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
It’s been nearly two years since Nokia CEO Stephen Elop shot off his burning platform memo as a way of shaking up the phone company’s leadership. This fiery term refers to the story of a worker living on a North Sea oil rig who awoke one morning to a loud explosion and an all-consuming conflagration. […]… Read More
For our HBR article, Innosight interviewed CEOs of two severly disrupted companies to discover what works when navigating transformation. Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and B&N CEO William Lynch offer up five strategic lessons.… Read More
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
There is a lot of hair in India. That was the blinding insight that started our quest to develop a disruptive business in India’s men’s grooming market. Our idea was to port the efficient, affordable QB House model that is popular in Singapore and other Asian markets to India (QB House is detailed in the […]… Read More
Before launching a new round of brainstorming sessions in search of the next great idea, executives should seek out something altogether different – the bottlenecks that choke innovations before they see the light of day.… Read More
Harvard Business School Professor (and former IBM and Kodak executive) Willy Shih poses an intriguing question: “Let’s say your goal is to average 60 miles per hour in a journey across a one-mile bridge,” he said. “Your average speed is 30 miles per hour at the half-mile mark. How fast do you have to go […]… Read More
“You have to deliver $300 million in incremental growth by 2015,” the business unit head told the leader of his innovation team. “That’s less than 5 percent of our revenues, so that should be quite doable.” While $300 million might sound like a ridiculously large number to small business owners or entrepreneurs, leaders in many […]… Read More
The reform law is a start, but to truly change how we get medical services (and make them cheaper) we need to fundamentally rethink how we interact with the entire health-care system.… Read More
A recent report by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation raises serious questions about the degree to which venture capital deserves emulation. The report, provocatively titled “We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us” [PDF], summarizes its findings thus: Limited Partners — foundations, endowments, and state pension funds — invest too much capital in underperforming… Read More