The 3 Most Dangerous Work Personalities and How to Deal With Them

Inc., May 20, 2017

by Theodore Kinni


Since I don't have real job, I take special pleasure in reading about how bad having a real job can be. So, of course, I found it impossible to resist Jody Foster's The Schmuck in My Office: How to Deal Effectively with Difficult People at Work (with Michelle Joy, St. Martin's Press, April 2017). No, not that Jody Foster--Dr. Jody J. Foster, clinical professor of psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at UPenn.

None of us are perfect, but Foster directs our attention to those select employees who really are schmucks--10 types of people whose personalities are so difficult and disruptive that they create chaos on the job, upset their coworkers, and drive their managers to distraction. Unfortunately, you'll recognize many of them. There's the Bean Counter, whose obsessive demands for the most minute details ensure that nothing meaningful ever gets done, and the Robotic, whose inability to connect with others on anything near a human level leaves people frostbitten and demotivated.

But even these knuckleheads are tolerable compared with the worst schmucks that Foster calls out in her book: Narcissus, The Venus Flytrap, and The Swindler. Here's how to recognize these three types and minimize the damage they can do to you and your company. Read the rest here.

An Antidote for Health Care Reform Failure

Insights by Stanford Business, May 16, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

Want real health care reform? Focus on fixing health care delivery, says one Stanford lecturer. | Reuters/Nicky Loh

Health care reform has been the bane of U.S. presidential politics for over a century. Teddy Roosevelt included universal coverage in his run for president in 1912 and lost. Since then, almost every U.S. president has been stymied by health care reform in one way or another.

It’s no different this time around. This past March, President Trump and the Republican-led Congress couldn’t muster the votes for their own American Health Care Act, and discussions to reprise it have fallen flat.

Robert Pearl, a doctor and the CEO of the $11 billion Permanente Medical Group and a strategy lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that might not be much of a loss. In Pearl’s opinion, neither President Obama’s Affordable Care Act nor President Trump’s AHCA adequately addresses the essential conundrum of American health care — the fact that the U.S. as a whole spends 50% more on health care that any other nation, yet ranks 70th globally in health and wellness.

Pearl, whose new book, Mistreated: Why We Think We’re Getting Good Health Care — and Why We’re Usually Wrong, hits shelves this month, shares his vision of a better health system...read the rest here

How to Order Wine Without Making a Fool of Yourself

Inc., May 16, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

CREDIT: Getty Images

 

 

Americans drink more wine than people of any other nationality--we chugged 913 million gallons of the nectar of the gods in 2015.

Yet, sit most of us down at a fancy restaurant with a multipage wine list and a sommelier breathing down our necks, and we start to think a beer sounds really good. Make it an important business dinner with a prospective employer or a big customer and a shot of bourbon with that beer sounds even better.

It doesn't have to be this stressful. In fact, wine can help you seal the deal, according to Bianca Bosker, author of Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste (Penguin, March 2017).

Bosker is a journalist by training who "generally preferred wines from a bottle, but certainly wouldn't have turned up [her] nose at something boxed" before she became fascinated by the highly competitive, sensory world of sommeliers. She dove into that world for a year and emerged as a Court of Master Sommeliers' Certified Sommelier (she's one of the mere five percent of applicants who passed that exam on their first attempt).

In the following interview, Bosker offers us some savvy advice on how to order wine in a business setting...read it here

Train Your Brain To Focus. It'll Make You a Better Leader

Inc., May 11, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

You've probably seen the famous experiment that Harvard University psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons conducted in 1999. They filmed two teams of students--one in white t-shirts; one in black t-shirts--weaving around and through each other. Each team was passing a basketball back and forth. Then the psychologists showed the film to a group of subjects, who were asked to count the number of passes by the white-shirted team. Simple, right?

Not so much. When they made the film, Chabris and Simons had a student in a gorilla suit walk into the middle of the two teams, stop and beat her chest, and walk out the other side of the picture. After they showed the film to their subjects, the duo asked the subjects if they had noticed anything unusual. Almost half of the subjects never saw the gorilla.

The "Invisible Gorilla" experiment is often cited as one more lesson in the many facets of cognitive failure. But Friederike Fabritius and Hans W. Hagemann of Munich Leadership Group argue that a sharp, strong focus is an essential trait and strength of leaders.

"The truth is that what is often perceived as distracted behavior by outsiders is actually an indication of the exact opposite! It's a sign of intensely focused behavior," they write in their new book, The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance (TarcherPerigee, Feburary 2017). "Your brain has allocated nearly all of its resources toward solving one specific problem and has deliberately and efficiently shut out any stimuli that are considered irrelevant to the task at hand."

