Business Strategy

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Strategy Step 2: Market Focus

April 21, 2011

Strategy step one was understanding identity. Step two is market focus, but always with the realization that you think these two through together, not one by one. Your identity is about uniqueness, strengths, and weaknesses. That influences your choice of target market. And your market influences your identity. They mix together. Most of us make [...]

Read the full article →

How Do You Define Small Business Strategy?

March 31, 2011

Yesterday I got this comment to my post Maybe You and I Aren’t As Good At Strategy as We Think, from last November: I’ve been wondering: How do you define “strategy?” Is it possible to brainstorm to arrive at one? What are the “parts” of a good strategy? That’s a really good question, worth a [...]

Read the full article →

10 Ways to Improve Team Management and Grow a Business

March 29, 2011

I’ve been traveling a bit, which means time for reflection on long plane flights. I’ve also been talking and thinking about management, what it takes to make a small business grow larger, and what it takes to manage teams better. Here’s a list I wrote up in off moments. Find people smarter than you are, [...]

Read the full article →

Business Landscapes Change. Giants Fade.

February 2, 2011

Quick thought for the day: business landscapes change.  Giants fall. Startups become giants. The giant, the big power, that everybody fears, and by whom everybody wants to be acquired … it’s Google these days. It used to be Microsoft. Are you familiar with Lotus 1-2-3? There was a time when Lotus was the giant of [...]

Read the full article →

Maybe You and I Aren't As Good at Strategy as We Think

November 18, 2010

To be honest I could probably make a compare and contrast list between business strategy and sex; but I decided against that. It seems like too obviously pandering to the SEO. Instead, I want to focus on just this one thing business strategy has in common with sex: both are on the short list of [...]

Read the full article →

I Love How Markets Are Constantly Dividing Into New Slices

October 21, 2010

In a pitch presentation, the presenter said: If we can only get 1% of the $4 billion market, we have a $40 million business. But you won’t. Nobody ever gets the small percentage of the large market. I hate those tops-down market projections. What happens instead, I think, is that markets are like organisms that [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries