In 2014, Resolve to Make Your Business Human Again

In 1960, marketing legend Ted Levitt provided perhaps his seminal contribution to the Harvard Business Review: “Marketing Myopia.” The article castigated companies for losing sight of the essence of their business, setting themselves up for challenges from competitors and, ultimately, for obsolescence. To avoid that, Levitt exhorted leaders to ask themselves the seemingly obvious question […]… Read More

Reflections on Transformation

Last Wednesday we held a Webinar on corporate transformation. It drew on the Harvard Business Review article “Two Routes to Resilience” (in which Gilbert detailed his first-hand experience driving transformation as CEO of Deseret News) and Innosight’s field experience guiding corporate clients around transformation. The Webinar had three main messages: Transformation involves two components, not… Read More

What a Good Moonshot Is Really For

More than 50 years ago, U.S. President John F. Kennedy captured the world’s imagination when he said, “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” And thus, the term moonshot entered the lexicon as shorthand […]… Read More

How To Really Measure a Company’s Innovation Prowess

Who is the world’s most innovative company? The editors of Fast Company say Nike. Last year, number crunchers at Forbes found that Salesforce.com is the company with the highest “Innovation Premium” baked into its stock price. MIT Technology Review didn’t pick a winner, but on its recent list of top 50 “disruptors,” the magazine mixed […]… Read More

Transforming a Company Is Daunting, But You Can Prepare for It

There’s no harder job for a corporate leader than transformation. One key to success is recognizing that transforming a business involves three activities: Transforming the core business to maximize its resilience (“Transformation A”) Creating a disruptive growth engine (“Transformation B”) Building a mechanism to share capabilities between the two (“Capabilities Exchange”) Those three activities (detailed […]… Read More

Your Innovation Problem Is Really a Leadership Problem

When Karl Ronn recently said, “Companies that think they have an innovation problem don’t have an innovation problem. They have a leadership problem,” I listened carefully. I featured Ronn, a former P&G executive (and current executive coach and entrepreneur), in several places in The Little Black Book of Innovation, most notably for his rant against […]… Read More

Two Routes to Resilience

Sooner or later, most companies will need to reinvent themselves in response to disruptive market shifts, technologies, or start-ups. But can a new business model quickly replace all the revenue an incumbent has lost to market upheaval? Only in rare instances, say the authors.… Read More