Our conventional wisdom about teams is that factors internal to the team mostly determine how well they will operate. My LinkedIn Live guest, Professor Deborah Ancona from MIT, begs to differ. No matter how great the clarity of roles, alignment on deadlines or otherwise suitable a team’s internal structure is…

Among the unintended consequences of AI applications built with few guardrails is that conventional views of what is intellectual property are upended — I found out the hard way! Well, that was a surprise! An acquaintance contacted me on LinkedIn about something unrelated, and then congratulated me for being forward-thinking enough to work with an…

When it comes to challenges like climate change, it can feel overwhelming. After all, how much of an impact can any individual have on such a massive problem? Imagine my delight at finding out about an initiative which is already having a dramatic effect on global groundwater restoration. The Global Groundwater Crisis According to…

A dazzling array of speakers opened a day of hearing from entrepreneurs, researchers, businesspeople, and others convened for Princeton’s Keller Center’s Innovation Forum. I was delighted to be part of a panel, each person discussing a slightly different aspect of the current innovation system. The Keller Center at Princeton and…

I was deeply saddened to learn of the sudden passing of Brian Dovey, a partner at Domain Associates and a family friend on August 27. Imagine my surprise at receiving a signed copy of his new book, synthesizing so much of what he had learned in decades of investing in…

This week, we’re launching a new guidebook series at Valize, designed to share core ideas about strategy today in a convenient online format for using with your team or on your own. The first one has to do with customer behavior and the all-important understanding of how traditional segmentation lets…

A board and governance level issue that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is whether firms are being run as value creators or value extractors. As economist William Lazonick points out, absent real pushback, it is all too easy for management to simply extract value from companies — value that was…

There was a brief period in the early 2010’s when a new business model — dubbed “direct to consumer” emerged and threatened to upend established incumbents. A decade or so in, the assumptions underlying the model are in tatters and we’ve come to realize, as we always should have, that…

Every bubble produces its own poster children. One of the more astonishing is WeWork — a company that promised to defy the gravity of conventional real estate transactions by leasing long-term and renting short-term. At one point, it was valued at $47 billion — now it is warning that it…