Category: Product Development

Reading Time: < 1 minute Good habits are hard to acquire and bad habits are hard to break…and our dependence on smart phones doesn’t seem to helping in getting rid of the bad ones…until now. This short HBR article provides some great insights into habits good and bad, and offers some interesting technology options for dealing

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 Quality isn’t everything.  Case in point: Domino’s Pizza.  Founder Tom Monaghan discovered that the key to success in the pizza business wasn’t great pizza, but free delivery.    But no competitive advantage lasts forever and the company’s subpar pizza began to deliver subpar results, no matter how fast it’s delivered, especially

Reading Time: < 1 minute Those who are concerned that China’s economy will surpass ours should consider the following “required reading.” China just announced to great fanfare that after years of effort and millions in investment, it has managed to produce… a ballpoint pen! (This was accomplished in the US about 80 years ago).  Before

Reading Time: < 1 minute We often think of “disruption” as belonging to the realm of startups or big, but innovative and relatively young companies like Google or Apple.  Is it luck…is it art… or is it science?.   One really old, really large company that makes many products you use every day knows that disruption

Reading Time: < 1 minute We celebrate comebacks, like so many other events, because they are rare.  These stories are valuable because, as John Henry Newman observed over 100 years ago, “history offers lessons, not rules.”   A turnaround for the times is a company that came back from the brink of oblivion to a level

Reading Time: < 1 minute The wonderful film  “Driving Miss Daisy”  portrayed an aging wealthy widow who could afford to hire a chauffeur to drive her when she no longer could. The driverless car touted by Google and others will make it possible for all of us to have chauffeurs when we no longer can (or

Reading Time: < 1 minute The great innovations that have become part of the fabric of our lives were once extraordinarily disruptive.  Check out this short article that summarizes remarks made by Malcolm Gladwell this week at the World Business Forum on the “preconditions” for  effective disruption; the first consisting of being somewhat  “disagreeable.”

Reading Time: < 1 minute The past 150 years has seen more innovation and invention since people started, well,  innovating and inventing.   But what made all this possible?   If you’re curious about how the world you live in came to be, check out this two page executive summary of a wonderful new book  “How We Got

Reading Time: < 1 minute Henry Ford once remarked that he didn’t do market research because if he asked people want they wanted they would have said a faster horse!  He trusted his instinct as to what the customer would want even if they themselves could not articulate it today.  He built it and they came. (Though