In Getting Organized: The Entrepreneurial Death Star, I described how the chaos of growth drives startups to get organized.  Organization comes at a price yet it seems that the only options are to stay small and creative, suffer chaos, or pick execution over agility. This piece provides two alternatives. Before we start, let me ask [...]

Apple’s the closest company we have to a national hero.  When Apple prevailed over Samsung, I was pleased.  The good guys won. While the financial judgment is still pending, the $1-3B financial range is certainly not chump change. Yet relative to Apple and Samsung’s balance sheets, the impact is minimal. The victory was an homage [...]

One would think that the big news from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference was the overdue refresh of the MacBook Pro with a sharper screen or that they’ve dropped Google maps for their own mapping technology. Not so. The developer conference is a leading indicator.  It signals where Apple is heading; where they see the next [...]

This post was inspired by my friend Steve Pile who after reading a letter I’d written to a colleague said it should be on Working Wider. Tell me if this doesn’t sound familiar… Your group is totally overwhelmed.  Demands outweigh capacity 7 to 1.  There are no top priorities because now everything is at the [...]

What made Apple the most valuable company on earth?  Their relentless focus on creating extraordinary customer experience unveils opportunities others miss.   They attack them using proprietary hardware and software embedded into elegant consumer products that ultimately disrupt long standing business models. Because Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson that he’d finally “cracked TV” many [...]

This piece  offers a proven approach that will dramatically cut the deficit without cutting spending or raising taxes.  Interested? Run the government as a business but not any old business. Certainly we wouldn’t want to run it like the airlines.  Who’s going to advocate that Wall Street take over the remaining parts of government they [...]

I begin most mornings reading national newspapers online.  What looked like just another story about crowdsourcing on the Internet turned out to be one of the most creative and humanly compelling change strategies I’ve ever seen. Ironically, I’ve been working on a piece on the importance of individual heroics in our flat and networked world.  [...]

A firm’s business strategy reflects its leaders.  Under Steve Jobs, Apple differentiated itself through elegantly simple design.  This piece explores Apple’s business strategy in the first full year of Tim Cook’s leadership. Already, we can see Tim Cook is changing Apple.  In contrast to Jobs’ rare appearance before the press and analysts, Cook took the [...]

Have you ever written a piece that was for internal consumption and mistakenly posted it publicly? Ouch! That’s essentially what Google’s Steve Yegge did last week on Google+ when he inadvertently published “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant” to the world.  As you’d imagine, it went viral pretty quickly.  And it elicited the expected public apology from [...]

Mark my words, Amazon has just introduced the world’s second successful tablet. Here’s why: Point of View (POV): Amazon designed the product based on what they do best rather than mimicking Apple.  Yes it uses Android and will run Android apps but it’s not an Android trying to be an Apple. Price, price and price: [...]