The April 15 issue of The Economist published a simple chart that gave me chills. Look at it for a minute. What looks scary to you? The chart displayed the number of pieces of mail sent by year over the last decade. When you look at the chart, the first thing you probably noticed was the precipitous decline in mail volume over the past few years. Indeed, mail...

Do you find that company strategy meetings often descend into adversarial position-taking? Many people complain to me that it's the single biggest block to strategy-making that they encounter. But getting around that block is a lot easier than you might think. The solution lies simply in posing a single question, which I believe is the most important question in strategy. I discovered the question about 15 years ago...

Root cause analysis and preventive maintenance are concepts we expect to see in a factory setting. Start-ups supposedly don't have time for detailed processes and procedures. And yet the key to startup speed is to maintain a disciplined approach to testing and evaluating new products, features, and ideas. As start-ups scale, this agility will be lost unless the founders maintain a consistent investment in that discipline. Techniques from...

The single most common competitive mistake investors, CEOs, and entrepreneurs alike make is this: striving to do slightly better what their fiercest rival already does incredibly well. The result is usually a muddled, incoherent mess of a strategy — one that fuels not disruptive, explosive differences between a firm and its rivals, but their very opposite: bland, boring similarities. Most companies are competitively challenged — and the Golden...

C.K. Prahalad manifestly qualified as a High Lord of Strategy, Second Generation. News of his death saddened me, and set me to reflecting on the themes running through his work over four decades. This isn't as easy an exercise as it is with many other management thinkers, including some great ones. Does it strike you, as it does me, that many a business author writes the same book...

The April 15 issue of The Economist published a simple chart that gave me chills. Look at it for a minute. What looks scary to you? The chart displayed the number of pieces of mail sent by year over the last decade. When you look at the chart, the first thing you probably noticed was the precipitous decline in mail volume over the past few years. Indeed, mail...

Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon has emerged as one of the world's compelling voices on the future of strategy, competition, and brands. She teaches one of HBS's most popular courses, she has written some of its best-selling case studies, and, a few years ago, she co-authored one of the most provocative articles that HBR has published in years. So it's no surprise that her new book, Different,...

Navigating India's legal landscape often reminds me why the tale of the elephant and the six blind men originated in that country. Before setting up a corporate entity in India, my partners and I spent a great deal of time asking experts worldwide — including senior executives, accountants, and attorneys in India — in the life sciences industry about the right legal structure. We wanted to ensure our...

Root cause analysis and preventive maintenance are concepts we expect to see in a factory setting. Start-ups supposedly don't have time for detailed processes and procedures. And yet the key to startup speed is to maintain a disciplined approach to testing and evaluating new products, features, and ideas. As start-ups scale, this agility will be lost unless the founders maintain a consistent investment in that discipline. Techniques from...

Mark Wallace, former US Ambassador to the United Nations, has a term for people who can quickly absorb information, adapt to new challenges, and get people aligned in the right direction: fast zebras. They are the people who can skirt around or blast through the kind of gridlock found not only in the political spectrum, but in organizations of every stripe. The metaphor is based on the fast...