Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
BigTechCo Strategy #1 – should you pay the platform tax? Sriram Krishnan
Sriram is a product manager at Twitter and has written an excellent article on the platform tax. If you need distribution for your product today, you almost have no choice but to go through the large tech companies. Is there a way around? How does it fit in with your company’s strategy?
How Jeffrey Immelt’s ‘Success Theater’ Masked the Rot at GE Wall Street Journal
A lot has been written about GE in the last few weeks. WSJ wrote a fascinating deep dive on what exactly happened. “GE itself has never been a culture where people can say, ‘I can’t.” The article describes in painful detail the missteps and strategic mistakes the company made in the last few years including poor M&A. The inability to admit failure was a key factor in the decline.
2018 Corporate Longevity Forecast: Creative Destruction is Accelerating Innosight
In many of my powerpoint presentations, I include a slide that shows the decline in corporate longevity. It seems that this trend is only accelerating based on this Innosight report. If you want to understand why this is happening, check out this report.
How ‘The Lean Startup’ Turned Eric Ries Into an Unlikely Corporate Guru Fortune
The word ‘MVP’ is used a dozen times internally every day. There is one person to blame, Eric Ries. His best selling book the Lean Startup is considered gospel in tech organizations. This bio in Fortune describes his latest projects, which also include a new type of stock exchange focused on long-term results instead of short-term profits (called the Long Term Stock Exchange).
Is Execution Where Good Strategies Go to Die? Harvard Business Review
We spend a lot of time thinking about bridging the gap between strategy and execution. This piece in HBR piece articulates how difficult that can be. 1) Participation & ownership, 2) Different mindset of those creating the strategy and those implementing, 3) Strategy narrative, 4) Measurement and metrics
