The Best Business Model in the World - Anthony Tjan - Harvard Business Review

One of the "golden rules" of investing we have at our firm, Cue Ball, is that we value the business model over the financial plan. In fact, we value the business model over any particular sector for investment and like to say that we are "business model driven" (versus sector-driven). There is not necessarily a consistent definition for business model, but the Wiki definition is good enough. It says a business model is "the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value." Consistent with this definition, we see the business model as the explanation of how a firm translates an idea into value, or more bluntly, into money. There is no doubt that at the heart of a business model is the monetization model. Over the years we have learned that having a business does not necessarily mean that you have a business model. Think of the dot-com heyday, when shipping 89-cent pet foot in an $18 Fed Ex package was a business.

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There's More to Innovation Than Good Ideas - BusinessWeek

Chances are, you're already familiar with the concept of the Air Sandwich, if not the term itself. An Air Sandwich is what happens when the leadership within an organization issues orders from 80,000 feet and lobs them down to the folks at 20,000 feet. Without the benefit of feedback, questions, or even a reality check from below, this strategy isn't destined for blazing success. When I witnessed it firsthand, I was working at Autodesk (ADSK), the third-largest software company in the world, where I managed revenues for the Americas region. It started innocently enough. My boss stopped by my office, excited, with big news: The company had decided to introduce six new product lines within the coming 18 months.

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Innovative Thinking in Strategy and Strategic Planning - Harvard Business Review

In 1966, Time magazine published a cover article posing the question, "Is God Dead?" Asked about the possibility, former President Eisenhower reportedly responded, "That's funny. I was just talking with Him this morning." Some of us are beginning to feel the same way about trendy assertions that strategy is dead. You may have read one such proclamation in the Jan. 25 Wall Street Journal. "Strategy, as we knew it, is dead," argued Walt Shill, who leads Accenture's North American consulting practice. An article titled "Strategic Plans Lose Favor" goes on to quote him saying, "Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future." If you believe strategy consists of predicting the future, or making plans, please feel free to take a chair next to Mr. Shill in the front row of mourners. On your seat you'll find a copy of Henry Mintzberg's 1994 book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, which should completely disabuse you of any residual hope you may have held out for the corporate planning process.

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The History of the Evolution of Strategy as a Professional Service - Harvard Business Review

I spoke recently with Walter Kiechel about his new book, The Lords of Strategy, which describes the rise of the large strategy consulting firms — BCG, McKinsey, and Bain — as well as the business school professors who contributed conceptual frameworks and pragmatic insights to the strategy revolution. Kiechel, a former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, was the Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing from 1998 to 2002. HBR: Two of the big themes in the evolution of strategy thinking from the 1960s to the present particularly caught our eye. The first is the rise of frameworks that brought with them Greater Taylorism — sharp-penciled analytics that focus on costs and efficiency. The second is about helping employees to learn, innovate, and change. Why is the first set of ideas so much better understood?

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Creating Disruptive Differentiation with Innovation Management

Ask a CEO and he or she will tell you that innovation is critical to the organization's long-term growth prospects. Ask the same question of people who work in that organization and the answer won't be quite so positive. Without continued innovation, companies are likely to be relegated to the low-end commodity business (where returns are sure to be unattractive). Staying ahead of the product life cycle through effective and intelligent innovation and complexity management is a highly rewarding strategy, provided you can anticipate what the customer wants or - as was the case with Apple's iPhone - your company can be in a position to drive what the customer wants.

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