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In a Business Week Online interview, highly-regarded Harvard business school professor and author, Clayton Christensen, praises the work of Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan:
"There's a method that's the brainchild of Rita McGrath at Columbia and Ian Macmillan at Wharton called "discovery-driven planning." It's a much better way to assess the value of projects. Most companies, when they look at the financial projections [of a potential innovation project], if they look good, they do it. If they don't, they don't.
But the desirability of attractive numbers has never been an issue. Why shine the spotlight on the numbers? Rather, a better way to do it is: We all know how good the numbers need to look for this to be attractive. But what assumptions have to prove true in order for those numbers to materialize out of this innovation? So you focus the spotlight on what assumptions have to prove true, and you launch a project to test those assumptions. It's a much better way.
If you combine Rita's work with mine -- that a disruption always creates market capitalizatio -- and if one of the assumptions relates to what job customers need to do when they hire a company's product, the probability of success and of it being big can be assessed without even looking at numbers."
To read the entire article, click here.
Question: If sustainability requires consumers to reduce consumption, how can a company that makes money selling products address this concern while maintaining profits? The answer, according to a handful of analysts and companies, is "servicizing."
Rita Gunther McGrath, associate professor at the Columbia Business School and co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth calls it "finding a new unit of business" and says it’s something a lot of companies are looking to do.
"The most successful companies capture the absolute greatest amount of customer spending, or create far lower costs for themselves by altering what they sell," she says.
For the complete article, click here.
Rita McGrath was recently quoted in the Daily Herald on the subject of corporate universities:
Creating a corporate curriculum that makes a difference can be a tall order, according to Rita Gunther McGrath, a business book author and associate professor at Columbia Business School in New York.
"What a lot of companies have come to realize is that creating a high quality educational environment for their people is actually a lot of work and requires considerable expertise," McGrath wrote in an e-mail on the topic.
For the complete article, Download file here.