The Chief Innovation Officer of a large financial services company was interviewing me for an article when she poised an unexpected question: “What do you learn from your children about innovation?” After stalling with “umm,” it hit me: warm batteries. My son has taught me to look out for warm batteries. That lesson, I believe, […]
Category: Contributors
Haar to heart: Innovation in the Americas—The Next Challenge
With the recent release of the World Bank’s “Doing Business 2011” report, Latin America and the Caribbean have much to cheer about with more advances than declines in key categories of conducting business. Mexico and Peru scored highest—first and second place, respectively. For Mexico, the achievement was a much needed shot in the arm, in […]
Passionately Pursue Customer Captivity
There are three primary sources of long-term sustainable competitive advantage: customer captivity, economies of scale and preferential access to resources. Lock on to one of these early and you can build a potentially insurmountable barrier to competitive threats. WebMD intelligently focused early on one of these three: customer captivity. When I pushed CEO Wayne Gattinella […]
Condense your strategy to its core
Passion, when channeled correctly, can create a powerful strategic advantage. When a company’s people are all focused on one mission, one purpose, they become passionate and engaged about it. However, in order to truly leverage the passion of your people, you must make sure your strategy is well-defined. Verne Harnish, probably the world’s leading expert […]
Selling Information, Not Diamonds
Blue Nile’s divergence from industry norms begins with its purpose. Most jewelers exist for the jewelry. Tiffany & Co., for example, describes itself as “the world’s premier jeweler and America’s house of design.” While this positioning may seem innocuous, it exerts a powerful pull on how Tiffany’s people see their business and the thousands of […]
Storytelling and Influence: Learn How to Get What You Want
“Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.”—David M. Ogilvy You have devised a brilliant strategic idea. You’ve asked the right questions, diagnosed the critical issues, conceived a set of unorthodox solutions to address the key issues, narrowed down your ideas into an actionable […]
Andres Carne de Res—the perfect restaurant?
Every year, for the past four, I travel down to Cali, Colombia to talk about “service innovation.” I spend a week with a group of young managers from places like Colgate-Palmolive and Cadbury Schweppes, exploring the anatomy of great service experiences. How do The Four Seasons, Starbucks and Apple Stores engineer unparalleled experience? What frustrates […]
A lesson on leadership—from Venezuela with love
During my recent seminar on “influencing” for 240 managers and entrepreneurs in South America, one issue participants shared with me was the “leadership vacuum.” Local executives, who reach seniority, want to leave Venezuela because of the difficulty of doing business there, and outsiders resist being posted in the country for the same reason. As a […]
Oil spill may force an innovative social construction.
As oil continues to fill the waters off my wife’s home state, Louisiana, inventors around the world are surely scheming up new technologies to prevent such catastrophes from happening again. While I wish for their success and am thankful for their efforts, history says their energy would be better spent engineering a different kind of […]
The duck flaps ahead of the competition.
Earlier in the week I started reviewing the insurance giant Aflac. In 2004 we start to see the growth rates of Aflac suddenly starting to climb and a new radical idea was starting to pay off for Aflac: the duck. Over 2003 and 2004, Aflac started to enjoy the fruits of an uncommon bet it […]