Strategy, clarified. Strategy, clarified More than one year ago while I was still studying, I wrote this short post called Uncle Mark’s Fourth Duvel. The purpose, back then, was to motivate myself to gain a clearer understanding of a field that is open to many interpretations within a fast-paced industry: strategy in service design. Nowadays, I am working in an agency in London as an Experience Strategist and I have to admit that things are still not crystal clear. I have the feeling that our industry is partly to blame. First, there are too many personal definitions floating around. If you’d ask ten strategists to define in one sentence what it is they do, you’ll get two similar answers. Recently, I found out that the reason for this confusion partly lies within myself and my inability to see the red thread between many stories.
One model I find very intruiging is Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. What is strategy? How do you do strategy? Why do you need a strategy? What is strategy? How do you do strategy? Thomas. Precepta stratégiques, la web TV de la réflexion stratégique. Why consumers run the enterprise. Why consumers run the enterprise The shortage of human-centered design talent has never been felt more acutely than it is today.
Why? In part, it’s because of an accelerating consumerization of technology that begins with more traditional consumer-facing offerings, but extends into new types of businesses that are employing a consumer approach to transforming enterprise verticals. This includes both “full stack startups” attempting to upend industries and new consumerized enterprise software with superior engagement and lower cost than technology incumbents. Ubiquitous technology access is the force behind all this consumerization of the enterprise.
More ubiquity than ever Smartphones have made the Internet ubiquitous, even as cloud technology prices have been dropping precipitously every year. “UX matters so much now, because we are experiencing so much. Upending industries “So I think that when you look at the role of technology it’s everywhere in this network-integrated model. Reid Hoffman’s Two Rules for Strategy Decisions. Reid Hoffman — the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn and partner at the venture capital firm Greylock — is a preeminent Silicon Valley strategist. I recently ended my tour of duty as Reid’s chief of staff and wrote a long essay about that experience — “10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: Lessons Learned on Business and Life.” These are the two major strategic decision-making lessons that I learned from working so closely with him.
Reid’s first principle is speed. One of his most popular quotes is, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.” When faced with a set of options, Reid frequently will make a provisional decision instinctually based on the current information. If you move quickly, there will be mistakes borne of haste. Speed certainly matters to an extreme degree in a start-up context. Reid’s second principle is simplicity — simplicity enables speed. Making the complex simple does not mean ignoring complexity. Apple just defied a bunch of theories about business. Apple’s most recent quarterly numbers broke all sorts of records and, as we shall see, a number of laws. Apple just released its numbers for the quarter ending last December, the first quarter of its 2015 fiscal year. The figures are astonishing: iPhones: Apple sold 74.5 million, +57% over last year’s same quarter. iPhone revenue was $51.2 billion, +57%. That’s enough iPhones for 1% of the world population, 9.4 iPhones for every second of the past quarter.
Overall company revenue grew 30% to $74.6 billion, with the iPhone representing a never-before 69% of total sales. Profit (a.k.a. net income): $18 billion. Record quarterly profits is becoming commonplace for Apple. (The Wikipedia article on record profits and losses has Fannie Mae’s $84 billionin 2013 in the #1 spot, but Fannie’s categorization as a Government-Sponsored Enterprise puts it in a different race—not to mention the $77.8 billion and $64.2 billion losses in Q4 2009 and Q4 2008 respectively.) We now turn to law-breaking. From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy. Forget Market Size, Think Problem Size. Publishers and the Smiling Curve. One would not normally draw a connection from a company like Largan Precision (TPE:3008), a small Taiwanese component supplier, to the publishing industry.
But it was a very insightful observation from another Taiwanese company’s CEO – Acer founder Stan Stih – about what he called the “Smiling Curve” that created the analogy in my mind. From Wikipedia: A smiling curve is an illustration of value-adding potentials of different components of the value chain in an IT-related manufacturing industry…According to Shih’s observation, in the personal computer industry, both ends of the value chain command higher values added to the product than the middle part of the value chain.
If this phenomenon is presented in a graph with a Y-axis for value-added and an X-axis for value chain (stage of production), the resulting curve appears like a “smile”. Created by Rico Shen for Wikipedia What makes this observation particularly ironic is that Acer is the epitomical company at the bottom of the curve. Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It. Since Michael Porter’s seminal work in the 1980s we have had a clear and widely accepted definition of what strategy is—but we know a lot less about translating a strategy into results. Books and articles on strategy outnumber those on execution by an order of magnitude.
