Building the moat… the work of strategy
In my previous blog I explored the purpose of strategy: the creation of a sustainable competitive advantage. In Buffet’s terms, it is about building a moat wide enough and deep enough that marauding invaders cannot bridge the gap.
It's official: the new economy won
Did you miss it? In the run-up to year-end, the five largest public companies in the US by market cap were the masters of the ‘digital economy ‘. Can you guess their names?
The Business Model Test - the narrative and the numbers
Fifteen years ago, Joan Magretta (HBR) observed that all business models must satisfy two tests: the narrative – does the story make sense – and the numbers – does the P&L stack up? This remains the standard today.
Can you see the 'Disruptive Edge' from where you sit?
‘Step away from the edge’ might be good advice for the young, but it could be fatal advice for businesses. Economics has long held that 'things are driven by what happens at the margin, not at the core'. This is a central principle in Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation.
Understanding the disruption engine: what can I do?
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel decried Silicon Valley’s obsession with disruption, declaring “disruption has transmogrified itself into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything new and trendy”. He’s not alone.
Free is not a business model
“Free is not a business model” declared the CEO of Box, a cloud based enterprise storage and collaboration company, feeling the price pressure of the competitive battle between Amazon and Google in the storage space. While his lament is self-evidently true, it does open the broader question: what is a business model?