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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...