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Companies Need a New Approach to Investing This Election Year

Harvard Business Review

In any other election cycle, the predictable increase and decrease in uncertainty offers shrewd managers unique opportunities for operating, investment, and financing decisions. This year, however, is different.

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Why Winner-Takes-All Thinking Doesn’t Apply to Silicon Valley

Harvard Business Review

The Justice Department even tried to break it up in the late 1990s because it thought, and many agreed, that this was the only way to create competition in the operating systems market. The message is simple: beware of the siren song of network effects, winner-takes-all, and first mover advantages.

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Why We Shouldn’t Worry About the Declining Number of Public Companies

Harvard Business Review

They operate as lean organizations, using cloud and internet-based infrastructure, and launch and distribute products more quickly than did firms that competed with factories, warehouses, inventories, and suppliers. Emerging digital firms compete with knowledge, strategy, and expert human capital, attacking even the largest established firms.

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Strategy and The Uncertainty Excuse

Harvard Business Review

When I ask business executives about their company's strategy — or about an apparent lack thereof — they often respond that they can't or won't do strategy because their operating environment is changing so much. There isn't enough certainty, they argue, to be able to do strategy effectively. In truth every company has a strategy.

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Growing, or Not, in an Age of Permanent Volatility

Harvard Business Review

This creates an environment in which successful companies must have operating models that are dramatically more dynamic and able to shift more readily to capitalize on growth opportunities (or to cost-effectively weather periods of decline). Innovation focused on first-mover advantage, not price point.

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Business Model Innovation is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

Harvard Business Review

Before long, despite all the first mover advantages of Viagra, the competitors reduced Viagra's market share from over 90% to around 50%. Business model innovations are often embedded in the firm's DNA, they define its core operating logic and for the competition to change and adapt its business model is much harder.

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A Survey of 3,000 Executives Reveals How Businesses Succeed with AI

Harvard Business Review

And AI success stories are becoming more numerous and diverse, from Amazon reaping operational efficiencies using its AI-powered Kiva warehouse robots, to GE keeping its industrial equipment running by leveraging AI for predictive maintenance. Investment in AI is growing and is increasingly coming from organizations outside the tech space.

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