archiveChief Design Officer Insider

The odds of any foreign firm becoming an insider in China are long. There are two reasons for this. First, foreign firms are not competing in China with hundreds of multi-billion-dollar Chinese enterprises but instead are competing against a multi-trillion-dollar monolith (which my co-author and I label “Enterprise China” in...

Everyone has heard of famous entrepreneurs such as Gates of Microsoft, Musk of Tesla and of course Zuckerburg of Meta. But what about intrapreneurs? An entrepreneur is defined as a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk. While an intrapreneur is...

Ryan Hurley is the founder and CEO of Hurley Development, a commercial real estate and development firm in Vancouver, WA. He started this company in 2008, during the financial crisis, after working in the real estate industry for about seven years at Hinton Development.  A rugged season that signaled the...

When my student Brooke returned from her first week as an intern at a prestigious New York City ad agency, she said, “I was the only one on my team who rattled off one good idea after another. My creative director said we could utilize all my ideas. The other...

Pricing is your most powerful lever to quickly increase profit, and in the long run as well.  Assuming you have a 10% gross margin, if you could raise your prices by 1%, your profit would increase by 10%.  Not only does pricing have great leverage, but price changes can be...

One of the biggest highlights of the last decade has been the gigantic adoption of online banking globally. This widespread adoption has also given birth to countless FinTech startups, 75% of which actually fail in a short span, as per a few studies. FinTech, being one of the fastest-growing sectors,...

Sustainability is at the forefront of many people's minds these days, as the environmental impact of climate change continues to rear its ugly head in the form of intense droughts, stronger storms, heat waves, and community health risks. Many companies are leading the charge towards a more sustainable world, bringing...

"We have always considered Patagonia an experiment in doing business in unconventional ways." These are the words of Yvon Chouinard – the founder of multi-billion-dollar outdoor apparel company Patagonia. He has often done things differently and even said, "I never wanted to be a businessman." Recently, you might have read...

Across many sectors and industries, leaders are realizing that they have to get better at collaboration, and many are plunging in. But it’s easy to get implementation wrong and fall into what might be called “collaboration traps.” For example, some leaders treat collaboration as a magic cure-all, as if all...

In every organizational relationship, there’s an accountability equation at play. Accountability matters because it functions as the invisible thread that enables effective interactions with others.   But in its traditional sense, accountability is thought of as having to answer to or justify your actions to someone who has power over you....