One of the biggest cop-outs in corporate life is to say, “we had a great a great strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” Hogwash. Any strategy that doesn’t take the ability to execute is a lousy strategy to begin with. Strategy is not a game of chess, but depends on operational capacity.
The problem is particularly pervasive when it comes to content. For all of the talk about “brands becoming publishers,” most marketers are simply tacking on publishing functions to their existing operations without implementing any new processes or practices. That is a grave mistake.
As I previously wrote in Harvard Business Review, marketers need to think more like publishers, but they also need to act more like publishers if they are ever going to to hold an audience’s attention rather than merely broadcast messages. If you can’t create a compelling experience, it doesn’t really matter what your content strategy is, it will fail.
When Steve Jobs was trying to lure John Sculley from his lofty position as CEO at Pepsi to Apple, he asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” The ploy worked and Sculley became the first major CEO of a conventional company to join a hot Silicon Valley startup.
That same spirit pervades the tech world today. People go to Silicon Valley and other technology hubs not just to make money, but to make a positive impact on the world through innovation. By searching frantically for the “next big thing,” they hope to do well by doing good.
In The Rise and Fall of American Growth, economist Robert Gordon throws cold water on that notion. With a painstaking—and fascinating—historical analysis of U.S. productivity, he argues that the innovations of today pale in comparison to earlier in our history and that we might actually be entering a period of prolonged stagnation. He may very well be right.
J.P. Morgan believed in trusts. It seemed to him that excessive competition diminished profits and undermined capital formation, which he saw as essential to building a modern economy. Although that may seem like a strange point of view today, it was one widely held by 19th century industrialists.
That view became an anathema in the 20th century as the focus of business shifted to competing effectively. Men like Alfred Sloan, Peter Drucker and, eventually, Michael Porter came up with important ideas about how to run a business more efficiently and create a sustainable competitive advantage.
Today, however, efficiency will only get you so far. Three of the world’s five most valuable companies are not old line industrial or financial companies, but fast moving tech companies who prosper through agility rather than efficiency. Much like the 20th century industrialists, today’s managers need to adapt to new rules. Here are three trends you need to know.
Are communication technologies like Slack, Yammer and Skype actually helping us, or just getting in the way? Certainly, they have made it easier to communicate, share information and collaborate with colleagues, but what if all that extra communication is actually preventing us from getting important work done?
In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Bain & Co. partner Michael Mankins estimates that while a typical executive in the 1970’s might have received 1,000 messages a year, that number has skyrocketed to more than 30,000 today and argues that we may “have reached the point of diminishing returns.”
I think just about everyone can see his point. Today, the amount of meetings, emails and IM’s we receive can seem overwhelming and it’s increasingly hard to find uninterrupted quiet time to focus and concentrate. However, the nature of work has changed. The real reason that we communicate more is because, today, we need to collaborate more to be effective.
In Mindset, psychologist Carol Dweckargues, based on decades of research, that how we see ourselves is a major factor in what we can achieve. If we see our abilities as fixed, we tend not to go very far. However, if we see our capabilities as dynamic and changeable, we will work to improve them and are more likely to attain excellence.
The same can be said about a field like marketing. If we see the rules as fixed, we’ll tend to be limited by conventional barriers of achievement. But if we see that paradigms are, to a large degree, self imposed then the possibilities are endless. We are only bound by what we believe.
That’s why it’s important that we learn how to shift our mental models. While the tried and true gives comfort and has a track record to fall back on, the new and different often feels like a reckless shot in the dark. Still, we are living in an era of extreme change and we have no alternative but to keep pace. In an age of disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt.
When scientists decoded the human genome in 2001, they found something astounding. While our DNA provides the blueprint for everything about us—from how we develop in the womb to eye color and personality traits—it takes only 20,000 genes to do so, less than one fifth of what had previously been thought.
What was even more mindblowing was the reason that they had been so off the mark. While our genome would seem to be the model of efficiency, squeezing all that information into a microscopic nucleus, 98% of our DNA is “junk” that doesn’t code for anything. How could our biology be so wasteful?
In The Selfish Gene, the eminent biologist Richard Dawkins explains that the confusion arises because we assume that DNA exists for our sakes rather than the other way around. We, he argues, are mere vehicles to propagate genes. Much the same can be said about ideas in an enterprise. All too often, we fail to recognize what our business’s DNA is telling us.
In 2014, a muslim student at The University of Michigan was harassed for a satirical column he wrote about the oversensitivity of students at his school. As Jonathan Chait described in a post in New York Magazine, the student was viewed as a perpetrator rather than a victim because he mocked politically correct norms.
Yet just in case you think that political correctness is strictly in the realm of the liberal left, consider the case of Larycia Hawkins, a professor at Wheaton College who was forced out after expressing sympathy for Muslims after the Charlie Hebdo attack, or Steven Salaita, a professor censured for criticizing Israel.
Political correctness, all too often, is in the eye of the beholder. One person’s empathy is another’s insensitivity, or so it would seem. But whatever your opinion of the merits and demerits of political correctness, it is, at least in part, a technological phenomenon. So perhaps instead of the usual vicious cycle of recriminations, we should look for deeper roots.
On December 9th, 1968, a research project funded by the US Department of Defense launched a revolution. The focus was not a Cold War adversary or even a resource rich banana republic, but rather to “augment human intellect” and the man driving it was not a general, but a mild mannered engineer named Douglas Engelbart.
His presentation that day would be so consequential that it is now called The Mother of All Demos. Two of those in attendance, Bob Taylor and Alan Kay would go on to develop Engelbart’s ideas into the Alto, the first truly personal computer. Later, Steve Jobs would take many elements of the Alto to create the Macintosh.
So who deserves credit? Engelbart for coming up with the idea? Taylor and Kay for engineering solutions around it? Jobs for creating a marketable product that made an impact on the world? Strong arguments can be made for each, as well as for many others not mentioned here. The truth is that there are many paths to innovation. Here are nine of them.
In 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore published a remarkably prescient paper which observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit was doubling every two years and predicted that this pace would lead to computers becoming embedded in homes, cars and communication systems.
That simple idea, known today as Moore’s Law, has helped power the digital revolution. As computing performance has become exponentially cheaper and more robust, we have been able to do a lot more with it. Even a basic smartphone today is more powerful than the supercomputers of past generations.
Yet the law has been fraying for years and experts predict that it will soon reach its limits. However, I spoke to Bernie Meyerson, IBM’s Chief Innovation Officer, and he feels strongly that the end of Moore’s Law doesn’t mean the end of progress. Not by a long shot. What we’ll see though is a shift in emphasis from the microchip to the system as a whole.
In David and Goliath, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell explains how small upstarts often have surprising advantages over larger, more powerful opponents. “Giants are not what we think they are,” he writes, “and that often makes us fail to appreciate less conventional strategies that may be superior.”
That’s certainly true in business. Large enterprises must serve the present. Things are expected of them. They have to keep customers, employees and other stakeholders happy. These obligations often weigh them down and make them vulnerable to disruptive innovation.
Yet that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that startups make for such enticing stories precisely because they are so unlikely. Most fail. And when they succeed, they become Goliaths themselves and face the same challenges as incumbents do. So instead of glorifying startups, perhaps we should take a closer look at what it takes to stay on top once you get there.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
argues, based on decades of research, that how we see ourselves is a major factor in what we can achieve. If we see our abilities as fixed, we tend not to go very far. However, if we see our capabilities as dynamic and changeable, we will work to improve them and are more likely to attain excellence.
, the eminent biologist 
, bestselling author 
