How would you reinvent business, reinvent America, or reinvent the world? This is the question I was asked to answer a few weeks back for a #TEDtalk. TEDxNewEngland’s event was held at the WGBN station, just 3 weeks before the US National Election and the amazing organizers asked a range of politicians, economists, national policy [...]
Tag Archives | High-Tech Case Studies
Innovation Isn’t Tied to Size, But to Operating Rules
I have to admit that I see red whenever I see people pick on big firms for not being able to innovate, or celebrate startups alone as “getting it”. I teach and advise entrepreneurs (from Stanford, in Silicon Valley, et al) and I’ve advised and worked with some of the best global Fortune 500 firms [...]
3 Must-Reads for this Weekend #13
Welcome to Fall, 2012! Hope you are getting your pumpkins, and your fall gear out this weekend. There’s a definite crispness in the air here in California. These stories caught my eye this week; All address the tension of scale and meaning, much like #SocialEra. 75% of the S&P500 in 2020 won’t be ones we [...]
TedGlobal Talk: Banking on Openness
As you might have noticed, I took the summer off. Well, not quite off. More like away. I went to Scotland, and gave a talk at TEDGlobal on the topic of openness. I also finished a new book (my 2nd title) on the #SocialEra that Harvard Press releases next week. Yet, I also managed to [...]
Resilient Organizations & Open Networks
In Philip Auserwald’s recent book, The Coming Prosperity, he mentioned that open networks beat closed networks and larger networks beat smaller networks. As regular readers know, I’ve been talking about similar ideas in the fast/fluid/flexible series on business models. His set of ideas provoked me into asking a series of questions to and with Philip [...]
Social Means Freedom, For Better or Worse
This is part II of a series on how the social era affects every business model, from how we organize, what we produce, and what we sell. (Part I, the foundational rules of the social era can be found here.) Do let me know what you think.. and especially what you want to see addressed [...]
Yahoo’s ShakeUp Demands Fearlessness
Four longtime Yahoo board members, including the chairman, are leaving the company. In this one move, Yahoo is trying to make a clean break from the past — signaling that they are primed to reboot. It’s a much-needed and long-overdue step on the path to shifting trajectories. The Pattern of Failing Organizations Larger organizations follow [...]
What is Happening To Netflix Is Unfair
Here’s the deal. Companies are around to profit maximize – a corporate form of self-interest. For many years, this was the organizing principle of all commercial enterprises. The rules, and rewards seemed fairly clear. Not many people argued with it as a system that worked. Then came the social era we live in. More than [...]
What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Growth
Finding that first market — a few customers willing to pay for your early product – is hard enough. But there’s one thing that may be even harder. And that’s finding the second market. Especially because companies are often so focused on protecting what they already have. In 1996 when Steve Jobs first returned to [...]
Silence Hurts
This essay originally appeared in the collection End Malaria, proceeds from which go to Malaria No More. End Malaria is full of short yet meaningful posts by 61 amazing writers/thinkers. For more information or to buy the book (or 10), go to EndMalariaDay.com. [Really, do it.] HBR was also kind enough to break their rules [...]