Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking? – Only Dead Fish

It’s difficult to navigate through all the myriad factors to identify what might really be behind this picture, but perhaps the real story is less about the impending death of large businesses and more about their need to adapt – to move through business and product life cycles more quickly than before, to be more focused on systematic experimentation and organising swiftly around opportunity.

Source: Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking? – Only Dead Fish

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Cracking the digital code: McKinsey Global Survey results | McKinsey & Company

When asked about specific challenges to meeting digital priorities, executives cite a variety of hurdles that reflect the complexity and difficulty of implementing a successful digital program. A lack of leadership or digital talent tops the list, followed closely by a limited understanding of how digital trends affect the company and industry, difficulty keeping pace with digital development, and an inability to adopt an experimentation mind-set.

Source: Cracking the digital code: McKinsey Global Survey results | McKinsey & Company

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Part I: Validate Your Business Model Start With a Business Model, Not a Business Plan – The Accelerators – WSJ

A business model describes how your company creates, delivers and captures value. A business model is designed to change rapidly to reflect what you find outside the building in talking to customers. It’s dynamic and it reflects the iterative reality that startups face. Business models allow agile and opportunistic founders to keep score of the pivots in their search for a repeatable business model.

Source: Part I: Validate Your Business Model Start With a Business Model, Not a Business Plan – The Accelerators – WSJ

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It’s the Purpose Brand, Stupid

Marriott followed this strategy in leveraging its brand across the jobs for which hotels might be hired. It built its hotel brand around full-service facilities that were good to hire for large meetings. When it extended its brand to other jobs for which hotels were hired, it adopted a two-word brand architecture, appending to the Marriott endorsement a purpose brand for the different jobs its new hotel chains were intended to do. Hence, individual business travelers who need to hire a quiet place to get work done can hire Courtyard by Marriott — the hotel designed by business travelers for business travelers. Longer-term travelers can hire Residence Inn by Marriott, and so on. Even though these disruptive hotels were not constructed and decorated to the same standard as full-service Marriott hotels, the new chains actually reinforce the endorser qualities of the Marriott brand because they do the jobs well that they are hired to do.

— Why has product innovation become a gamble with such low odds? By Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall

Source: It’s the Purpose Brand, Stupid

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