Book review

You don’t want to stay a fish Failure is an issue. The policy report on entrepreneurship 2014 by the Irish government shows we have an issue with failure and risk. Talking to our clients in the innovation space, the same issue arises. In innovation and particularly iterative innovation, failure is a given and in theory,

Innovation Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble embarked  on a ten-year journey during which they completed research on a number of well-known and well-respected companies (e.g. Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, The New York Times, and Unilever) and interviewed dozens of senior-level executives at dozens of other companies that include Aetna, Allstate, Ben & Jerry’s, BMW, Citigroup,

Ecosystem economics will become the new black. What is your transformative purpose? We recently started to use “Exponential organisations” with our clients. One of the key points of the book is about businesses finding their “Transformative purpose”. It really resonates with our clients. When you get involved in staff engagement, it eventually always boils down

Do you like meetings? Not many people like meetings. Most of us accept that a lot of them are useless. And organisations can live with that. But what they should not live with, are meetings about strategy that are boring and do not work. Strategic conversations In a VUCA world, where you try to cut

What happens when all technologies cross collide and digitisation, demonetisation and dematerialisation come together at exponential speed? Exponential change It goes back to what “The second machine age” explains as the difference between linear change and exponential change. One is gradual, the other one doubles every 6 or 12 months. And with exponential change, we

The strapline for Nir Eyal’s book is ‘How to build habit-forming products’ because companies that form strong user habits enjoy several benefits to their bottom line. These companies attach their product to internal triggers. As a result, users show up without any external prompting. Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services

Do you want to become a billionaire? We do. Actually, some of our clients are billion dollar companies. When we reviewed Peter Thiel’s book, “from one to zero”, we were hoping we would find the answers. We have now. Peter Thiel Peter Thiel suggests you should focus on next practice and create a monopoly based

Marketing as a hot topic Marketing is a hot topic for our clients. With an increasing emphasis on internal marketing and ensuring that the brand internally is aligned with the brand externally. It is another way of saying engaged, happy staff that love what they are doing, are better at selling. By a factor of

Peter Thiel has pedigree. Billionaire, one of the Paypal founders, CEO of Palantir. Worked with Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman. When he talks, you should probably listen. No progression since the 70s His starting point is that we have not progressed much since the ‘70s. With the exception of IT and the internet, not much