Category: Digital Transformation
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Batman, Business, and the Incomparable
How one Batman cartoon from 1992 demonstrates the strategic value of looking for what makes your business impossible to compare to the competition. The most important question in business isn’t “how does your offering compare to the competition?” Instead, the question to ask is “how is your offering incomparable?” What is it about your business that…
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What’s Next for Apple and Amazon?
The world’s most valuable company won’t buy Disney anytime soon, but there’s a giant caveat. Plus, what else will the ecommerce giant do with Amazon One, its new biometric payment platform? Being a futurist can be glum when other writers breathlessly announce new-to-them ideas that I’ve been talking about for years while missing the broader…
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The Hollywood Strikes, AI, Strategy, & Overfocusing
The organization on the other side of the negotiating table from the striking writers and actors is the AMPTP, but how can one organization represent studios with such divergent interests? The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a mysterious Hollywood trade association. Its website contains no list of member organizations: just some technical documents,…
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Digital Transformation: Three Stories
The ingredients for Digital Transformation are institutional pain, inflection points, and tools lying around, but you also have to get the people part right. Usually, when we talk about Digital Transformation, we focus on the physical: paper and ink newspapers dissolve and go online; albums become cassettes then CDs then MP3s then streams; physical books…
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Adapt-amnesia, and why it matters
[Note: I wrote this piece back in November of 2017, but it only appeared on the Center site, not here. Since this is still something I think about, I’m adding it here, albeit belatedly.] We’re the most adaptable species on the planet, but then we forget that we adapted. That’s bad news for incumbent businesses…
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A Recipe for Digital Transformation
19 years before COVID, the 9/11 attacks gave me a sneak peek at how quickly we can change if the right three ingredients are in place. “Turn on the television.” 6:00am. Urgency in my brother-in-law’s voice cut through the grogginess as I held the bedside phone to my ear and clutched for my glasses. Our…