Thought leaders across the web

Getting a venture underway is often easier than keeping it going and growing. At each major stage from start-up to sustainable success, entrepreneurs face tough questions about shifting gears, making major changes, and letting go of people, partners, and products. For new businesses, inability or unwillingness to change can land them in the statistics about [...]

My partner Mats Lederhausen, formerly worldwide head of strategy for McDonald’s, introduced me to “Strategy Trees.” The concept is, like most useful things, deceptively simple. It forces you to get at the heart of what you are trying to achieve. The “tree” analog comes from the linkage between the questions in a Strategy Tree. Start [...]

Our eyes are underrated innovation tools. It’s easy to get caught up in a whirlwind of activities and miss opportunities that are literally right in front of your face. Make a regular habit of just standing and watching. You may be surprised by what you see. Here’s how it worked for me recently. This Monday, [...]

Lately I have been spending a lot of time with some of our portfolio company CEOs talking about how to differentiate their products and services. How should they think about their value or selling proposition? How can they best measure their success? For our portfolio businesses (especially those in digital media and information services) and [...]

For HBR’s April issue on failure, I penned a piece on the experience of going through a failed IPO. In one context or another, you’ve likely failed, too. You may have chosen to frame it some other way (“experience,” “lessons learned,” etc.), but it was failure. First, welcome to the club. We’ve all been there. [...]

Singapore, although far from Silicon Valley, has a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem, and I’ve been impressed by passion and talent of its entrepreneurs since my wife and I moved here a year ago. The government plays a big role in the city’s ecosystem — administering grants and programs that provide financial support for startup companies. Innosight [...]

As research for an upcoming book with Harvard Business Review Press, my colleagues and I have been interviewing entrepreneurs and business builders about the factors that drive success. We talked to David Lawee, vice president of corporate development at Google, about how he got to where he is and the role that luck has played [...]

We recently did an informal survey of some of our venture capital colleagues. We asked, “What crossroads decisions are most common and challenging for entrepreneurs in the course of the business-building journey?” The most common responses to this open-ended question were whether to take an investment and whether to sell the company. For some the [...]

There’s no such thing as an average customer. A Harvard Business School marketing professor named John Deighton once came up with a vivid analogy to illustrate this and show why a business should sub-segment its customer base. He concocted Via research, a hypothetical beverage producer, which discovers that roughly 50 percent of the world’s citizens [...]

The news that health care in Zimbabwe can be paid for with peanuts (and sometimes corn and goats) made the front page of the New York Times. This peanut-finance system, which turned the peanuts into food for hospital patients, seems quaint, like tales from 19th century America of rural doctors taking chickens for treating chicken [...]