Category: strategy
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Navigating change – Technology S-curves
As Charlie Ebdy has adeptly pointed out chasing shiny new trends too early can easily result in wasted resources and time. The timing and speed with which new technologies find genuine use cases, and genuine scale and maturity can be notoriously difficult to predict (and some never take off at all). So making smart decisions…
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Making decisions with imperfect information
Thanks to Antony Mayfield for sharing these book notes which Ron Kohavi made about Annie Duke’s book (and also her Maven course) ‘Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When you don’t Have All the Facts’. The notes led me down all kinds of rabbit holes so I’m going to unpick one or two of them…
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Subtraction as a strategy
In a culture of accumulation, the value of taking things away is often overlooked. As I listened to this short Atlantic podcast featuring Professor Leidy KlotzI from University of Virginia (author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less) I was reminded of a couple of things about the challenge of subtraction. Firstly, when it comes…
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Strategy on a page
I once worked with a client to create a one page summary of their transformation strategy. We had a name for the strategy, a defined mission and a vision, some associated values, a customer promise, key goals, time gates and measures. The risk with this approach of-course is that it becomes overly reductive and misses…
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The Learning Organisation
In all my work whether it’s about organisational agility, leadership, marketing or transformation, I am increasingly of the opinion that the critical capability of the modern organisation is the ability to learn fast. And I don’t mean training or new skills (though this too is not unimportant). I mean to learn about the optimal way…
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Google Firestarters: Kevin Kelly
A brand new episode of Google Firestarters is now LIVE, featuring the peerless Kevin Kelly, author and co-founder of Wired. Kevin’s insights are fantastic in this. He talks about why technology optimism is the only way to make a future that we really want to live in and why we need imagination and a ‘willing…
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Tipping points in social convention and change
This was an interesting study (HT @Emollick) looking at tipping points in social convention. Researchers conducted an experiment to test what proportion of people were needed to successfully challenge a norm that was held within the group. They looked at groups of people that had acheived a consensus about something (in this case the name…
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The Birthday Paradox
Answer this: How many people do you think need to be in the same room before two of them have the same birthday? We have a tendency to think of this question in a linear way and so most people approach this by thinking about the 365 days in a year. Meaning that having around…
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In defence of flywheels
My friend Mike Baxter had a good post on strategy flywheels (which I also talk about in my books on Agile Transformation and Agile Marketing), talking about two key concepts that underpin the whole idea of strategy flywheels: synergy and compounding. The ‘flywheel’ approach has been popularised by Amazon’s famous example which articulates how exceptional customer…