Why You Need to Pay More Attention to Small Customers — I am always interested in broad, slowly-developing trends because they can be overlooked if you don’t pay attention — frog-boiling stuff (though that metaphor is actually an urban myth). The trend on my mind concerns how to think about the size of your customers and, while mainly relevant in the…

Utilizing the Four Quadrants of the Virtue Matrix — For corporations, sustainability has moved from a maybe to a must over the past decade. It is no longer a question of whether or not to have a conscious and coherent strategy. The question for corporations is choosing where and how to deploy their sustainability investments. That choice is challenging…

The Three Key Principles — I seem to have created a lot of angst with my critical views on data analytics, about which I have written both earlier in this series and in my new book A New Way to Think. Because it feels that the topic warrants some further exploration, I have dedicated my…

When More IS Better — I recently had a fascinating conversation with a client about job titles. The question was how to select the optimal title that would help people both inside and outside his company know what he did? I had thought and written before about a related subject — but not exactly this…

Why the MBA Business Just Has to Get its Act Together — I had a bittersweet conversation with Dan Pink and Joe Gebbia last week. It was immensely enjoyable but saddening at the same time. It inspired me to dedicate my 30th Year II Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece to The Design School Advantage: Why the MBA Business Just Has to…

The Rules of Alignment — In my recent Getting to Know Me series, I invited readers to request topics for me to tackle in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) series. One (thanks Alan) echoed many questions I have previously been asked variations on: how to ensure information technology (IT) really does align with business…

The Inspiration for My Writing — This is the fourth post requested by the Medium folks of one hundred of their regular authors designed to enable the Medium readers to get to know us better: 1. The Backstory on My Writing 2. The Books that Inspired My Work 3. The Process by Which I Write 4…

Never Violate the Hansel & Gretel Rule — There is truly an impressive amount of wisdom in the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Think too about their stunning productivity in creating a string of iconic characters from Cinderella to Rapunzel to Sleeping Beauty to Snow White. But the subject for today is the business wisdom of another of their…

The Process by Which I Write — As I explained in my first post in this series, the Medium folks reached out to one hundred of their regular authors to write the following four posts that would enable the Medium readers to get to know us better: 1. The Backstory on My Writing 2. The Books that…