Some business models are inherently more attractive than others, yet investors and other stakeholders often don’t ask the obvious questions. Here’s a checklist that makes sure you are not one of them.

People like to make thinking about business models really...

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...

You would think that after funding and supporting people to develop innovative new ideas, that the parent corporation would want to take advantage of launching them.  Nope. Markets are full of concepts that didn’t fit the parent firm – either not consistent with their strategy or...

The first step of discovery driven planning lies in specifying what success looks like. For for-profit projects, this usually takes the form of a level of growth or enhanced profitability.  But there are many kinds of projects that don’t have such a clearly defined outcome – this...

Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his great book “The 7 Rules of Power” declares that “success excuses (almost) everything.”  Success also determines which stories about the origins of that success get told and which headlines are buried.  This makes it all but impossible to...

The traditional model of how teams progress goes by stages – forming, storming, norming and performing. While it’s easy to remember, teams today don’t necessarily follow that model. They’re dispersed, virtual, temporary and potentially remote. So how do you know if things...

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...

In developing an initial marketing plan, it is crucial not to be confused about what kind of business architecture you are building in order to establish your initial metrics for success. Geoffrey Moore has a great way of capturing this in the distinction between complex systems versus...

Traditional sales organizations used the concept of a sales “funnel” to describe the process through which potential customers move, ending up with sales at the end. Winners today have abandoned that way of thinking in favor of building flywheels – business models in which every...

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...

When you ask why large companies have a problem building an innovation proficiency, you get back all the usual suspects: “We have silos.” “It’s nobody’s job.” “We’re afraid of failure.” “It’s unpredictable.” And...

Through Valize, Ron Boire and I have been working with clients to use the tools we have developed to bring Discovery Driven Planning / Discovery Driven Growth to life. Although we’ve got years of experience doing this, and over 100,000,000 hits when you search on the term, it’s still...

Through Valize, Ron Boire and I have been working with clients to use the tools we have developed to bring Discovery Driven Planning / Discovery Driven Growth to life. Although we’ve got years of experience doing this, and over 100,000,000 hits when you search on the term, it’s still...