In the heady days of coming up with what you think is a breakthrough idea, it’s easy to get carried away by assumptions. Forcing yourself to create a deliverables specification can create powerful discipline. Entrepreneurs… Read more »
Growth Options / Real Options
Landing at the end of the road: Verizon’s decision to disengage from its media strategy
The very human tendency to continue to pursue a failing project, strategy or investment just increases the suffering when the inevitable happens. What are some indicators its time to pull the plug? Verizon’s recent decision… Read more »
One reason Tesla Lost $10 Billion in Market Capitalization in a Breathtakingly short period of time
Understanding investor psychology can be baffling and frustrating for the managers of publicly traded corporations. For instance, despite what many would regard as a stellar track record of proven performance, CEO Mark Fields was fired… Read more »
Failure can be your friend – if it’s intelligent
Just out, a short video primer on how you can decrease the fear and increase the learning from failure by practicing the art of intelligent failure. Click here to view.
Innovation and Jobs-to-be-Done discussed in my latest newsletter
My latest newsletter offers observations and ideas that were discussed at two CEO Summits sponsored by Innosight and featuring keynotes by Clayton Christensen and myself. We discussed Clay’s terrific new book, Competing Against Luck, some… Read more »
Clearing the space for growth-on disengagement, transformation and reinvestment
With September just ahead of us, in my August newsletter I touch on why disengagement from exhausted advantages is important for renewal, share the story of Target’s transformation from a traditional department store to the “Tar-zhey”… Read more »
Why managing an opportunity portfolio leads to surprising investment decisions
There is no shortage of interesting strategic activity going on in the intertwining worlds of content creation, telecommunications and other forms of distribution. The recent sales of AOL and Yahoo! to Verizon are representative of… 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 »
New HBR article: Living with Complexity and Link for Free Download
Gokce Sargut and I are working together on the fascinating subject of how organizations can sensibly and strategically cope with the demands of complex situations. One of the papers from our ongoing research project is… Read more »
Interesting application of options idea to “Green” Energy programs
A colleague of mine drew to my attention an NPR story about the Federal government's plans to develop green technologies. In many ways, the approach echoes options reasoning: Many small bets Substantial upside if… Read more »
Uncertainty and risk in discovery driven planning
I was recently fortunate enough to be teaching in a very interesting program for strategy consultants at IBM. One of their senior leaders, an ex-BCG guy, pointed out to me that I really could use… Read more »
Six Sigma is Deadly for Innovation - But then I’ve said that before!
Every so often, doubtless in a doomed bid to make the whole process of growth and innovation more predictable, some bright spark comes up with the idea of trying to apply six-sigma quality controls to… Read more »