Business Strategy

The Growth is Always Greener in Your Neighbor’s Lawn

May 7, 2013

Have you noticed this? Businesses that sell to small business want to sell to enterprises. Businesses that sell to enterprises want small business. I’ve seen it for 30 years now.  On the one hand, it’s good business. Expand. Go from where you are to where there’s more market waiting.  On the other hand, damn, I [...]

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What Really Happens With Idea Adoption

January 14, 2013

Seth Godin has a good post today on idea adoption. He calls it you’re not a slot, you choose a slot. It’s an important point:  Individuals choose a slot based on what sort of leadership or risk or followership behavior makes them happy right now. Early adopters and nerds like to go first. But some people [...]

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Classroom Kindle with Big Brother Control One-Ups iPad

October 18, 2012

Interesting post: Amazon Just Beat Apple to the Classroom, on Gizmodo. I’ve been following ebooks and textbooks for more than 10 years now, expecting disruption. Textbooks are obsolete. It should have happened years ago. And there’s a lot going on now, but classrooms are still the same.  In this one, post author Brian Barrett starts by [...]

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The Best Business Success Factor is Value

October 1, 2012

Keys to entrepreneurial success? We talk about passion, persistence, ideas, funding, planning, sales, product-market fit, and all of that. Do what you love, we say. My opinion changes according to recent events, experience, even mood. Which is fine, because it’s a reaction to events, and we don’t want to get static. But on the long [...]

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The Vital Fresh Look for Business Survival

July 12, 2012

The artist knows the scene. He lives there. But he closes his eyes, squinting, to get a fresh view of it. Sometimes things get too familiar.  Back in the 1970s when I was a foreign correspondent living in Mexico City, I dealt frequently with an American diplomat who provided information about Mexico’s increasing oil exports, [...]

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The Thin Line of Fremium Strategies

June 29, 2012

It’s not like I’m going to say “poor Tripit.” Tripit was purchased last year for $120 Million in cash and stock. So I presume it generated a collection of happy founders. But the pressure on so-called fremium sites, like Tripit, must be tough. I’m getting emails now offering enticements to upgrade.  I like Tripit. I’m [...]

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Should Your Strategy Be Constantly Changing?

June 21, 2011

I read Holly Green’s Shifting from Strategic Planning to Strategic Agility, on Forbes.com the other day. Ok, agile sounds good for a business. And the world does change rapidly, too. But what about this, from something I wrote about 10 years ago: Better a mediocre strategy, consistently applied over time, than a series of brilliant [...]

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Those Sad Stories of Elephants and Mice in Startups and High Tech

June 14, 2011

Big squashes little. The elephant steps on a mouse and kills it, but never even notices. We stop on ants on the sidewalk without realizing. You can probably think of a lot of these cases. I had a friend who rode a big wave in the late 1980s with a PC-compatible add-on board that enabled [...]

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3 Stories Your Business Strategy Depends On

June 2, 2011

Stories are not just stories; they’re experience repackaged. They can tell a lot more than just a story. If you own a business, or ever want to, you should be able to tell each of these stories well. If you can, you’ve already nailed the essence of long-term strategy. If you can’t, then here’s a [...]

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Not the Customer's Job to Know What They Want

April 27, 2011

There was a nice short video on TechCrunch the other day, quoting Mark Zuckerberg, John Doerr, and two other industry leaders on how much the iPad has changed “everything.” I picked it up because of what John Doerr says near the end. The video snippet I’ve embedded here skips directly to my favorite part, at [...]

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