Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Early Indications April 2015 Review Essay: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

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Let me begin by dispensing with any pretext of objectivity: I think Atul Gawande, a surgeon at a Harvard teaching hospital who writes for ...
Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Early Indications March 2015

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After a busy few months away, the newsletter returns with a collection of news and notes. 1) My long-ish blog post on Uber, Airbnb...
Thursday, October 30, 2014

Early Indications October 2014: Who’s Watching?

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I didn’t really go looking for this particular constellation of ideas, but several good pieces really got me connecting the dots and this ...
Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Early Indications September 2014: Alternatives to Industry

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In classic business school strategy formulation, a company’s industry is taken as the determining factor in cost structures, capital utili...
Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Early Indications July 2014: Betting the Business

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I read with great interest the recent Fortune article on the new Ford F-150 pickup. This is the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. (but sol...
Friday, May 30, 2014

Early Indications May 2014: When computing leaves the box

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Words can tell us a lot. In particular, when a new innovation emerges, the history of its naming shows how it goes from foreign entity to ...
Monday, March 31, 2014

Early Indications March 2014: TED at 30

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On the occasion of its 30th birthday, TED is the subject of a number of both critiques and analyses. It’s a tempting target: the brand is ...
Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Early Indications February 2014: Who will win in an Internet of Things?

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As usual, Silicon Valley is in love with tech-y acronyms that sometimes do not translate into wider conversations involving everyday pe...
Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Early Indications January 2014: The Incumbent’s Challenge (with apologies to Clayton Christensen)

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I. For all the attention paid to the secrets-of-success business book genre (see last October’s newsletter), very few U.S. companies that...
Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Early Indications December 2013: A Look Ahead

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Rather than issue predictions for the year-end letter, I am instead posing some (I hope) pertinent questions that should be at least parti...
Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Early Indications November 2013: What makes a great business book?

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I recently read Brad Stone's book on Jeff Bezos and Amazon entitled The Everything Store . It's a good job of reporting on a topic...
Friday, October 25, 2013

October 2013 Early Indications: How do companies "do" Big Data?

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1) Some of you may have seen a piece I wrote in the October 21 Wall Street Journal , on the risks of "big data" for companies tr...