What is disruption? Many believe that disruption is innovation. Truth is, what many believe to be disruptive really isn’t. First of all, nobody deliberately sets out to be disruptive; it happens after the fact.
To bring some clarity to the subject, Marc Andreessen wrote up a tweetstorm where he explains Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory in 15 tweets:…
in Innovation
America’s 10 Million Unemployed Youth Spell Danger for Future Economic Growth. That’s the headline of a June 2013 report by the Center for American Progress, 22.5 percent of teens ages 16 to 19 are unemployed, and 1.4 million teens are neither enrolled in school nor working. Young people in general can have a hard time positioning themselves with employers due to age, shortage of experience and maturity, and lack of education and skills. Certain subpopulations face even greater barriers due to factors including race, sex, and socioeconomic status.…
in Strategy
Lëtzebuergesch: De Garri Kasparow géint de Computerprogramm Deep Junior am Januar 2003. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Doing what everyone else is doing is the wrong strategy, and thinking that what made you succeed in the first place will result in success again is a flawed thinking. This is strategy 101, but many don’t heed this principle.
This is a lesson famed Chess Grandmaster Gary Kasparov knows all to well. From an HBR interview on what business leaders can learn from him:…
in Innovation
The mindset of innovation is characterized by a deliberate attempt to question what you know and explore what you don’t. In large organizations this manifests itself in a very simple equation; Innovation = reducing errors + increasing insights. …
What do high-flying startups know about growth that others don’t?
According to new research on startup growth, there are ten things high-flying startups do differently to grow quickly. One of them, and it isn’t a surprise, is they change the game by playing by a different set of rules:
None of these breakout companies did it the same way that the incumbents grew in their vertical or type of business. They all picked their own path, often leaving people wondering what they were thinking. HubSpot charged for upfront onboarding, which people thought was a mistake. Turns out it’s a huge piece of their massive retention success.
Yelp stayed away from paying for reviews and wooing food critics, instead focusing 100% on the community above all else. In a landscape where Citysearch and other behemoths catered to businesses and paid for reviews, this seemed almost foolish at the time.
Pretty straightforward, but unfortunately “changing the game” is still very much an anomaly. Why? Because herd mentality is the default setting for most.
One point I strongly make to startups is they need to have a point of view, a set of opinions about what they do; what are they about. Frankly, this is very much a maverick approach to strategy, one where you want to be the only one who does what you do and thus make competition irrelevant.
Good strategy is about making decisions, about choosing WHAT NOT TO DO as much as WHAT TO DO. Making this decision is critical for high-growth startups, and for yours too.
Bottom line: If you mimic the herd, you’ll regress to the mean. Aim to be the only one, not just another one.
Though the old Be Like Mike ads are cultural icons, Gatorade has found a way to make them more interesting. …
Does the term crowdfunding sound familiar? Have you ever seen a Kickstarter or GoFundMe page before? If all of this seems foreign to you, then you are missing out on a fabulous opportunity. Crowdfunding is a new way of funding projects, allowing anyone to contribute a small amount of money to help a new business get on its way or get the capital that it needs to succeed.…