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How Separate Should a Corporate Spin-Off Be?

Harvard Business Review

The traditional advice, from Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovations and Michael Tushman’s on organizational ambidexterity , is to set up the new activity as a separate unit, reporting to a manager at the corporate headquarters who can sponsor the new activity and help to integrate it with the rest of the company.

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Prototype Your Product, Protect Your Brand

Harvard Business Review

Designers and entrepreneurs have been experimenting with live prototyping — putting unfinished product ideas in the context of real markets and real customer situations — for years, and now bigger businesses have begun to catch on. Is quality essential in your market, or simply a nice-to-have. Might we tarnish our brand?

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Why Is Capital Afraid of Cities?

Harvard Business Review

Making the case for investments that produce social impact as well as market returns is not a discussion most executive directors want to have with their board — or their financial stewards on Wall Street. Large corporations know more about opportunities in Chinese markets than they do about opportunities in US cities.

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Why Social Marketing Is So Hard

Harvard Business Review

But despite this outpouring of expertise, many organizations still find marketing in the social era ridiculously hard to do well, if at all. Perhaps marketing in the social era is that kind of problem. The funnel is a favorite of marketers because it is linear, uni-directional, and transaction-centric.

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Does Your Company Come Across as Too Male?

Harvard Business Review

Every manager, male or female, saw the difference very fast, without any preaching on my part. He had no idea that the ad they’d just run to launch their latest mass-market device was so completely male-oriented. After all, Red Bull and P&G were strategically going after a market segment they had chosen to focus on.

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Making Room for Reflection Is a Strategic Imperative

Harvard Business Review

The most disruptive, unforeseen, and just plain awesome breakthroughs, that reimagine, reinvent, and reconceive a product, a company, a market, an industry, or perhaps even an entire economy rarely come from the single-minded pursuit of the busier and busier busywork of "business."

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When to Make a Promise to Your Boss (and When Not To)

Harvard Business Review

Maybe even cleverer is the market that Leo Burnett targeted to introduce it — a group with a strong need (and a perfect opportunity) to socialize: college freshmen. And because batteries are the single most expensive component in electric vehicles, that would be a big step toward his dream of a mass-market Tesla car.