June 18, 2013
I've written before about the science that helps explain why and how constraints and limits, often in the form of intelligent, well-set stretch goals, result in more creative solutions.
Too often, though, managers set what appears to be a good stretch goal, only to discover that it did not...
June 13, 2013
Kantar Worldpanel predicts that 75% of growth for consumer products companies in the next decade will come through new product development. And yet, more than half of senior executives...
June 12, 2013
Companies in commoditizing industries tend to follow one of two strategies: either they try to find new services to offer around the product or they compete on price. The one certain outcome of these two strategies, of course, is to accelerate the commoditization process itself.
But, as an HBR article on this topic once pointed out, even commodities have customers. And where there are customers there can be...
During a painfully dull futures workshop Down Under, a simple word change helped transform a stagnant discussion.
The facilitator, with a world-class flair for bafflegab and platitude, had asked the group to envision products customers might desire a decade hence. The conversation regurgitated cliché after customer-centric product cliché until the moment the team rejected and replaced the facilitator's language.
Instead of brainstorming new "products," the group instead...
Any five-year-old has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose. This is called Functional Fixedness and while you probably won't need to build a fort during your professional career, chances are you do suffer from it...
June 11, 2013
"A properly integrated business model forms the essence of a company's competitive advantage," my colleague Mark Johnson advises. That quote ran through my head as I watched a young man in a track suit prance around my table twirling a 10-foot noodle.
I was in one of the Shanghai locations of a chain of hot pot restaurants called Hai Di Lao. If anything deserves to be commoditized, it would be a hot pot restaurant. The essence of the meal is cooking food yourself in close-to-boiling...
Who's the target audience for the new iTunes Radio? Me. My family and I have a bunch of Apple devices, a WiFi network built around an Apple Time Machine, and not enough technological savvy (or time) to figure out workarounds. I signed up for Spotify a while ago, and like it. But I can't figure out how to get it to play on the...
June 10, 2013
I recently served as a mentor at a hackathon and came away shaking my head. In hackathons, teams compete intensively, typically for just a day or two, to create software (and sometimes hardware) solutions. What struck me was that most of the participants — young, tech-savvy programmers, engineers, and others — seemed largely uninformed or unconcerned about...
We've all seen examples of unstoppable companies that suddenly hit the wall. Growth slows down, stock prices start to decline, shareholders get nervous, and the press starts to speculate that something is wrong. In some cases, like P&G and Starbucks, the board brings back a former CEO who can presumably return the firm to its previous glory. In other cases, like with...
June 7, 2013
In Greek mythology, Hydra, an ancient water-serpent had many heads. If one head was cut off, two rapidly grew in its place before another head could be cut off — an energy-sapping disappointment for any opponent trying to overcome it. Regenerative speed made the Hydra formidable. Even Hercules, the legendary Greco-Roman...
