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How to Lead On Purpose

Great Leadership By Dan

When he left the company in 2004, however, it fell on hard times. Fast-forward three years, and in 2007 Dell returned to refocus the company on its core purpose, going so far as to take the company private in an effort to make it the “largest start-up in history.”

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Compete on Know-Why, Not Know-How

Harvard Business Review

They get stuck making incremental improvements that are rooted in existing competencies, markets, and business models. I call these types of insights core insights, a concept which I first introduced in my book, Innovation X. But whereas core competencies are about know-how, core insights are about know-why.

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Three Cases of Better Corporate Philanthropy

Harvard Business Review

To do this, Goldman used its competencies in understanding markets, convening needed expertise and business networks. Goldman used its power to scale to get to market quickly, assembling a pipeline of services, investing in sophisticated measurement systems and developing a global core curriculum.

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What Is Strategy, Again?

Harvard Business Review

Focusing on a few key success factors, critical resources, and core competencies (maybe a reference to C. Prahalad and Gary Hamel’s 1990 article, “ The Core Competence of the Organization ”). A tour de force by any measure, “What Is Strategy?” But it was far from the final word.

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Zappos’ CEO on Using Corporate Relocation to Preserve Customer-Led Culture

Harvard Business Review

One of the most significant came in early 2004 when we decided to relocate from San Francisco to Las Vegas. But we were reluctant to relinquish control of something that is one of Zappo’s core competencies. Usually when marketing departments do their ROI calculations, they assume that the lifetime value of a customer is fixed.

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