Building an Invincible Company

I recently watched Alexander Osterwalder deliver a keynote on “Building an Invincible Company“, based on his book with the same name. He shares a lot of great insights on leadership, innovation and building sustainable business advantage for businesses. You can watch the entire keynote here. Here are some lessons I took away from the talk: The moment a company thinks it is invincible, their decline becomes inevitable. Invincible companies constantly reinvent themselves while they are successful. They fully realise that they will be disrupted and so work hard to find invest in technologies and business ideas that could potentially disrupt […]

The State of the Gig Economy

We have all at some point in time talked about or heard about the growth of the gig economy and how this could potentially be the future of work. While the number of people participating in the gig economy has been on a growth path, their ability to earn from their gigs alone to support them and their families has not been growing in proportion. JP Morgan Chase Institute recently did a study on the state of the online platform economy. It tried to answer a fundamental question – “Has all the technological and business model innovations that have led […]

The Future of Banking –  Promises and Threats

The past decade has already seen a lot of industry structures being redefined with leaders going bust and new age companies taking their place. One of the industries that seems to be on the cusp of going through a similar upheaval seems to be the banking industry.  If you look at what a bank does at its core, it is only two things:  Collect money from parties (individuals, businesses and governments) and keep them safe and pay them whenever they need the same back. Banks in most economies pays a simple interest (and in some countries, charge a fee to […]

Google to Alphabet and a New Model for Organisational Growth

Google founders Sergey and Larry have the knack of doing unconventional things. They have done it again by giving birth to a parent company for Google – Alphabet. In a blog post, that seems to have surprised almost everyone, Larry explains their reasoning behind the need to create Alphabet and how the new structure will provide focus, leadership and independence to all their businesses, while allowing both Sergey and Larry the time and latitude to focus on their moonshots or the big bets that they are going after. In my opinion, the move is a good move because of the following reasons: This […]

Shift from Competing Organizations to Competing Networks

In the past few years, I have started seeing a definite trend that is shaping up and one that can have an immense impact on all of us and how we do business. There is more competition between networks of organizations competing with each other rather than individual organizations competing. This was prevalent in the B2B space in the IT industry, where software vendors would team up with hardware vendors and implementation partners and go to market together. They win the deal together or lose the deal together to a different network. Airlines around the world always had these networks […]