Posts by Patrick Lefler
Innovation and Creative Destruction
Did you know that at the turn of the last century in 1900, there were over 100,000 workers employed in this country as carriage and harness makers; men and women who made their living solely off of the manufacture and maintenance of horse-drawn carriages. With the rapid rise of the automobile in the early twentieth…
Read MoreDon’t Let Talent Get Stuck – Reallocate Your Innovators
One of my favorite Peter Drucker passages about innovation goes something like this: “To render a business entrepreneurial, management must take the lead in making obsolete its own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so. The business must be managed so as to perceive in the new an opportunity rather…
Read MoreManaging Failure
Failure is inevitable for most new ventures. It’s inevitable because the high risks involved for most new ventures make success difficult to achieve; if it wasn’t risky, then someone would have successfully launched the venture years earlier. But how we react to failure is one of the keys to success for the next venture. In…
Read MoreComing Changes in Broadband Pricing
Peter Burrows of Bloomberg Businessweek has written a great piece this week on how the crushing demands of video delivery and mobile devices are going to change the pricing model of the internet. In an article titled; Will Netflix Kill the Internet? Burrows makes the point that the rise of Netflix and other video content…
Read MoreNetflix Pricing Model Reinforces New Strategy
Netflix, which has already conquered Blockbuster in the DVD-rental business, is now focusing its resources on winning online video services. In an announcement yesterday, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings pretty much spelled out their strategy going forward: “We are now primarily a streaming-video company delivering a wide selection of TV shows and films over the Internet. 
Read MoreBasketball's Disruptive Innovation
Of all the changes that have occurred in basketball over the past 120 years since James Naismith invented the game, which is considered the game’s most important? The dunk? The shot-clock? The Laker-girls? All significant…but this particular change could also be considered one of basketball’s true innovations – a game changer that revolutionized the game…
Read MoreEntrepreneurs Must Focus on Learning
The Entrepreneurial Mindset written by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan is one of the best resources available for organizational entrepreneurial strategy. While the book was written ten years ago in 2000, it still defines the methods for success for fast competitors who “move on ideas that others overlook and who confidently act while others…
Read MoreBureaucrats Can’t Mandate Innovation
This week’s Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine features an interesting piece on the challenges that the Japanese government faces in transforming the island of Okinawa into a “cluster†site for innovation. In an article titled Okinawa’s Doomed Innovation Experiment, author Vivek Wadhwa makes the point that governments and the bureaucrats who run them can’t mandate entrepreneurial success.…
Read MoreMake Yourself Obsolete or Your Competitors Will
Peter Drucker tells a great story about how the leading American consumer electronics manufacturers fumbled away their technological advantage during the early days of the transistors. “In 1947, Bell Laboratories invented the transistor. It was at once realized that the transistor was going to replace the vacuum tube, especially in consumer electronics such as radio…
Read MoreDoes Globalization Inhibit Creativity?
For the better part of two decades now, the globalization of markets has moved steadfastly forward and for the most part, this has been promoted as a benefit to society. And globalization refers to more than just trade, it is about the spread of ideas. In his book Predictably Irrational, author Dan Ariely makes the…
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