And what little has been written on execution tends to focus on tactics or generalize from a single case. So what do we know about strategy execution? We know that it matters. A recent survey of more than 400 global CEOs found that executional excellence was the number one challenge facing corporate leaders in Asia, Europe, and the United States, heading a list of some 80 issues, including innovation, geopolitical instability, and top-line growth.
We also know that execution is difficult. Studies have found that two-thirds to three-quarters of large organizations struggle to implement their strategies. Myth 1: Execution Equals Alignment Myth 2: Execution Means Sticking to the Plan Companies also struggle to disinvest. Want to be the next Airbnb or Taskrabbit? Don't fall for these marketplace myths | VentureBeat | Entrepreneur | by Michelle Regner, Near Me. Have you ever seen the movie Field of Dreams? In this movie, Kevin Costner’s character is told, “If you build it, they will come.” At Near Me, a software company I cofounded that powers peer-to-peer marketplaces and private communities, we experience this philosophy every day with our prospects. We call it the “Field of Dreams” myth. We hear elevator pitches like, “I’m going to be the eBay of Soccer jerseys, I’m going to build the Airbnb of boats, or we will create the Taskrabbit of food delivery.”
And then we ask, “How are you going to attract customers and marketplace participants?” And then the crickets start chirping. Entrepreneurs see the $172 billion of dollars in VC capital invested into peer-to-peer marketplace deals over the last 12 years. And they want a piece of the gold rush. The Truth About Marketplaces At a fundamental level, peer-to-peer is e-commerce. In other words, you need traffic and you need to convert that traffic. Going Deep on KPIs The Organic Traffic Fallacy. The Big Shift in Strategy - Part 1. Data science: 'Machines do analytics. Humans do analysis' Booz Allen has been pushing data science, developing tools and publishing field guides to advance analytics. Internally, Booz Allen also has a Pinterest for data science. The goal: Advance data science so it just happens in the background. However, it's way early before data science and analytics simply happen. Josh Sullivan, who leads the data science and analytics practice at Booz Allen, likens analytics to where computing was in the 1950s.
I caught up with Sullivan along with Angela Zutavern, vice president in the strategic innovation group, to talk about the issues surrounding data science. Talent. "These people are curious and relentless in the face of failure," Sullivan said. The machine/human link. "I can take 10 tools, U.S. Another way to put it is that machines are used as "data janitors" to clean data and crunch numbers, but it's a small part of the overall process. Growing talent. Bottom line: Data science is a team sport and you need a diverse team to explore multiple angles. Less analysis, more design « MindBlog. This article has also been published in Mandag Morgen Former American Secretary of State and peace mediator Henry Kissinger is an active man.
At the age of 91, he has just published his latest work, World Order, a comprehensive mapping of the world’s problems and challenges. I have not yet read the book, but according to The Economist, it amounts to a fairly depressing experience: there is war, conflict and instability wherever you look in the world, and no prospect of things tentatively improving. All the more surprising is that Kissinger uses 400 of the book’s pages analysing all the problems and only about four pages of suggestions and recommendations. Obviously there is not much of substance to get hold of here.
In the same issue of The Economist you can read about a pretty much equally depressing book, namely the prestigious Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf’s analysis The Shifts and the Shocks, on the financial crisis and its causes. We’ve gone analysis-crazy A new balance. Jim Whitehurst: Don't build a better mousetrap. Change the business model. Companies that are creating massive value typically aren’t building a better mousetrap. They’re not improving on existing technologies or simply adding new features.
Instead, they’re changing the business model. This was the message behind Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s keynote at today’s CED Venture 2010 Conference. The conference, held in Pinehurst, NC, brings together more than 500 entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to discover where innovation is happening today and to find those young companies that will transform business tomorrow. A community where ideas and investments come together. To create transformative business models, Whitehurst suggests, you can start by looking at customer problems. Whitehurst cites what makes Red Hat unique in this regard. He also draws from his previous experience in the airline industry as Delta’s Chief Operating Officer.
