Thought leaders across the web

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 [...]

June’s Harvard Business Review features a story by Procter & Gamble Chief Technology Officer Bruce Brown and me on “How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate.” The article’s core message is that P&G achieved that result by approaching the creation of new growth businesses in a highly systematic way, building what Brown and I call [...]

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 [...]

Try this thought experiment: Maybe America’s Great Stagnation isn’t happening because we’re failing — maybe it’s happening because we’re not. To illustrate, consider the most straightforward example: Wall Street megabanks were propped up and lavishly resurrected, and your grandkids will likely still be paying the price — because they were too big to fail. But [...]

Consider a curious set of observations: What’s standing in the way of democracy might just be politics — parties, Congress, lobbyists, the whole glad-handing, schmoozeful K-street shebang, which seems to exist mostly to subvert the will of human people, and replace it with the wishes of corporate “people.” The best investment a company can make? [...]

Cannibalization. It’s an awful word, isn’t it? When it gets thrown around in business contexts, people don’t stop to think about its origins. The online etymology dictionary (there is a website for everything!) traces the word traces back to Christopher Columbus’ description of a tribe in the Caribbean that was believed to eat human flesh. [...]

I recently spent a couple days inside a large financial services company with a team that had been tasked with developing disruptive ideas. The team had been together for three weeks and had already come up with dozens of ideas. Members felt energized and were pleased with their progress. While I thought many of the [...]

Back in January 2009, my colleague Tim Huse and I wrote an article for Forbes.com in which we offered some predictions based on a pattern we’d observed while doing research for The Silver Lining. We had assembled a database of companies that we called “on-the-brink” disruptors. These were companies following the pattern of disruptive innovation. [...]

If you can’t do it right the first time, then do it better the second time. That’s one of my favorite guideposts for sustainable business success, and Verizon is my latest poster child for this truth of business strategy (and life). Verizon, which missed the chance five years ago to be Apple iPhone’s exclusive U.S. [...]

Before 2010 is dumped into the dustbin of history — and it was a year when cleaning up after disasters was not just a metaphor — it’s worth finding the gems among the trash. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, IBM, PepsiCo, P&G, Stonyfield Farm, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and former British politicians provided me with occasions for pointing to [...]