William Andrew/Getty Images After years of working in tech startups, which strive to transform underdog status into competitive advantage, I dove into the nonprofit world. The contrast was striking: Too few nonprofits use the advantages of their nonprofit status. In doing so, they miss out on a huge opportunity. The nonprofit model has a strategic edge beyond tax Read More
Gillian Blease/Getty Images Knowing which organizations perform the best on any particular dimension used to require subjective surveys or painstaking research. Today, the data to answer those questions exists — it’s captured by the software-as-a-service firms whose services companies use to run their businesses. Mainstream software companies are beginning to hold “data mirrors” up to Read More
Martin Barraud/Getty Images China’s two retailing powerhouses, online commerce pioneer Alibaba and social media-gaming pioneer Tencent, have systematically established a duopoly of record proportions in record time. Combined, they have spent more than $20 billion in the past 12 months alone to change the way people in China shop. (The precise value of their investments Read More
Tintan/Getty Images Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and computer technology are causing us to think again about some really basic questions: what is a firm? What can firms do better than markets? And what are the distinctive qualities of firms in a world of smart contracts and AI? While there has been a lot Read More
Doug Perrine/Nature Picture Library/Getty Images There are lots of compelling reasons to build a better team. Great teams deliver stronger results, faster. They’re more innovative. They challenge you to learn more quickly and to be at your best. And, let’s face it — they’re simply more fun to work with. Recently, I found a new Read More
Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images There’s an unassuming restaurant in Dallas called Chop House Burger, home to handspun milkshakes, truffle parmesan french fries, and six innovative burgers. It’s an eight-year-old restaurant in an industry where 80% of new entrants fail in the first five years. And stitched into its origin story is a clue to why some Read More
jakob owens/unsplash Netflix has a lot to gain by becoming a multisided platform. Currently, Netflix is in the business of buying or making content, which it sells consumers access to at prices and on terms it fully controls (a monthly subscription). That’s unlike a platform such as YouTube, which enables myriad content providers to sell directly to Read More
Paper Boat Creative/Getty Images Many leading American digital firms, including Google, Amazon, eBay, and Uber, have successfully expanded internationally by introducing their products, services, and platforms in other countries. However, they have all failed in China, the world’s largest digital market. The widely touted reasons for these failures include censorship by the Chinese government and Read More
pbombaert/Getty Images Are you successful at coaching your employees? In our years studying and working with companies on this topic, we’ve observed that when many executives say “yes,” they’re incorrectly answering the question. Why? For one, managers tend to think they’re coaching when they’re actually just telling their employees what to do — and this behavior Read More
Paul Taylor/Getty Images The big question around self-driving cars, for many people, is: When will the technology be ready? In other words, when will autonomous vehicles be safe enough to operate on their own? But there has been far less attention paid to two equally important questions: When will the driving environment be ready to Read More
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