The state of customer service across most of the economy is dreadful. A recent delightful experience at Patagonia proves that it doesn’t have to be that way. The sad world of customer service As I have written about elsewhere, the more automation we introduce into the customer service experience, the less likely you are to offer…

People have been predicting the end of Hollywood as we know it for a long time. Talking pictures were first dismissed as a novelty, then eventually embraced. Television proved destabilizing for the studio system that preceded it. And now, Chris Moore, a veteran of the hit-driven Hollywood business model of…

Happy New Year! Ram Charan and I co-authored an article just out in this month’s Harvard Business Review about how technology is creating the conditions for what we call the “permissionless” corporation. In it, we suggest that corporations organized like conventional bureaucracies are going to give way to organizations that…

I’ve been asked to offer a public lecture for Ukraine by the DTEK Academy, the learning and development arm of one of the country’s leading energy providers. As we bring 2022 to a close, I thought I would share some of the contents of that talk. Image source: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1100501433/heres-how-much-it-could-cost-to-rebuild-ukraine-and-who-would-pay-for-it The…

When leadership coach and major award winner Marshall Goldsmith describes you as the greatest leader he has ever met, that’s saying something. Frances Hesselbein was one of the last of a generation that included Peter Drucker, a group of influential thought leaders who created much of what we know as…

As the world begins to open up and I’m back on the speaking circuit, a question I get asked again and again is how one can tell when a once-robust competitive advantage is starting to show its age. Here’s how you can diagnose it. The traditional strategy prescription Find a competitive advantage, throw up…

When a major inflection point passes through, institutions and the environment take a long time to catch up. But when they do, the consequences can be swift. Facebook’s current troubles illustrate this principal. My editor reacted with shock when I handed in Chapter 1 of my most recent book Seeing…

Gradually, then suddenly. That’s the line that I borrowed from Ernest Hemingway to describe the progress of strategic inflection points. They brew along for a long time — sometimes decades — before finally breaking through. The gradual, then sudden, pace of progress Strategic inflection points — those events that punctuate a shift from one reality to another…

Big flashy billion-dollar investments. Leaders optimistically pronouncing totally unrealistic launch dates. Geeky engineers becoming the darlings of the moment. Yes, the story of Ford’s foray into autonomous cars has it all! The autonomous driving bubble inflates The Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off the modern race to invent…