In my most recent newsletter, I suggested that businesses would do well to anticipate the consequences of a valuation bubble bursting in Silicon Valley with so many private companies valued at more than a billion… Read more »
Innovation
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 »
Looking forward to the mach49 Mothership Blitz on Friday
As someone who has spent much of my life watching organizations fall victim to what I call the ‘transient advantage‘ economy, I’ve always been puzzled that despite its obvious importance, large organizations do a lot more… Read more »
Don’t listen to what your customers say, watch how they behave
I am often asked by companies with whom I work whether focus groups, surveys or customer panels are useful in learning what customers want and more importantly, what they will pay for. Sure, these techniques… Read more »
What trends fuel the disruption list for 2014?
It was really fun to be part of CNBC’s advisory panel to choose the most disruptive 50 companies of the year. The full list for 2014 can be found at this link. Some of the… Read more »
How do we get our middle managers back into a growth mindset?
It’s been five or more years since the Great recession walloped economies all over the world, with the result that for many companies it has been a time of doing not very much but cost-cutting,… Read more »
Continuous reconfiguration – commended paper by Emerald Insight
Emerald Insight commended the research behind a recent paper, Continuous Reconfiguration in the Transient Advantage Economy. In a nutshell, what I found was that firms that were capable of delivering consistent performance over a relatively… 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 »
Ron Adner’s response to my “Better Place” question
As promised, I asked Ron what he thought about A Better Place, a company that I'm very struck with that has the potential to transform our relationship with energy. Turns out he'd given them a… Read more »
Ron Adner’s great new book “The Wide Lens” highlights two important risks for innovation
My good friend (and sometime intellectual sparring partner), Ron Adner, has just released a new book, the Wide Lens, which highlights a major problem for companies seeking to innovate: The essence is that they focus too… Read more »
Scott Anthony’s “Little Black Book” is a must-read for corporate innovators
I am diving with great delight into my good friend Scott Anthony's latest book, The Little Black Book of Innovation. It's a great book which distills a huge amount of what we know works into… Read more »
Square Enix and Business Model Disruption – Event tonight at Columbia!
This evening, I will be a discussant at an event sponsored by the Columbia Center on Japanese Economy and Business. Entitled Video Games and the Shaping of Industrial Transformation, the event will feature a keynote… Read more »