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Say “No” to Innovation-in-General

Harvard Business Review

For over an hour, the panel discussed all of the innovative projects they’d worked on — spanning projects from Google Fiber to ad bidding technologies at Facebook. Yes, all of the panelists were speaking broadly on innovative projects. But innovation is a word that means a wide variety of things to a wide variety of people.

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Resolution 2011: Make Your Strategy Coherent

Harvard Business Review

Focus on capabilities rather than just fixed assets: Fixed assets, including brands, are more difficult to leverage across diverse businesses and tend to expire, become obsolete, or give way to related services. Define precisely how your way to play adds value for your chosen customers (e.g.,

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Recommended Resources – An Interview with Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi, authors of The Essential Advantage

Strategy Driven

These choices historically conferred advantage – first-mover, scale – but asset-based scale advantages have diminished in recent years, thanks to technology, cheap information, and outsourcing. Assets are important, but they are, increasingly, table stakes in most competitive industries; everyone in the game has them.