Two words that don’t fit well together. Corporate. Innovation. Said inside of startup circles, you’d hear a bit of a cynical chuckle. Heh. Innovation doesn’t happen in corporates. The story we’ve been telling for years: Corporate, large, giant, public companies are hampered by: Investor expectations to deliver the short term Large hierarchical organizational structures of
Why do we still keep using the metaphors of the industrial age to describe the opportunities we see? Data is not oil. Data was not formed over millions of years. Data was not extracted from deep underneath the earth’s crust. Data is not derived from the fossilized remains of dead organisms. Notice the words we
This post is part of a four-part series mapping the business model moves of the FANG stocks: Facebook Amazon Netflix and Google. I tried to give Amazon up for 3 months last fall. It was hard. Let me tell you how I suffered. I had to call local bookstores to order books for me and then I had to wait
This is the third in our series on FANG company business model narratives, including Facebook and Netflix (check next week for Amazon). Typically, when companies get big, extremely mega big, $100 BN revenues big, they start to slow down. Google is not slowing down. Companies built on technology follow an S curve of growth. At the start of the
Is there any room for business model diversification? Yesterday Facebook announced a re-org of their management team to improve communication and put more accountability for privacy decisions. But the company also needed a reorg to deal with the growing complexity of their business. We all thought we understood Facebook’s advertising business model until it started
Swerving and pivoting a business model story for customer joy and massive shareholder value Thinking of a switch to a subscription model? We have much to learn from the swerves and pivots of today’s leading subscription company: Netflix. Of the top 5 tech companies, only Netflix depends entirely on a subscription revenue model for success,
One day, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page woke up and realized they were in the advertising business. And they were sad. All of that technical prowess, all of those high IQ Stanford grads, all of that bold experimentation to optimize people buying more stuff. Sergey and Larry did something about it. They
Telling your narrative + growth story to attract the people, resources, and everything else you need. Impressed by the Female Entrepreneur contingent – women entrepreneurs from Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Germany at this Nordic Innovation House event.
A call to articulate your long-term view We have this story we tell in business: a vicious loop of misaligned expectations and unrealized dreams. Investors, we tell ourselves, want short-term quarterly results. Visionaries have no place in large public companies because all decisions are optimized for the short term win. Unicorns, companies valued at a
Let’s start this year with a beginner’s mind. Tap into our rookie smarts. Shed the crustiest skin. Slough away the thickest callouses. Admit, for once, that we don’t know how this year is going to unfold: more unprecedented weather, politics, business transformation, and cultural change. A recent study published by NC State’s Management School revealed key risks