (and a… Read more »
An interview with Rita by Thinkers50’s Des Dearlove
A while back, I was in London and took some time to catch up with the folks behind the Thinkers50 management awards. We did a wide-ranging video in which we talk about the nature of competition… Read more »
Disruption visits law firms
Be a doctor or a lawyer – that was once the route to a guaranteed good life. Both professions are seeing an erosion of that premise, with legal work being the most dramatic victim. … Read more »
What are we to use to replace industry analysis in strategy?
In my blog over at the Harvard business review web site, I noted that industry boundaries are blurring and that this can lead to serious strategy miscalculations. Several people wrote in to say that they… Read more »
Lessons from the Growth Outliers – HBR Article available for download
This is an article about an exceptional group of companies – publicly traded, with market cap as of 2009 of over $1 Billion USD – who were able to grow their net incomes by at… Read more »
So much for “Keep the Change”
In 2005, Bank of America did something very unusual – they introduced an innovation in financial services that customers actually liked! Called Keep the Change, the program targeted young women who were terrified of running… Read more »
Growth ambitions, yes. Growth capability? Still working on that…
My colleagues over at the growth practice at consultancy Accenture surveyed some of their largest clients about their growth prospects. The results are in my blog, “ready for growth, but not prepared” over at the… Read more »