There is a battle underway. My stomach is telling me to eat, my heart is saying play with my kids, my gut is exhorting me to write my dissertation and my calendar is pressuring me to write this blog. If you are human, you’ve surely felt these moments. Unfocused, unsure and frozen, you kill your […]
Sunday night, crammed into an airplane seat, tired, with a headache banging through my forehead, I feel miles away from the topic I planned to write about this week: passion. But I’m going to give it a shot because I’m armed with reams of notes and if I can connect to my passion now, I […]
I got to this playbook using a process of narrative analysis. After lining up 30 financial service outthinkers—from Second Market to BancVue—looked at how they described their strategies, categorizing each element of their strategy into one of 36 generic strategic narratives. This produced a prioritized list of strategies that are most often cited by the […]
What I have discovered over the past few months is that while my big-bank friends sit back complaining about a lack of innovation in financial services—“everything is regulated,” “competitors copy too fast”—a new generation of outthinkers is busy dismantling nearly every dimension of the sector and introducing a new order of things. Position Position is […]
The ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu once wrote that “power comes from formation.” Fundamentally the way one creates power is by coordinating the pieces in a strategic formation. This is a great chess player setting up the first few moves to position her pieces in an optimal pattern. Birds fly in flock, animals travel in […]
How do today’s most successful companies stay on top? Chances are, they outthink the competition, coming up with strategies that leave business rivals in the dust, said Kaihan Krippendorff, a FastCompany.com blogger, founding Fellow of the Center for Leadership and an adjunct professor at Florida International University’s (FIU) College of Business Administration. On February 3rd, […]
Walking through airport lounges, surfing channels in my hotel room, I’m struck by how many kung fu fights and ancient grand battles fill the screens. I suppose this is China, after all, native home of Bruce Lee and Sun Tzu. I usually switch channels pretty quickly, hunting for some Bloomberg TV before I hit my […]
My mind is buzzing with thoughts of a book I just finished reading: The Intelligent Entrepreneur by Bill Murphy Jr. The author follows the inspiring stories of three entrepreneurs who turn their backs on traditional careers after business school, launch businesses, and make millions. Murphy offers 10 rules to follow if you want to succeed […]
Experts are terrible at predicting the future. At the dawn of the age of air travel, experts shared a compelling vision: a personal airplane in every garage. When the tape recorder was introduced, experts warned of the death of radio. Listeners would simply record the station and then listen to what they wanted. And, inspired […]
This week I listened to the CEO of a large technology firm I’ve been working with share his views on the future. One small comment he made struck me. If he is right, this could have radical implications for technology-based businesses worldwide. He said the flow of technology adoption is reversing: where once corporations drove […]
