I’m often asked whether it is possible to teach entrepreneurship – or more importantly – having an entrepreneurial mindset. Well, I can’t teach you passion or hard work. What I can teach you is how to de-risk projects and how to build the right kind of plan.

Fascination...

At Valize, we believe that the right amount of insight and experience can be a business accelerator.  This article specifies when using consultants like us can be a great use of time and money..

Paid advisors don’t deserve their bad reputation.

By Rita McGrath

Some things never go out...

The state of customer service across most of the economy is dreadful. A recent delightful experience at Patagonia proves that it doesn’t have to be that way.

The sad world of customer service

As I have written about elsewhere, the more automation we introduce into the customer service...

People have been predicting the end of Hollywood as we know it for a long time.  Talking pictures were first dismissed as a novelty, then eventually embraced.  Television proved destabilizing for the studio system that  preceded it.  And now, Chris Moore, a...

Happy New Year! 

Ram Charan and I co-authored an article just out in this month’s Harvard Business Review about how technology is creating the conditions for what we call the “permissionless” corporation. In it, we suggest that corporations organized...

Gradually, then suddenly.  That’s the line that I borrowed from Ernest Hemingway to describe the progress of strategic inflection points.  They brew along for a long time – sometimes decades – before finally breaking through.  

The gradual, then...

Some business models are inherently more attractive than others, yet investors and other stakeholders often don’t ask the obvious questions. Here’s a checklist that makes sure you are not one of them.

People like to make thinking about business models really...

Big flashy billion-dollar investments. Leaders optimistically pronouncing totally unrealistic launch dates. Geeky engineers becoming the darlings of the moment. Yes, the story of Ford’s foray into autonomous cars has it all!

The autonomous driving bubble inflates

The Defense Research...

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 the parent firm – either not consistent with their strategy or...

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 of projects that don’t have such a clearly defined outcome – this...

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.  This makes it all but impossible to...

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. So how do you know if things...

In traditional strategic thinking, beating the competition, by finding an attractive position in an attractive industry, is the name of the game. An updated perspective suggests you need to be paying attention to at least three categories of competition.

Traditional strategy textbooks would...

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 making it work in real life. One of...