How did Amazon succeed? By playing the long game. Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, is known for his long-term thinking approach to business. And, long-term thinking has paid off for Amazon. Think about AWS and Kindle, bets that have changed the world.
Category Archives: competition
The Marginal Gains Philosophy: How to Achieve Big Results Through Small Improvements
We all want to get better, some more than others, at whatever it is that we do. But, most fail and end up being average. Talent alone won’t make you great, but obsession will. Obsessing about the details, and focusing on getting better everyday. How?
Tim Grover: The Language of Winning
Everyone knows who Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant are. But, do you know who was their trainer throughout their careers? Their trainer was Tim Grover. Tim knows a lot about winning from having spent so much time with the best of the best athletes.
Contrarian Mindset: The Courage to Be Wrong
A couple of months ago I republished a list of all the ways Misfits (innovators) are misunderstood in the workplace and what they want from their boss to be able to get along with them. It got a great deal of attention immediately after I published it, many Misfits empathized with the list; non-misfits probably didn’t.
So for all of you non-misfits, today I’m going to elaborate on a key attitude of a Misfit: being a contrarian. …
How Startups Slay Giants

Illustration credit Christian Laborin
Slaying giants is fun, almost every new disruptive company slays a giant or two. Last week I had a chat with a team based in Puebla Mexico working on a cool augmented reality application for museums. They asked for my thoughts on their app and business model, I happily answered their questions. One of those questions comes up every time I talk with startups: How do you protect yourself from giants who might copy your idea?
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Chaos Learning: The Key To Mastering Uncertainty
It’s a given that The Next Economy will be driven by 10 essential technologies, some of which are already a big part of our daily lives. What’s not a given is we don’t know how everything will play out. Still, it is imperative for leaders to understand how these technologies will shape business and society, for every organization is slowly turning into a technology company but are not acting like one.
This changes how leaders think about strategy. …
Platform Revolution: How Platforms Change Strategy with Geoffrey Parker
The internet is the big disruptor of our time, changing the advantage from products to platforms. Case in point, Uber, Airbnb and PayPal. They all disrupted their markets when they launched. Today they are industry leaders.
What’s the secret to their success?…