Tag Archives: management

Every strategy should Make a Difference

Isn’t it kind of old to see the word ‘differentiate’ on proposals? I mean, any strategy should be different. And adding the words ‘different’ to proposals doesn’t necessarily make it different. Difference is in the actions. Not the words.

Here’s a thought: Let’s frame differentiation as creating memories.

Look at the video below:

Innovation must reads of the week: Age of Disruption?

There were a lot more interesting reads this week, check out my Delicious bookmarks on Innovation for more.

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

If you can’t answer these questions, your business is irrelevant

We recently met with representatives from one of the largest energy utility providers in Mexico to talk about their current issues and how we might help them transform themselves.

Before we met, I created a list of 20 questions to ask them. These questions, which went into detail about their their current strategy, could give us a inside look of this company’s thinking and what we might be up against.

Here are a few questions that went unanswered and thus got these executives to shake their heads:

Innovation posts of the week: Fire all the managers

Enhanced by Zemanta

How to manage through disruption

Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe, interviews Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia.

Mr. Elop has some great thoughts about innovation and about managing through disruption. It’s interesting because both of them worked at Macromedia before it was bought by Adobe. If you remember well, Macromedia used to make authoring tools for CD-Rom’s back in the day before the internet existed.

They saw that the internet was a potentially disruptive force that would undermine their business and so they had to make decisions on where to focus and place their bets. Their bet was Flash and they put all of the resources behind it. Flash went on to become the leading platform for creating dynamic content on the web.

Innovation posts of the week: Anticipate what’s next

How Leaders can set the tone for innovation

Remember last month I told you about a client who told his staff that they needed to start thinking about what they’ve never thought about? Well this past week I went back to check up on them and see exactly what had happened since our last conversation.

Absolutely nothing.

I wasn’t surprised. The predictable ‘I haven’t had time to think about it’ came up. Sure, they definitely have some ideas like focusing on not just businesses but also consumers and creating a brand for that. Though that’s just an idea and they know they have to do it but again nothing has happened.

The President of the company understands that they need to make time to ‘think about what they’ve never thought about’ but hasn’t really made the decision to do so. Well let me tell you something:

For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently.