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 profitability as a qu...

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 lessons to be learned in th...

Asking what your digital strategy is today is a lot like asking what your electricity strategy was at the turn of the last century. Seems absurd. Yet both questions reflect how a shift in an underlying technology fundamentally changes what is possible.

Electrification of factories and plants took...

The article “Discovery Driven Planning” was published in 1995. The book-length treatment came out in 2009. And yet, we’re only now catching up to what entrepreneurs and corporate innovators have long understood – when you are dealing with uncertainty, you need a plan to learn.

If it were ev...

OK, we have finally realized that innovation and transformation are not optional for the long run well-being of a large enterprise. But that is a far cry from having the capability to do something with that understanding. The good news is that the things that sink innovation efforts are often easy t...

With any corporate venturing program, one of the most important factors that will determine financial returns is the ability to stop investing in projects that simply won’t work out at all, or will be inconsequential to their parent company, even if they do succeed. Here’s Part 2 of a set of questio...

With any corporate venturing program, one of the most important factors that will determine financial returns is the ability to stop investing in projects that simply won’t work out at all, or will be inconsequential to their parent company, even if they do succeed. Here’s a set of questions to revi...

All too often, when we think about dealing with politics at work, it conjures up toxic and negative feelings. But if you want to make big ambitious changes happen, you’re going to have to get skilled at navigating the political waters.

When I say “politics,” what’s your reaction? If you’re like m...

To create outside returns, you need to be prepared to invest in uncertain opportunities. But that requires a different management logic than investing in the core business.  

If you think about the value you create as a manager, when uncertainty is really low, you can use all of the standard metric...