I was deeply saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Brian Dovey, a partner at Domain Associates and a family friend on August 27. Imagine my surprise at receiving a signed copy of his new book, synthesizing so much of what he had learned in decades of investing in young entrepreneurs and...

This week, we’re launching a new guidebook series at Valize, designed to share core ideas about strategy today in a convenient online format for using with your team or on your own. The first one has to do with customer behavior and the all-important understanding of how traditional...

A board and governance level issue that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is whether firms are being run as value creators or value extractors. As economist William Lazonick points out, absent real pushback, it is all too easy for management to simply extract value from companies –...

There was a brief period in the early 2010’s when a new business model – dubbed “direct to consumer” emerged and threatened to upend established incumbents.  A decade or so in, the assumptions underlying the model are in tatters and we’ve come to realize, as we...

Every bubble produces its own poster children.  One of the more astonishing is WeWork – a company that promised to defy the gravity of conventional real estate transactions by leasing long-term and renting short-term. At one point, it was valued at $47 billion – now it is warning...

Growth programs need a different plan for progress than the operating business needs

Executives without experience in bringing new ventures to life — whether as entrepreneurs, business leaders, those with transformation responsibilities or other change agents — often think that...

To recap and continue: Competitive advantages have life cycles – born in innovation, scaled up with launching, making a profit by operating and eventually transforming to the next advantage. Unfortunately for leaders in today’s fast-paced contexts, we tend to only teach the...

Competitive advantages have life cycles – born in innovation, scaled up with launching, making a profit by operating and eventually transforming to the next advantage. Unfortunately for leaders in today’s fast-paced contexts, we tend to only teach the “operating” part...

 Struggling with your weight? It’s because you are outmatched

As the Washington Post’s Tamar Haspel observes, “When three-quarters of humans can’t navigate the system successfully, the problem is the system, not the humans.” She notes that the food...

When it comes to funding investment in cost-center functions like IT, efforts can often go underfunded because the ROI doesn’t meet the normal cost-justification hurdles. That’s because we are used to evaluating Productivity Zone investments on the basis of direct impact on the...

The utilization of management tools, ideas and frameworks has a strange cyclicality to it. The boss reads another book and suddenly we’re all required to calculate Net Promoter Scores! It’s worth taking a critical eye to the tools that we use to increase performance.  

Everybody wants to be the author of a popular management tool. But at the end of the day, it’s useful to realize that many have a lot in common – what makes the difference, as with any tool – is the skill of the person using it and the consistency with which you stick with it.

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Once we’ve learned how to do something, we become “unconsciously competent” at it. In order to break with the predictable path and move forward, what my good friend and colleague, Greg Galle, suggests is that we need to “think wrong.” That means opening our minds to...

Too many executives fail at leading successful change initiatives, even as successful initiatives are a prerequisite for winning in today’s dynamic marketplace. That failure is no small part of the reason why employees detach emotionally or resign.

Addressing how some 70% of change...