Business Models

2018: The Year We Unlearned

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

Read More 

KPIs: Boxes to Digital Service Models

The Hardest Transformation: Changing What Your Measure  “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it” – Lord Kelvin “You are what you eat.” – Anthelme Brillat-Savarin   “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” – Peter Drucker  “You are what you measure.” – Anonymous Imagine Kelvin, Drucker, and Brillat-Savarin sitting down to a meal prepared from

Read More 

KPIs: Apples vs. Orange is the New Black

Ratings, Subscribers, and Netflix vs. the Media Execs Do industrial era executives have blind spots when trying to understand the success of disruptive digital-first competitors? Let’s take the case of media and the metrics of ratings vs. subscribers. Traditional TV and cable execs are still struggling to understand content consumption habits from video-on-demand, gaming consoles,

Read More 

Negotiating New Business Models and Culture in an Age of Connected Machines

What do these recent events have in common: Cops are offered free body cameras from Taser Farmers are buying software patches from Ukrainian hackers for John Deere tractors Burger King tricked Google Home devices to talk about the Whopper In all of these cases, connected devices are reshaping business models. These new models are in

Read More 

Will Your Health Business Model Survive?

Stress-testing your business for a new policy agenda Since the election, US stocks are mostly up. Except hospital stocks. Public hospitals like HCA are worth looking at the stock charts to see how wrong we were about the election – rising high the day before, tanking the day after. Then there are the health insurance

Read More 

Business Model Myths in the Circular Economy

Today at 11 EST I’ll be giving an online talk for the virtual Circular Economy “Dif” Festival put on by the Ellen MacCarthur Foundation. What was planned to be a thorough analysis of common business model mis-conceptions has changed in light of recent events. We will discuss: Equitable outcomes. Ray Anderson. Circular economy. Business model myths.

Read More 

Designing for Human Dignity in the New Economy

Competing Design Philosophies in the Two-Sided Marketplace of Time The Sopranos series was violent. But the most painful scenes for me drew a hyper realistic version of my Northern New Jersey upbringing. There’s that scene in season one, episode three, when Carmela hires her restaurant owner friend Charmaine to do some catering for a fundraiser.

Read More