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To gain any groundbreaking insights into marketing, consumer psychology, popular art, or even a mobile app’s user interface, an innovator is still necessary to synthesize human experience, newspaper articles, and stories about how people have reacted, conversed and complained. Extracting hidden and ambiguous meanings in the social realm requires not just big data, which are …

How Businesses Can Keep Up In A Rapidly Changing World Read More »

When is it possible for David to beat Goliath in the platform economy? On March 25 mighty Uber bowed out of Southeast Asia by selling its operation in several countries to local rival Grab. The news came as a surprise to many observers. Grab, which launched its service in 2012 with 40 drivers in Malaysia, came late to the …

For Some Platforms, Network Effects Are No Match for Local Know-How Read More »

A bold decision always looks good—until it is wrong. To facilitate evidence-based decision-making, managers must carry out frequent experimentation to diminish the dark space of ignorance and to arrive at conclusions with the required level of familiarity. Critical assumptions must first be identified and then proved right through rigorous experiments. As recounted in my book LEAP, forward-looking …

The Revolutionary Approach Honda Took to Rise Above Competition Read More »

The upshot is that artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive computing can exert either a complementary effect or substitutional pressure. But that outcome is not predetermined.

When industry knowledge matures, copycats always catch up. Because latecomers often inherit a lower cost structure without the legacy assets, they exert competitive pressure on industry pioneers. That’s why Steinway can’t compete against Yamaha, even though it has always made the finest pianos in the world. To more than 90% of concert artists, including such legendary virtuosos as …

These Dueling Piano Companies Can Teach Business Leaders How To Handle Copycats Read More »

To come up with an integrated strategy, every effective leader must begin with the big questions: What world am I living in? What are the biggest trends in this world? How do I align my company’s activities so that my organization gets the most out of these trends and cushions the worst? In my book, Leap I …

Steve Jobs Used This Trick To Time Apple’s Strategic Moves Perfectly Read More »

Outlasting competition is difficult. Doing so over decades or a century often seems impossible. Since the great Industrial Revolution, every country that has become rich started by copying others: the French copied the British, the Americans copied the Germans, and the Japanese pretty much-copied everybody else.

The public should know this by now; whenever the U.S. administration is in deadlock at home, it has historically looked for sideshows abroad, to create an external crisis, a shifting backdrop so for the public to focus on a new dramatic event.

The U.S. Congress was not impressed. They were not impressed by the latest lift on ZTE ’s ban from buying American technologies, even with strings attached.

Europe’s new privacy law comes with teeth. Within hours of the General Data Protection Law (GDPR) coming into effect, an Austrian privacy campaigner used the new EU legislation to file a legal complaint against Facebook and Google. It’s too early to tell how the case will be resolved but companies that violate the law can be fined …

GDPR isn’t enough to protect us in an age of smart algorithms Read More »