Recent Blog Posts

What’s So New about the New Economy?
When Netscape launched in the early 1990s, we started moving into the economy driven by open innovation, knowledge, and networks. The Internet is our first interactive mass medium, and it...

Strategic Doing and the 5 Phases of the S-Curve
Some years ago, Deming told us, "if you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." This is where scholars run into trouble. They...

GENERAL ELECTRIC LOSING ITS COMPETITIVE EDGE
In 1984, I worked as a strategy consultant for General Electric. My firm, spun out by former partners of the Boston Consulting Group, conducted production cost studies for General Electric....

A Practitioner’s Model of Ecosystems
Ecosystems fascinate scholars. New publications are skyrocketing. Yet, when it comes to understanding ecosystems and how they form, scholars can quickly get wrapped around the axle. A practitioner perspective is...

Wicked Problems Require a Different Approach
Have you ever picked up the wrong tool to do a job? Perhaps a screwdriver too big or pliers too small? That's happening every day in our organizations, as leaders...

Strategic Doing in IT Project Management
Collaboration is a process, not a thing or an event. The process involves co-creation, recombinant innovation, and abductive logic: creating new value from existing assets. You don't tell people to collaborate....

Insights into Collaboration & Innovating Networks
The central question: How do we do strategy in networks? To answer that question, we need to explore networks in a bit more detail. We can easily distinguish three types...

Developing Entrepreneurial & Innovation Ecosystems
Developing entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems matters to regenerate our economies. But too few civic and political leaders know why this step is so important. What's worse, they don't know how...

Creating a Safe Place
Strategic conversations answer the two key questions of strategy. Where are we going? How will we get there? These conversations require a psychologically safe space. CONDUCTING STRATEGIC CONVERSATIONS We are...

Difference between Goals and Outcomes
Yesterday, a colleague asked why we don't use the term "goals" with Strategic Doing. Instead, we focus on outcomes that we can measure. What's the difference? The drawing below explains....

Strategic Doing Under the Hood
This graphic takes you under the hood of how an agile strategy process works within open networks, teams, and collaborations, including the development of ecosystems. Here are the key points: 1....

Insights from Ecuador: Moving to Network Thinking
Networks -- collaborations, open innovation, clusters, ecosystems -- drive an economy forward. Yet, many of today's leaders are lagging behind. It's understandable. They developed their skills in an Industrial Age,...