Leading VC/PE Firm Shares Free Stage-Appropriate Dashboards for SaaS ScaleUps — It isn’t every day that a leading global venture capital and private equity firm focused on SaaS companies gives away guidance without asking for anything in return, not even an email address. But that is exactly what NYC-based Insight Partners has done. It’s called ScaleUp By The Numbers: SaaS Sales…

Framework, Process, Tools — As a ScaleUp operating strategist for a leading global private equity firm, I spend a good bit of time working with senior executives and functional leaders facilitating sessions focused on answering five deceptively simple questions: What is our winning aspiration? Where will we play? How will we win? What capabilities…

Blue Oceans Are A Thing of the Past Business leaders dream of what is now a nearly mythical space: a “blue ocean” market, the term Renee Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim coined to denote unexplored and uncontested markets in their 2004 bestselling book Blue Ocean Strategy. The truth is, nearly all businesses operate in “red oceans” — markets…

In his new book When More is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency, Roger Martin offers an antidote to our fragile democratic capitalism. If you follow my work at all, you’d know that any book that focuses on less is right up my alley. I’ve made a career…

Don’t let uncertainty hold back development strategy — Searching for strategic sure-footedness amidst the gale-force headwinds of a global pandemic and socioeconomic upheaval has left business leaders struggling to regain control of their enterprise. Far too many are stunned and scrambling to simply survive, if they’ve been fortunate enough to weather the storm thus far. In a previous…

Don’t Let the Uncertainty Excuse Stop Your Strategy Making. — Albert Einstein once said, “Life is like riding a bicycle…to keep your balance, you must keep moving.” When it comes to thinking about our business strategy, though, this advice seems much easier to say than do, mostly because it feels like it runs counter to our natural tendency to do…

Defense Production and the Power of Continuous Improvement to Stabilize Society Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States with full fury, most people had probably never heard of the Defense Production Act, a U.S. federal government law passed during the Korean War. Even fewer know of the DPA’s genesis and precursor — Roosevelt’s World War II emergency services — and…

Can You Separate Strategy From the Strategist? The Unfortunate Answer. There’s a meme that’s been floating around for some time: “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” As with most memes, it’s rather silly. But what makes anything comical is the presence of some kernel of truth. To set strategy against culture is obviously nonsensical: Culture at its root is the product…

Had he suffered from one of the most common creative syndromes, Steve Jobs might never have even considered visiting the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1979. He might never have seen what he almost immediately recognized as the future of personal computing, a graphical user interface PARC had…