Five Frontiers Facebook Could Conquer

In Facebook’s initial public offering filing, Mark Zuckerberg says his company adheres to “the hacker way.” Experiment, try a lot of new ideas, prototype them, and keep moving. It’s an ethic that the company will need more than ever when its shares are trading at a projected multiple of 25 times revenue. To meet elephantine […]… Read More

What now, textbook publishers?

Apple just threw down the gauntlet to the K-12 publishing industry. In announcing iBooks 2, Apple is making a compelling case that if ever there was a time for school districts to switch from paper-based textbooks to a digital approach – it is now. Even in the absence of iBooks 2, the case was already […]… Read More

The Dangers of Delegating Discovery

Delegation is a necessary survival skill for senior executives. But when executives delegate their discovery-related innovation tasks, the odds of them finding the surprising insights that often spur transformative-growth businesses decrease dramatically. This thought crossed my mind as I participated in a review session for an interesting new growth business that a large company was […]… Read More

How Habit Conversion Can Drive Growth of the Smart Grid

A vision for a smart energy grid has been around for at least 10 years, yet adoption remains painfully low, with only 5 million smart meters and 140,000 programmable communication thermostats installed across the United States. Many barriers are holding up deployment of an “energy internet,” including technology, public policy and business model issues. But […]… Read More

Trend Hunting on the Periphery

The other week, I was in Beijing facilitating a company offsite. The company had absolutely no operations in Beijing, and no plans to start operations there. It is a disciplined operator, so this wasn’t a junket either. So, what was the company doing in Beijing? It was smartly spending time at the periphery of its […]… Read More

Nine Ways to Test an Entrepreneurial Idea

My sister Michelle has quite the entrepreneurial resume. About 10 years ago, she took her academic knowledge of language acquisition and tied it to her (then burgeoning) knowledge of parenting to create a novel way for people to teach hearing infants and toddlers to communicate via sign language. It turns out that infants and toddlers […]… Read More