18 January 2011
Robert Lane Greene has written a sparkling account in Intelligent Life of the growing rivalry between Google and Apple. For years Steve Jobs was an inspiration to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and, Eric Schmidt sat amicably on Apple’s board until 2009. As Greene puts it, ‘the companies could have been a match [...]
Entrepreneurialism
7 December 2010
Some books change your view of the world, not so much because they tell you something completely new, as crystallise ideas you half-understood already. Or as Proust put it, you see the world with new eyes. Daniel Pink’s Drive is such a book. Anyone who cares about work – how it can be [...]
29 October 2010
The Social Network may be one of the best films ever made about the birth of a business, but it only tells a tiny part of the Facebook story. Its main theme is the friendship between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Savarin that was a casualty of the business’s explosive growth, with the aggrieved [...]
28 June 2010
In my last post I discussed five fundamental questions every business entering a new market needs to consider. In this one we consider the other five:
6. Does our value proposition give customers a compelling reason to choose us repeatedly?
7. How will we achieve an organisational culture that combines entrepreneurial spirit and [...]
June 23 2010
In Winners and Losers I aim to describe and explain, not to prescribe or predict. The success factors I identified for organisations that create new markets and establish lasting industry leadership certainly contain lessons for any business, but they’re mostly implicit. In my workshops for business audiences, I suggest ten any business entering [...]
25 May 2010
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the authors of Rework, are right to call it ‘a different kind of business book for a different kind of reader’. With their passion for doing a few things really well it has some of the qualities of that enduring classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle [...]
31 December 2009
Few organisations achieve a satisfactory balance between entrepreneurial spirit and management discipline, the elusive quality I call disciplined entrepreneurialism. There’s an almost inevitable tension between the often anarchic forces of creativity and originality and those of order, efficiency and professionalism. Creative people and organisations are often hopeless at practical tasks, while the highly [...]
21 November 2009
The news that Dell has been pushed from second to third position in the PC market is a reminder of how short are the reigns of most industry leaders – in the first half of this decade it was number one and undisputed heavyweight champion. This industry of course has always been ferociously [...]
