mark's blog

By Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz

The surest way to develop successful new businesses – especially in transforming industries – is to focus carefully on an unmet market need and tailor a business model to meet it. This sounds straightforward but in practice it is devilishly hard because established, successful companies so often let structure (read: organizational baggage) drive strategy, rather than making strategy – choices about where to play and how to win – dictate the right structure.

Harvard Business Review The Conversation

By Mark W. Johnson

When people want to transfer money safely and directly to one another in the Europe, they go through their banks. But in the United States, they're more likely to use PayPal.

Harvard Business Review The Conversation

By Mark W. Johnson

How does your company make its money? I'll wager it's not in the way that you think. Not entirely, at any rate.

Chief Executive

Harvard Business Review The Conversation

By Mark W. Johnson

"We see local as the big white space."

That's America Online (AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong recently explaining to a group of investors how AOL's "digitizing towns" initiative (to offer one-stop website-management services to municipalities all across the U.S.) would position the company to compete against the likes of Google, Yelp, and CitySearch as the company looks for a clear path away from the disappearing dial-up subscription market.

Harvard Business Review The Conversation

By Mark W. Johnson

Quick: Describe your company's business model.

Having trouble? That wouldn't surprise me. In reality, there isn't really any consensus about what the term "business model" even means. Suggestions range from the all-encompassing, everything-in-your-value-chain approach to the reductionist "A business model is nothing else than a representation of how an organization makes (or intends to make) money."

Harvard Business Review The Conversation

By Mark W. Johnson

As we close the books on 2009 and, with the Federal Reserve, look to 2010 with "guarded optimism," I'll bet no one is adding to their New Year's list the resolution: "Ignore growth opportunities." And yet, odds are that someone in your company has already thought up its next great growth opportunity. And suggested it at some point. And gotten no response.

Harvard Business Review The Conversation

By Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz

Harvard Business Review The Conversation

By Mark W. Johnson