Tag: Startup

Some of the Smartest Ideas In Business, Finally Understandable

By

Just because you have a breakthrough business idea doesn’t mean you’re the right person to communicate it. Which brings us to Michael Porter. His essay “What Is Strategy?” is one of the most-reprinted articles in the history of Harvard Business Review, but I defy you to find anyone, including Porter himself, who can explain that article’s ideas about strategy and competition with the elegance and precision those ideas deserve. You can now, though, thanks to Joan Magretta’s Understanding Michael Porter. Magretta, once a student of Porter’s and subsequently a Bain partner, divides her book into laying out and answering, clearly and conclusively, two of the central questions of business: What is competition? What is strategy? She shows how Porter makes the two questions smash into and bounce off of each other. If you want to understand why competition leads to mistakes in strategy, when strategy is “an antidote to competition,” and how you can use Porter’s often-cited-but-rarely-understood five forces to gain practical insights into how your company and its competitors are performing, you’ve come to the right place. And in a Q&A that Magretta conducts at the end of the book with Porter, the man himself finally makes sense. We read this and, if you want to make better decisions about your business, you should too.

Welcome to Our New Home on Medium

By

We’re thrilled to debut NewCo Shift on the new Medium for Publishers platform today. If you haven’t heard of us yet, NewCo Shift is a multi-channel business publication, with a central home right here on Medium (if you want to learn more, you can read this overview). We’ll be publishing on a weekly and daily cadence, and interacting with the tens of thousands of readers and followers who care about the largest shift in our economy since the industrial revolution.

In addition to our Medium publication, we also publish an email newsletter, the NewCo Daily. This week, we’re adding a weekly version, with a new column by yours truly, as well as a new series of video interviews with NewCo leaders we call NewCo Spotlight.

NewCo Shift is the brainchild of folks from places like Wired, HBR, the New York Times, and other excellent publications. It’s a work in progress, and we’re honored to be teaming up with the talented designers and product minds at Paul Ford’s Postlight and Erik Spiekermann’s edenspeikermann. NewCo Shift complements the real world experience of the NewCo Festivals, which celebrate business on a mission through experiential events which connect attendees to founders and senior leaders inside company offices throughout North America, Europe, and Latin America. Oh, and yes, we partner with great brands, as well — huge thanks to Adobe for being our first presenting sponsor.

We’d love to get your feedback as we ramp up our content offerings during the course of this year. Drop us a line and give us a Follow, and if you want to help us spread the word, please recommend this story by clicking on the heart below!

Dozens of NewCos Will Be at SXSW in Austin. Here Are 10 of Them

By


NewCo follows the story of and brings people inside new kinds of companies reshaping work, cities, and the world. At SXSW Interactive, you can see more than two dozen NewCos from Austin onstage. Here are 10 thoughtful sessions that feature NewCos.

Internet of You: Wearables and Under-Skin Marketing
 UnderArmour Connected Fitness
 Douglas Ziewacz, Head of NA Media and Advertising
 March 11, 12:30–1:30 p.m.

Read More

NewCo Mexico City: Proof of a Movement

By

The unassuming exterior of Startup Mexico

If you drive 15 or 20 minutes north of Mexico city’s richer, more well-tended district of Polanco, you’ll find yourself in the middle of Ampliación Torre Blanca, seemingly just one more crumbling set of traffic-choked blocks in this mega-city’s smoggy sprawl.

But turn down the small street of Ignacio Allende and then again into a small courtyard of #21: There you’ll find Startup Mexico (SUM), a massive converted warehouse thrumming with the energy of scores of new businesses. Once inside, you may as well be in the shared workspaces of New York’s Flatiron or San Francisco’s South of Market. Then it hits you. No one city has dominion over the startup movement: It’s gone global.

Read More

Forgetting What I’ve Heard: Why I Miss Buying Music

By


Once upon a time, I’d read the yearly lists of “best albums” from folks like Rick Webb or Marc Ruxin, and immediately head over to the iTunes store for a music-buying binge. Afterwards, I’d listen happily to my new music for days on end, forging new connections between the bands my pals had suggested and my own life experiences. It usually took three to four full album plays to appreciate the new band and set its meanings inside my head, but once there, I could call those bands up in context and apply them to the right mood or circumstance. Over years of this, I built a web of musical taste that’s pretty intricate, if difficult to outwardly describe.

About two years ago, I started paying for Spotify. Because I’d paid for “all you can eat” music, I never had to pay for a particular band’s work. Ever since, my musical experience has become…far less satisfying.

Read More

How Companies Create Positive Change

By


At NewCo, we spend a lot of time thinking about mission statements. We ask companies that apply to become NewCos for their mission statement, and we remind them that while most companies have mission statements, we look for companies that are in fact on one. There’s a difference — companies that are on a mission are filled with people who live and breathe their organization’s purpose. If you ask them about the “why” of their business, they’ll usually trace it back to the change their company is trying to make. That change is a verb — an active shift the company wants to see happen.

Put another way, great companies view their business as an argument. The company has a thesis about how the world ought to be in some way different — and every product, service, and customer touchpoint is part of proving that thesis true.

Read More