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 »
Seeing Around Corners
7 Ways to Take Smart Career Risks: Lessons from Sharon Price John, CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop
Fear is one of the great barriers to career advancement. Sharon Price John’s fabulous career is full of lessons on how to get past those fears and get out of your own way. Being afraid… Read more »
You can’t tackle complex systems with linear thinking
As Daniel Kahnemann has pointed out to us, while the human brain is a remarkable organ, it also has its limitations. One of these is that it is built to conserve energy. What that in turn… 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 »
Pandemic – and reopening – surprises
When an inflection point comes to a head, human beings are remarkably ingenious in adapting to its requirements. It may not be fun, but we figure it out. But when the changes wrought by the… Read more »
Counting down Our Top Ten List of Discovery Driven Planning misses – Part 2 (5 through 1)
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 »
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 »