Category: Competition

Reading Time: < 1 minute Many companies are currently engaged in year-end planning and too many plans are not much more than “how can we do more next year?” This can happen when companies are enjoying success and assume, without much reflection or analysis as to why.   As we often say at #Vistage meetings,   “the

Reading Time: < 1 minute Most of us are familiar with Dr. Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” which ranks the basic needs all humans have.  After basic physiological needs (food, water, shelter, health)  the most important need for most people according to Maslow is safety. We may not be able to protect our employees outside of work, but Simon

Reading Time: < 1 minute “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”  wrote the Russian novelist Tolstoy.   The same seems to be  true for “happy” (successful) businesses.  Regardless of the nature of the product or service offered,  the most successful companies today can be considered “software” companies in that

Reading Time: < 1 minute With all the disruption being wrecked on traditional businesses by newcomers with new business models, it’s important to remember that the disruptors are sometimes disrupted before they can displace their competitors. To wit: Movie Pass:   This much touted start up offered a monthly subscription model for movie fans which, as a recent

Reading Time: < 1 minute Meet 21 year old Zander Futernick who may be about to teach the airline industry how to run, well, an airline. Existing businesses are often reinvented by finding an unserved market and/or creating a different business model for an old product.   This short article from Forbes relates how Mr. Futernick is

Reading Time: < 1 minute It’s one thing for a business or industry to suffer a significant downturn.  It’s quite another for an industry icon to disappear entirely. To wit: the Toys ‘R’ Us shutdown, liquidation and its soon to be total disappearance from the retail scene.  What can we learn from the demise of  Toys

Reading Time: < 1 minute The founder of Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad passed away on January 31. His extraordinary success (he was number 10 on the world’s richest persons list) by bringing a new business model to an old category is the stuff of business legends. What was so different about his offering? Vistage’s premier speaker

Reading Time: < 1 minute Microsoft paid $26 Billion for LinkedIn.  The following will help C-Level execs understand why.  Many CEOs and direct reports have a personal or company page on this site but know little about the power that LinkedIn offers them, so they don’t challenge their teams to use it to its fullest. 

Reading Time: < 1 minute NYU professor and marketing guru Scott Galloway has penned a book that explores the current and future impact of a group of companies that many call the “new four horsemen of the apocalypse” because of the cataclysmic effect they are having on many industries and many business models. Galloway’s book

Reading Time: < 1 minute For the past 30 years, Michael Porter of Harvard has been to the study of strategy what W. Edwards Deming was to Total Quality Management.  The size and scope of Porter’s remarkable body of work has, unfortunately, discouraged many from pursuing his contributions to this most important subject. A colleague