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When Should a CEO Leave?
We all love success stories. Someone starts in the mail room and makes it to the top. Visionaries come in to turn around companies. People like Steve Jobs innovate, leave, innovate elsewhere and return to innovate even more. But those are the rarities. More often we’re faced with some hard questions. How long should a…
Why can't we seem to innovate?
For the last decade I have been looking at innovation around the globe. I am seriously distressed about the total lack of innovation on a global scale. Less than 20 years ago we had think tanks such as BBN, Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, SRI and others, whose sole purpose was to bring thousands of brilliant…
Innovate or Die
Watching the drop in Eastman Kodak’s stock value is like witnessing death by water torture. The stock has lost 80 percent of its value in 2011 and is hanging on at less than a dollar a share. It’s sad. Kodak was the leader in photographic technology. Thirty years ago, it had an unmatched presence and…
Vive le Disruptive Consumer!
How better to illustrate the point of the power of the customer as part of the Culture of Disruption than the news that an activist investor group has approached the board of directors of Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the BlackBerry (and masters of the “see no iPhone, hear no iPhone, speak no iPhone” school of management) to propose innovations to keep the company competitive?
Going Postal
A few weeks back, the United States Postal Service declared an upcoming $10 billion loss and said it might need to lay off over 120,000 people. In an interview the president of the letter carrier association and number of other postal service officials discussed the reasons for the current situation. The following made me fall…
Everybody is Responsible…Except Us?
Who’s responsible for a company’s fate? Take Enron. All of us saw the valuation of this company skyrocket without explanation during the drunken euphoria of the bubble days. We loved Enron because our stock was making us rich. The shareholders were sleeping by not demanding answers. The board was bought and sold. The employees were…