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 that it may no long...

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 planning a new ventu...

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 “operating” part of this ...

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 of this story. My Columbia Exec...

 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 industry “developed product after pr...

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 bottom line. 

Digita...

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.  

 The developmen...

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.

For some time now,...

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 new possibilities. In a recent se...

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 initiatives fail...

Leading strategic growth and change doesn’t need to be a mystery! If only we taught people the skills necessary for three key leadership roles, it could be a lot more systematic and corporate transformation efforts might yield a lot more success.  

 Image source.  

This article was co-authored with Claus Hirzmann of Strategic Finance 

“Never test the depth of the river with both feet.” Ironically, this is the very behavior that plagues many of the innovations that ended up in Rita’s “flops file.” From Disney’s Star Wars Hotel to Google’s Stadia to Anheuser-Bu...

Just back from an amazing week spent with thinkers, do-ers and executives considering culture at Novartis. Amy Edmondson, my dear friend, was there and both of us remain stunned that people are still confused about failure, after we have spent literally decades writing about it. For the record – the...

Photo: The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, designed by Frank Gehry

Bent Flyvbjerg studies spectacular mega-project flameouts.  I study (often) spectacular innovation mis-steps.  Who knew the process that produces both has so much in common?  Who knew that the path to success is knowab...