The problem with which leaders must contend isn't too much focus, but too little. We live in an era of distraction, when the ability to multitask is often celebrated as a virtue. Instead, say the authors, "multitasking is the arch enemy of focus." To beat this enemy and sharpen your leadership focus, Fabritius and Hagemann recommend these seven tactics...read the rest here

Here's How Steve Jobs Drove Apple's Phenomenal Growth

Inc., May 6, 2017

By Theodore Kinni





"Innovate or die," declared management philosopher Peter Drucker. But innovation is easier said than done. Established players like Procter & Gamble have departments full of people devoted to continuously launching "new-and-improved" products, while investor-funded newcomers like Airbnb can afford to burn through billions of dollars annually in the quest to disrupt their markets. How are you supposed to beat fierce, deep-pocketed competitors like them at the innovation game?

David Robertson, a Wharton professor who studies and teaches innovation and product development, thinks there is another way to innovate that is different from the incremental innovation of a P&G and the big-bang disruption of an Airbnb. In his new book, The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation (with Kent Lineback, Harvard Business Review Press, May 2017), he describes this 'Third Way' as complementary innovation and explains how you can use it to gain a competitive advantage for your company...read the rest here

To Fire or Not to Fire: 3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Let Someone Go

Inc., May 1, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

 

Reruns of The Celebrity Apprentice notwithstanding, firing people is not much fun. It's costly, too: studies show that firing and replacing an employee costs anywhere from thousands of dollars to two times the employee's annual salary. That's why you want to be sure you are making smart firing decisions.

But aside from the obvious cases (I'm thinking of you, Bill O'Reilly), how do you know if and when you should fire an employee? Kim Scott offers some savvy advice on that very topic in her new book, Radical Candor: Be A Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity (St. Martin's Press, March 2017). Scott, an entrepreneur who did stints at Google and Apple before founding training consultancy Candor, Inc., says that before you fire someone, you should ask yourself three questions...read the rest here

Why Managers Can’t Skimp on Radical Candor

strategy+business, April 17, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

It’s been a long time since I was a wage slave. But if today’s workplace is anything like what Kim Scott describes in Radical Candor, it must be a nightmare. People are picking their noses, stinking up the joint with body odor, and tucking their underwear into the office furniture. They call each other “dumb-a**” and cry a lot. Crying. It sounds like preschool for grownups.

Or maybe that’s just business as usual in Silicon Valley, where Scott, an entrepreneur, executive, and executive coach, spent a decade or so. She ran online sales and service at Google’s AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick, where she worked for her Harvard Business School classmate Sheryl Sandberg. Then, she joined Apple University, where she designed and taught a course for first-time managers. With those unimpeachable credentials in hand, Scott struck out on her own, coaching CEOs at Twitter, Dropbox, and Qualtrics. In 2016, she cofounded Candor Inc., a training firm built around the concept of radical candor, which she developed.

Radical candor stems from Scott’s conviction that interpersonal relationships are the currency of management. “They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively,” she writes. “If you think that you can do these things without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself”...read the rest of the review here

Investing in America’s Data Science and Analytics Talent

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand on this joint report:

Increasingly US jobs require data science and analytics skills. Can we meet the demand? The current shortage of skills in the national job pool demonstrates that business-as-usual strategies won’t satisfy the growing need. If we are to unlock the promise and potential of data and all the technologies that depend on it, employers and educators will have to transform.

This joint report from BHEF and PwC provides groundbreaking data science and analytics market intelligence informed by a Burning Glass Technologies workforce analysis and real-time survey data of business and higher education leaders from Gallup. The findings of this report document the emergence of the hybrid economy, in which companies in all sectors have become increasingly digital-intensive organizations. It also recommends at eight actions for change to put the supply of skills in balance with the demand.

Download the full report here

2017 Commercial Aviation Trends

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand on this Strategy& annual industry perspective:

What a difference a couple of years can make. In 2013, Warren Buffett called the commercial aviation industry a “death trap for investors.” In 2016, the legendary value investor spent more than US$1.3 billion buying the stock of four major U.S. commercial carriers: American Airlines, Delta, United Continental, and Southwest Airlines — and he has recently upped his stake to more than $8 billion.

Notwithstanding the speculation that this action is a precursor to Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, taking one of these major carriers private, Buffett seems to be betting that consolidation will continue to pay off for the airlines. He may or may not be right, but it is undeniable that airlines in the U.S. and in most other regions are enjoying a run of good results, buoyed by steadily rising demand and an extended drop in fuel costs. Industry-wide passenger traffic grew by 6.3 percent in 2016. And according to the latest International Air Transport Association (IATA) figures, commercial airlines posted their strongest financial performance ever in 2016 — reporting $35.6 billion in net profit, just a bit above 2015 results but nearly double those of 2014. For the third consecutive year (and only the third year in airline industry history), carriers reported a positive return on invested capital. Read the rest here...

