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How Lego used agile principles to accelerate innovation Aug 01, 2022

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...

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Flywheels vs. relationships Jul 25, 2022

In developing an initial marketing plan, it is crucial not to be confused about what kind of business architecture you are building in order to establish your initial metrics for success. Geoffrey Moore has a great way of capturing this in the distinction between complex systems versus...

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From funnels to flywheels Jul 18, 2022

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 favor of building flywheels – business models in which every...

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You can't tackle complex problems with linear thinking Jun 27, 2022

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 means is that we readily engage in fast, linear thinking when the challenges we face are...

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Building a proficiency for innovation and growth Jun 23, 2022

When you ask why large companies have a problem building an innovation proficiency, you get back all the usual suspects: “We have silos.” “It’s nobody’s job.” “We’re afraid of failure.” “It’s unpredictable.” And...

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Counting down our top ten list of discovery driven planning misses, Part 2 Jun 02, 2022

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 doing this, and over 100,000,000 hits when you search on the term, it’s still...

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Counting down our top ten list of discovery driven planning misses, Part 1 May 30, 2022

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 doing this, and over 100,000,000 hits when you search on the term, it’s still...

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Startups in distress - we've seen this movie before May 16, 2022

Wired magazine offered an article on the state of things in startup-land and discovered, astonishingly, that “The Bad times are Coming for Startups.” But not every startup, of course, mainly the ones that blithely ignore entrepreneurship 101, go for growth above all else, treat...

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Bright promise and dashed hopes - the AT&T Media saga May 09, 2022

Big, expensive unions of large and unwieldy companies almost never work out well. The sudden termination of CNN+ is but the latest casualty in a long history of things that began with a lot of confident predictions that eventually crumbled into “oh, never mind…” There are...

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You can't avoid the digital dimension of your business - even if you wanted to! May 02, 2022

Asking what your digital strategy is today is a lot like asking what your electricity strategy was at the turn of the last century. Seems absurd. Yet both questions reflect how a shift in an underlying technology fundamentally changes what is possible.

Electrification of factories and plants...

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What everybody ought to know about planning under uncertainty Apr 18, 2022

 

The article “Discovery Driven Planning” was published in 1995. The book-length treatment came out in 2009. And yet, we’re only now catching up to what entrepreneurs and corporate innovators have long understood – when you are dealing with uncertainty, you need a...

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When terrible things happen to good innovation projects Apr 04, 2022

OK, we have finally realized that innovation and transformation are not optional for the long run well-being of a large enterprise. But that is a far cry from having the capability to do something with that understanding. The good news is that the things that sink innovation efforts are often...

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