Modern competitive analysis started in the 1930’s with the introduction of the Structural-Conduct-Performance (SCP) paradigm (shown in Figure 1 below) that was used to analyse the causal dynamics of Industrial Organisation, the field of study concerned to a large extent with how public policy can limit monopoly power. The SCP paradigm has since evolved into … More Competitive Strategies: Structures and Power
I realised recently that I don’t have a good working definition of what Data Products are or should be. Sure, a quick googling will surface many generic definitions of Data Products from respected sources like Forbes and McKinsey. They are all usually variations of DJ Patil’s definition: “A data product is a product that facilitates … More What Are Data Products?
I was recently asked to speak about my leadership brand, a topic I hadn’t seriously thought about ever, until now. So what is my brand. Here are a few things that I know: So I think my leadership brand is the rational leader who tries to understand how things work, and who seeks to inspire … More My Leadership Brand
A friend sent me Safi Bahcall’s book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Disease, and Transform Industries” a couple of months ago. It’s a fascinating book with many interesting ideas and stories, the most important of which is (arguably) the Innovation Equation, a model that seeks to explain, in a … More Safi Bahcall’s Innovation Equation
Effective decision-making is one of those skills that separates good leaders from the more ordinary leaders. In this post, I summarise a few lessons I learned from good leaders I have had the privilege to work for in the past. These decision-making principles have served me well in the last couple of years as I … More Some Decision-Making Principles
I was recently asked a question on what are the weaknesses of Agile as a framework, and what do we have to do to work around those weaknesses. This is a real if somewhat unusual question, and I can imagine many people who grew up with traditional waterfall project-management methodologies asking that question from time … More Agile, Waterfall, Wagile, and All That
The Networks scientist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s latest book The Formula: The Science Behind Why People Succeed or Fail is a cracker. His six laws of success summarise more than a decade of research into the science of success, in particular how the social network in which we live and operate, with its many kinds of relationships … More The Success Formula
Outside Agile, Strategy is probably the most (ab)used word in the modern corporation. I used to have a very basic definition of what a strategy encapsulates, which has four components: an analysis of the current state and how we got to where we are; a statement of the end goal we want to achieve; a … More Strategy: The Art of Creating Power
The Peter Principle states that in most hierarchical organisations, there is a natural tendency for employees to rise in the management hierarchy through promotion until they reach the levels of their respective incompetence. This is a statistical statement about people in an organisation, and there are cultural and management practices that can be put in place to … More An Email Test for the Peter Principle
We have all read about network effects and how they underlie the business models of fast-growing and high-margin companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Apple. The book Platform Revolution by Parker, Van Alstyne and Choudary seeks to distill the key characteristics of these so-called Platform Businesses, whose overarching purpose is “to consummate matches among users … More Financial Intelligence as a Platform Business
Mental Models 4 Life 