The Short Road to Ignominy
Every day we confront the consequences of actions taken in the past. It may be a slight inconvenience caused by a shopper who left their cart in a parking space, or the expense of burying parents who failed to plan. We also deal with this issue in our enterprises. Outdated technology plagues our systems , […]
Strategy When the Well Runs Dry
We are not in a recession. But the economic conditions are erratic. At best, they’re dangerously uncertain, at worst, foreboding. This is especially tough if you are a founder in a high-growth startup. Unlike legacy companies, which can economize their way to profit, you are expected to grow while losing money. For anyone unfamiliar with […]
There is No Message in That Latte
What happens when you base your strategy on a pattern that isn’t actually there? Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer founded Fabulis, a social network for gay men. In 2009 they transitioned it into an e-commerce site called Fab.com. Fab catered to its clientele with short-notice flash sales of specialty items like rhinestone-bejeweled motorcycle helmets. Customers flocked in to spend! […]
Private Strategy
Often, when I first ask startup founders about their strategies, they usually tell me what their goals are for the year. Or they provide a laundry list of projects that they have underway and the various KPI’s (key performance indicators) that measure them. You know what they never do? No founder or CEO has ever […]
Mind the Gap –Executive Edition
As we discussed last week, in most organizations, the strategy doesn’t make it very far beneath the C-suite. This isn’t obvious when you are part of the senior team that creates that strategy. From that vantage point, because you are perpetually thinking about, measuring, and discussing it, it’s easy to assume that everyone else in […]
The Low-Hanging Fruit Dilemma
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. -John F. Kennedy “Pick the low-hanging fruit.” It’s so common a phrase that very few of us ever interrogate it. The low-hanging fruit –the projects we can knock off our list fast. […]
Spring Clean Your Resolutions
Believe it or not, spring is nearly here. That means that we have already progressed a quarter of the way through this year. No time to read? Watch the video instead. Withering on the Vine At the very beginning of 2022, you probably set some goals. Maybe you made New Year’s resolutions. What were they? And […]
How Was Next Year?
Happy New Year! Watch the video here! Take a minute and imagine that you were an Olympic diver. As preparation for the world championships, part of your training includes regularly visualize that winning dive. In your mind’s eye, you see and feel yourself walking up the steps to the board, taking the steps to the […]
Stop In The Middle
There is an interesting story about Ernest Hemingway. They say that whenever he walked away from writing for the day he always stopped in the middle of a sentence. With the stress of that unfinished sentence lingering in his mind, he could not wait to get back to work the next morning. Of course, when he […]
Back From The Future
New Year, Birthday, Graduation — They All Mean Goal-Setting Like it or not, at the beginning of the year, we experience a line of demarcation in our lives. After all, we both count our own ages and file our experiences according to the year in which things happened. I got my braces in 7th grade […]