Ecosystems typically have a healthy tension between players that creates a win-win for all parties. Often the players of the system stay in line with the dominant player, but occassionally one player will try to innovate outside of the system — as HP is now doing with Microsoft Vista.
The Windows Vista ecosystem is "showing signs of strain". Story here. HP is now trying to engineer around Vista features to provide a better customer experience.
Why do you hire anyone to provide a product or service to you? Why does anyone hire you? Presumably because the result for the customer is faster, cheaper, or better than the customer would get by doing it themselves. In my work with clients on creating a business plan, the issue is not that they…
Ten years ago, I made a decision to start my own business, which I named Aligned Action. What exactly is Aligned Action? Not as a business name, but as an idea that you can use to grow your business? Aligned Action is an Art. We all know art when we see it. When done well, art…
Bluebird: An unexpected prospect who shows up out of the blue, flies rapidly through your sales cycle and buys your product or service. You don’t really know where they came from, but you are happy to get the revenue. The problem with bluebirds is that they lull you into thinking that your sales and marketing…
When you think about strategy, are you assuming a continuous or discontinuous environment? In a fascinating book, Creative Destruction, Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplah note some remarkable trends. Most intriguing is how the turnover of S&P 500 companies is accelerating as companies are born and die. (The flipside is that the average tenure is declining…
Why are we here? Why do we exist? These are the questions of the existential crisis. Many people and organizations avoid these questions because they can be scary to confront. We fear spiraling into despair, lack of meaning, or irrelevance. It is much more comfortable to cruise along in the status quo, oblivious to these…
Rich Karlgaard writes a fascinating, informative, and entertaining historical perspective on the first ten years of the Internet economy — WSJ.com – The Ghost of Netscape. (subscription required) In many ways, this story parallels my early career. I was in graduate school at Stanford when Jerry Yang and David Filo quit their Ph.D. programs to…
