Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
The history of travel’s greatest acquisition Skift (reading time: 27 minutes)
Priceline, dominates the online travel space. In 2006, Priceline merged Active Hotels and Bookings to create Booking.com, a brand that changed the course of online travel history, and is largely responsible for Booking Holdings’ stature as a roughly $100 billion company today. This article dissects the story of that acquisition and how Booking.com reshaped the travel industry. This acquisition created $88 billion (!) dollars of value for Priceline. Today, Priceline Group even renamed itself to Booking Holdings.
Going Critical Kevin Simler (reading time: 29 minutes)
This is quite a long and complicated post yet very worthwhile. What causes something to “go critical”? Kevin Simler explores that rate of diffusion in a fascinating post. Though not related to strategy per se, the idea exposed in this post sheds light into how cities, ideas and knowledge propagate.
How to Compete and Win Leon Coe (reading time: 2 minutes)
This isn’t an article but rather a collection of resources on strategy. It’s a collection of some my favorite books, podcasts and essays on the subject. Definitely a bookmark to keep!
Sears’ Seven Decades of Self-Destruction Fortune (reading time: 18 minutes)
Key strategic decisions can have an impact for years, often decades. This why I’m such a fan of history. In order to understand which companies win or lose, you have to examine the past. The roots to the infamous Sears collapse are rooted in two strategic blunders make decades ago. This post is a fascinating biopsy into the collapse of the most iconic brands.
What makes a great leader, explained in eight counterintuitive charts Quartz (reading time: 4 minutes)
This short is delightfully insightful. It captures the author’s book summary within a few simple graphs. Attributes are plotted on a two dimensional axis to represent where the best leaders reside. It is of course a dramatically simplified representation of reality yet makes a ton of sense.
We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.
