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…

Competitive advantages have life cycles — born in innovation, scaled up with launching, making a profit by operating and eventually transforming to the next advantage. Unfortunately for leaders in today’s fast-paced contexts, we tend to only teach the “operating” part of this story. My Columbia Executive Education course “Leading Strategic…

Three-quarters of all Americans are overweight or obese. Despite the diet industry’s ballooning revenue at some $80 billion, whatever they are doing clearly is not working — which is a great business model but a pretty bad outcome for customers. With a whole new category of diabetes drugs being prescribed…

The utilization of management tools, ideas and frameworks has a strange cyclicality to it. The boss reads another book and suddenly we’re all required to calculate Net Promoter Scores! It’s worth taking a critical eye to the tools that we use to increase performance. The development of new management practices My former advisor, Ned Bowman, often…

Everybody wants to be the author of a popular management tool. …

Once we’ve learned how to do something, we become “unconsciously competent” at it. In order to break with the predictable path and move forward, what my good friend and colleague, Greg Galle, suggests is that we need to “think wrong.” That means opening our minds to new possibilities. In a…

Leading strategic growth and change doesn’t need to be a mystery! If only we taught people the skills necessary for three key leadership roles, it could be a lot more systematic and corporate transformation efforts might yield a lot more success. The anatomy of a successful growth pipeline. The first thing to realize about managing a pipeline…