Why is it that you can have a fantastic offsite session, and then 48 hours later, put the same people in a room and nothing that was proposed survives? Perhaps something similar has happened to you: You’ve just completed a very productive offsite creative session with the senior team and are feeling good. Pages of […]
My CFO client was lamenting the pace of progress on their innovation programs during a recent 1:1 session. I had an inkling that I knew what might be going on, so I asked her to show me the portfolio of project work they were funding for the current year. And there it was. Some background: […]
So, feeling my oats, and being a hotshot 30-something in a Fortune 100 firm, I was running around with my hair on fire, with three major product programs, and doing my best to make sure they all “made it.” I had just come back from a meeting when I received a message from someone I […]
Three phone calls: A colleague who is an internal catalyst who has given his all to get new things going – only to see them shut down due to problems in the core business. A reader who leads a breakout sales team and fights the internal inertia more than his competition. A senior team member […]
I work with a number of firms that most would call large companies, yet if you spent time with them, you’d find they are at a stage where they feel quite pressed. It’s a paradox that puts multi $100 million firms in a quandary around growth and innovation. Internally constrained teams leave a lot of […]
We are living in the era of unlocking hidden potential. Uber set up a marketplace and now unlocks value in both unused vehicle seats and good drivers with time on their hands. Big data projects go to work mining out value by looking into massive (& valuable) troves of unstructured information behind the firewalls of […]
Brace yourself for it: the click bait posts will be coming to your inbox soon, with titles like, “The Top Ten Trends to Watch in 2017”, or “Don’t Miss These Three for 2023.” Why do marketing and consulting firms amplify these and deluge us with them like clockwork every year? Peter Drucker gives us a […]
Everything looked good: the team was solid, the patents were sound, the pipeline of customers robust and the financials were reviewed and approved. The CTO & COO had overwhelmingly given their approval and the transaction was completed. You know how the next step in this real-life example plays out. The go-to market, operations, human resources […]
The question hangs like a fog over every firm I have the opportunity to work with. Simply stated, how do we get a hard driving and skeptical leadership team to be willing to adopt this promising, yet nascent, new project? Inevitably, once they have an established business and more than one hundred employees, the organization […]
I had dinner with a colleague recently who is heading up a new growth vector for his firm. The topic turned to one of those you don’t read about often: what happens if it goes sideways? I reminded him that everyone who has led one of these efforts experiences three phases of a journey. First […]
