Business model innovation lessons abound in the daily news, and not just in the business section. CNN and Fox News provide recent examples. Both offered breaking but inaccurate news that the US Supreme Court ruled Obama’s signature healthcare reform – the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – as unconstitutional. Their paradigm – a mental model for how things work – coupled with competition to offer breaking news resulted in their reporting mistake. Most of the courtroom and media debate about the ACA centered on whether the US Constitution’s commerce clause allowed the federal government to mandate insurance coverage. This discussion produced a paradigm that the case would be ruled on this clause. Chief Justice Robert’s reading of the majority decision even started with the mandate not being constitutional under the commerce clause. So CNN and Fox jumped to a false conclusion. That’s what paradigms…
Smart strategy challenges conventional thinking
Read any business magazine and you’ll discover a multitude of examples of companies that secured profitable, growing market positions because their visionary leaders challenged the conventional rules of how an industry works. The leaders’ fresh perspectives resulted in winning business model innovations in industry after industry. Netflix ousts Blockbuster. Starbucks creates a rapidly growing revenue engine that every local coffee shop missed and is poised to steal share from bland-tasting Maxwell House and Nescafé on grocery store shelves. Amazon disrupts not just booksellers Barnes & Noble and Borders, but also Target and Walmart, with its no-bricks-and-mortar business model strategy. All too often leaders of established businesses act like horses pulling carriages in New York City’s Central Park, wearing blinders to avoid distractions. Which brings me, a political independent, to the narrow thinking of Wisconsin’s Republican Gubernatorial candidates on high-speed rail transit connecting Milwaukee,…