There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer. –Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York,: Harper, 1st ed. 1954); Routledge, 2012, at p. 37 Urban legend has it that a Harvard Business School professor (who is never...
Sometimes when a corporation fails you could have seen it coming decades ago and so it’s not news. But rarely you could have seen it coming decades ago and it’s still news. Thus with Sears’ bankruptcy filing. “Attention, attention must...
Recent conversation with a veteran friend in the industry. He had correctly deduced from a recent column in these pages that I’m (re-)reading the all-time strategy classic Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin (Harvard Business Review Press: 2013) and...
By “only two strategies,” I mean what if there are only two general ways of creating a sustainable competitive advantage? I’ve read a lot of the business and management literature on strategy (believe me…) and this thought first surfaced when I...
Psychologists call us humans, among other things, “meaning-making machines.” We’re always looking for the reason why, the cause for the effect, the coherent narrative that pulls it all together and ties it up neatly. So far so good, but of course...
We often ask law firms, “Who’s your competition?” The single most frequent response we get is, “Well, no one, really.” This is delusion on stilts. Every business, I would venture to extend that to any human organization, has competition,...