Whitehurst believes this is one of the keys for any company wanting to build their business. How Google Harnesses The Entire Company To Stay Innovative. Making headlines the other week, Google CEO Larry Page anointed Sundar Pichai as czar of Google’s vast product realm. The move frees up Page to focus on Google’s innovation engine, including energy, Nest, Calico, and Google X. Page faces a daunting leadership dilemma: how to avoid becoming less innovative as the company grows. He has consistently expressed this concern in mantras such as “more wood behind fewer arrows” and “10x it.” Yet Page knows that faltering innovation cannot be stymied by catchphrases or moving boxes on the org chart. At its core, adaptive leadership is about mobilizing people to tackle challenges for which there are no known or easy answers.
CEOs like Page stay innovative in the face of the predictability their own success has sown by developing an adaptive capacity in five areas: purpose, strategy, structure, culture, and talent. 1. People tend to lose connection to their job’s meaning in the race to respond to fast-moving market pressures. 2. 3. 4. 5. Why startups fail, according to their founders. © Time Inc.
All rights reserved. Fortune.com is a part of the Time.com network of sites. Powered by WordPress.com VIP Email address or Password is incorrect Forgot Password? Want the Full Story? Privacy Policy Thank you for your interest in licensing Fortune content. 1. Business models based on the compiled list at I find the link very hard to browse, so I made a simple version in Markdown instead.
Evolution. What History Says about China's Chances in a War with America. "TOKYO, July 31, 1894 -- 'For the foreseeable future,' declares an American defense expert, 'no rational Japanese naval planner could present a plan to defeat the Chinese navy, even in the Yellow Sea.' Why say such a thing?
Because it stands to reason. Japan has been a modern industrial nation only since the Meiji Restoration of 1868-1869. That's under three decades. "And after centuries of self-imposed seclusion, Japan has no seafaring tradition to speak of. Its navy? Posh. "These are sketchy beginnings. "TOKYO, April 17, 1895 -- Today the Chinese and Japanese imperial governments signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, ending the limited war that broke out last August. "But the treaty's impact goes well beyond that.
"How? The foregoing is fictionalized news analysis, but it captures the state of expert opinion about the military balance on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, and at the peace settlement that followed. History abounds with such failures. Strategic focus. In order to lead the business to its greatest competitive advantage, there must be a mechanism to focus the organization on what it will do best and keep it from getting distracted by other opportunities that come along. This mechanism it the strategic focus of the business. The strategic focus it that intersection of three key elements of the business model: The organization's passion -- its compelling composed of values, mission, vision, and goals which inspire and motivate the members of the organization, the of the business -- what the customer values in the offerings and rewards the organization for doing, and a -- what the organization can be best in the world at .
Though an organization can operate without this strategic focus, there is strong evidence to indicate that organizations that develop and have the discipline to adhere to a strategic focus have a significant long-term competitive advantage. Strategic focus and related concepts -- Keeping a strategic focus current - Xiaomi's Oversold Global Ambitions, and the Week in Daily Updates. The main page content on Stratechery is free for all readers, but I also offer the Daily Update via email and RSS for $10 per month/$100 per year.1 This is one of the items sent out in this week’s Daily Updates.
To sign up, visit the Membership page Xiaomi’s Worldwide Ambitions Bloomberg BusinessWeek has a fairly rapturous profile of the West’s favorite Chinese technology company: Xiaomi (pronounced she-yow-mee) is one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world. It’s the sixth-largest handset maker on earth and No. 3 in China, behind Samsung Electronics and Lenovo Group, according to research firm Canalys. There’s no question Xiaomi’s success has been very impressive, but they deserve a lot more scrutiny than this article delivers. Xiaomi is not just forgoing retail and marketing expenditures; they are effectively selling phones at cost, which is what keeps their price low.
The full list of topics covered this week in the Daily Update include: Social Media Marketing Doesn’t Matter. Strategic Leadership: How to Avoid the Most Common Error Leaders Make. Your strategy-needs-a-strategy. 30 Content Marketing Lessons From The New York Times Innovation Report. The Last Re-Org You’ll Ever Do. The Operating Model That Is Eating The World — on management. How samsung competes with Apple. For Startups, Design is the New Competitive Advantage. Where Nokia Went Wrong. Full Text: Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s ‘Burning Platform’ Memo - Tech Europe. Winners Take All – 9 Fundamental Rules of High Tech Strategy.
The Long Tail: Moving From Mass-Market to Niche Economics.
Defining Design Strategy. Strategy VS Tactics. Business Strategy. Open Strategies. IoT Business models. Big Bang disruption. Light Footprint Management. Adapt to digital disruption. Fail Forward. Measure, Metrics, ROI of design. Images & PDFs tests.