Since everyone else seems to be revisiting Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation these days, the contrarian that I like to be.. I’d like to revisit Drucker – in a positive way. Still the most renowned and cited management consultant in recent times, the Austrian Peter Drucker, offered a radical view of business endeavors. He claimed the purpose of a business
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In my previous blog series, Strategic Planning for New Ventures, I showcased an example of a disruptive innovator in Veracyte, leader in thyroid cancer diagnostics. Veracyte pursues the specialized CLIA lab business model, offering a unique, high-value test that cannot be obtained elsewhere. In this blog, I profile another innovator, IQuum, which is pursuing the other common model in molecular
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Back in 1999, minty-fresh from my Sloan MBA and stint at the Boston Consulting Group, I thought I knew all there was to know about ‘survival’ business jargon. This namely consisted of what I called the ‘big eight’ buzzwords: The first four related to top-line growth, namely: Strategy, Competitive Advantage, M&A (when you have no competitive advantage but you have
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Based on your assessment of the current situation facing your startup or innovation project discussed in my last blog post, the Gut Check (including a good grasp of the past and changing conditions ahead), it is time to put your core idea and inertia through the strategy ringer, or a set of decision-making criteria that should improve your prospects for
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In part I of this blog, I covered various views on strategy, namely the distinction between strategy as a theory for competition and strategy as the realization of goals by all means necessary. We learned from the brilliant work of various though leaders including Porter, Christensen, Hamel, McGrath, Blank and Drucker that the formula for victory on the business battleground
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When working for a large company, I remember the arduous, but necessary process of yearly strategic planning, albeit I wasn’t personally invited to the swanky off-site or wherever “the generals gathered in their masses”. Now that I’m part of the management team of an early-stage biotech startup, I get invited to the party – yeah! Then it dawned on me
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When John Osher, a serial entrepreneur, was looking to expand his SpinPop Lollypop business, he went ‘prospecting’ with his team. They paced up and down supermarket aisles looking for gaps in product categories where they could apply their core technology, a small electric motor that would cause a consumer product to spin. During one of their prospecting missions, they noticed
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Necrophone 