1: “We had lost our bearings. We were wandering in the valley of death,” Andy Grove writes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

The year was 1984, a pivotal moment for Intel.

The company had been founded 16 years earlier.  “Every start-up has some kind of a core idea,” Andy notes.

“Ours was simple. Semiconductor technology had … continue reading

1: “Culture can be a hard topic to get one’s head around,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.

Perhaps the best definition comes from Marvin Bower, McKinsey & Company‘s former managing director, who said culture is “the way we do things around here.” 

Which is why the world’s best … continue reading

The short answer? Yes, writes The Lean Startup author Eric Ries.  

1: Asking potential customers what they want doesn’t work because many times, customers don’t know what they want.

A much better strategy, Eric suggests, is to build a simple product, a “minimum viable product” or MVP, and then watch what actual customers actually do. “The minimum viable product lacks many features that may prove essential later on,” Eric … continue reading