Top articles of the week | July 4

July 4, 2020

Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!

Four Logics of Corporate Strategy MIT Sloan Review (reading time: 9 minutes)

Strategy is often seen as an opaque concept that can be misconstrued (case in point here). However, compelling frameworks can help clarify the abstract. This post in MIT Sloan does a wonderful job of explaining corporate vs. business level strategy. There are four key concepts to understand: leverage, integrative, portfolio and federal. Each one depends on the level of corporate to business linkage and business unit to business unit linkage. We’ve already begun employing this framework with our customers and can’t recommend it highly enough.

Hierarchy of Marketplaces — Level 3 Sarah Tavel, Benchmark Capital (reading time: 4 minutes)

We’ve covered Sarah Tavel’s writing in the past. This is the third article on her series on marketplaces. Benchmark is a famous for its marketplace investments (Uber, Hipcamp, Grubhub, Opentable, Zillow and the list goes on). In this post, Sarah dives into how to dominate in a marketplace. She uses simple yet effective powerpoint slides to demonstrate the strategic rationale.

A Guide to Building a More Resilient Business Martin Reeves, Kevin Whitaker, Harvard Business Review (reading time: 9 minutes)

Building more resilient organizations is now of paramount importance. Martin Reeves and Kevin Whitaker provide some great tips on how to achieve this. There are six recommendations that are notable. The one I liked the most is “change as the default”. Being able to change and adapt should be the new normal for every leader.

Keep Running Morgan Housel (reading time: 7 minutes)

I love the concept of the Red Queen. If you’ve seen Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. In the world of business, this means that you have to keep running just not to fall behind. It’s an evolutionary theory that was wide applicability. In this article, Morgan Housel applies it to the lifecycle of companies. He looks at the different probabilities of a company surviving across its lifespan.

The world changes, and competitors create their own little twist that exploits and snuffs out your niche.