Latest, by subject
One post from each of the things I write about. The full archive is here.
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Nobody’s Job
Two people, adjacent roles, a piece of work sitting in the space between them. Both saw it. Neither picked it up, and both had good reasons. What happens next depends on whether somebody steps in or somebody gets told to, and those two things are not the same.
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Product-Market Misfit
Long before most newspapers knew what to do with the internet, a business weekly put itself online. Readers came along, stayed loyal, and the move looked right. That is usually how product-market fit goes missing. Quietly, while you are busy fixing the part you can see.
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Competing Where the Leader Can’t Follow
Most markets have one leader and many followers, and the leader gets to define what everyone competes on. Match them point for point and you lose slowly. The durable alternative is narrower than most strategy advice admits, and it usually means choosing to stay smaller on purpose.
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Six Months Away, Forever
Somebody has been selling the future for as long as most of us have been working. The internet, then mobile, then social, then data, then digital transformation with a bigger budget behind it. Every wave carried real technology, and every wave carried a story much larger than the technology, and the story is what set the price. A promise nobody can define is a promise that can never fail. A deadline that keeps sliding is a deadline nobody can audit. Telling the tool apart from the story is the whole job, and it is worth learning before the next wave…