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
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
2012 has not gotten off to a great start for Eastman Kodak. Three of the company’s directors quit near the end of last year, and word recently emerged that the company was on the brink of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The easy narrative is that Kodak is a classic case of a company […]… Read More
Systematically exploring alternative approaches to value creation can allow companies to find new opportunities for growth.… Read More
My first blog post for HBR.org went live in February 2008, when the platform was still in its infancy. Here’s what I’ve learned about market demand in three-and-a-half years and (now) 200 posts. While I thought that a reflective post might be a little self-indulgent, I think these lessons transfer to other domains, so I […]… Read More
To mark the passing of one of the world’s all-time great innovators, some of the leaders of Innosight are reflecting on what Steve Jobs taught the world. He leaves as his legacy a set of lessons about innovation that will continue to inspire us for generations to come. These are just eight of the main takeaways […]… Read More
Remember how after Chemical Bank launched the first Automated Teller Machine in the 1960s, waves of bank branches shut down? And remember when banks went online, how waves of local bank branches shut down? Oh wait. In both cases the new technology ended up augmenting, rather than replacing existing channels. This isn’t unusual. Despite bold […]… Read More
It was about four years ago when I, like many of my friends, abandoned Friendster for Facebook. I never thought about why I decided to jump ship — until I saw the The Social Network a few weeks ago. The film suggests that what made Facebook a far more desirable network than MySpace and Friendster, […]… Read More
I read with interest a recent Wired Magazine article about Hunch.com – an online decision-support tool that’s similar to Ask.com and Yahoo Answers but with the ability to customize recommendations based on users’ taste profiles and their answers to a set of probing questions related to the topic of interest. The company claims that an […]… Read More
I picked up an iPad in late April when I was swinging through the States. The Anthony family has been experimenting with it during the last six weeks in Singapore. I have five reflections on the device: • Magazine companies hoping that the iPad will “save” the industry could be disappointed. I downloaded the Wired […]… Read More