The Flare and Focus of Successful Futurists

Enjoyed editing Amy Webb's adaptation of her book, The Signals Are Talking, for MIT Sloan Management Review:

Futurists are skilled at listening to and interpreting signals, which are harbingers of what’s to come. They look for early patterns — pre-trends, if you will — as the scattered points on the fringe converge and begin moving toward the mainstream. The fringe is that place where hackers are experimenting, academics are testing their ideas, technologists are building new prototypes, and so on. Futurists know most patterns will come to nothing, so they watch and wait and test the patterns to find those few that will evolve into genuine trends. Each trend is a looking glass into the future, a way to see over time’s horizon. This is forecasting: simultaneously recognizing patterns in the present and thinking about how those changes will impact the future so that you can be actively engaged in building what happens next — or at least be less surprised by what others develop. Forecasting is a learnable skill, and a process any organization can master.

Joseph Voros, a theoretical physicist and professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, offers my favorite explanation of future forecasting, saying it informs strategy making by enriching the “context within which strategy is developed, planned, and executed.” The advantage of forecasting the future in this way is obvious. Organizations that can see trends early enough to act can gain a first-mover advantage. They can also help shape the broader context, keenly understanding how developments in seemingly unconnected industries will affect them. Most organizations that track emerging trends are adept at conversing and collaborating with those in other fields to plan ahead.

While futures forecasting is a professional and academic discipline going back more than 100 years, few companies employ futurists. That’s starting to change as more leaders become familiar with the work futurists do. Accenture, Ford, Google, IBM, Intel, Samsung, and UNESCO all have futurists on staff, whose work is quite different from what happens within the traditional R&D function.

The futurists at these organizations know that their tools are best used within a group — and that the group’s composition matters tremendously to the outcomes they produce. Within every organization are people whose dominant characteristic is either creativity or logic. If you’ve been on a team that includes both groups and didn’t have a great facilitator during your meetings, you probably clashed. If it was an important project and there were strong personalities representing each side, the creative people felt as though their contributions were being discounted, while the logical thinkers — whose natural talents are in managing processes, projecting budgets, or mitigating risk — felt undervalued because they weren’t coming up with bold new ideas. You undoubtedly had a difficult time staying on track, or worse, you might have spent hours meeting about how to have your next meeting. This is what I call the “duality dilemma.”

The duality dilemma is responsible for a lack of forward thinking at many organizations. Read the rest here... 

Regulation, Who Needs It?

LinkedIn, March 11, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

President Trump wasted no time launching his promised war on federal regulation. Ten days after the inauguration, he signed Executive Order 13771: Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs.

You’ve probably already heard that EO 13771 is a two-for-one deal. It requires that every newly proposed federal regulation be accompanied by the repeal of two existing regulations. And just in case the folks at the FDA or EPA or SEC or any other agency think they can pull a fast one, the order also requires that the total additional cost of all new regulations in fiscal 2017 net out at zero. Read the President’s lips: No added cost!

This is music to investor ears. Within a couple of weeks of EO 13771, the S&P 500 Index rose 5 percent. The chief executive’s order is not the only reason for the jump, but clearly less federal regulation means more profit for your company. Right?

Maybe not. Like President Trump himself, EO 13771 is only concerned with “how many” and “how much.” Also like the President himself, the order tars all regulation with the same brush. You’d never know it from EO 13771, but companies in all sectors—agriculture, auto, financial services, healthcare, pharma, tech, telecommunications, etc.—depend on and demand regulation. Read the rest here...

Nir Eyal’s Required Reading

strategy+business, March 8, 2017

by Theodore Kinni


Nir Eyal teaches companies how to hook customers. When he says hook, he doesn’t mean entice or engage — he means designing products that are habit-forming.

“Habit-forming products change user behavior and create unprompted user engagement,” Eyal explains. “The aim is to influence customers to use your product on their own, again and again, without relying on overt calls to action such as ads or promotions. Once a habit is formed, the user is automatically triggered to use the product during routine events such as wanting to kill time while standing in line.”

Eyal first got interested in habit-forming products in 2008, as cofounder and CEO of AdNectar, a platform for advertisers trying to reach social gamers. In the process of launching the company, he became intrigued with the behavioral influence that gaming sites and other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, exerted on users.

After AdNectar was acquired by Lockerz in 2011, Eyal took a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of habit formation. He taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. He invested in and consulted with companies seeking to hook customers. Eyal encapsulated his findings in the best-selling book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Portfolio, 2014), which details the Hook Model, a four-step cycle for creating habit-forming products.

When I reviewed Hooked a couple years ago, it raised a few eyebrows: The ethical line between creating a habit and creating an addiction seemed too thin to some readers. It’s a common response and one that Eyal, like other influence experts such as Robert Cialdini and nudger Cass Sunstein, takes pains to address. “Let’s admit it: We are all in the persuasion business…[but] the power to build persuasive products should be used with caution,” Eyal warns.

One of Eyal’s motivations for developing the Hook Model and writing Hooked was his own frustration with the lack of information on the topic for product designers. When I asked him about the books that had influenced him, he shared the following four titles. See the titles here.

Zero-based trade for CPG leaders: Five steps for raising the impact of your trade promotions

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, March 8, 2017

by David Ganiear and Edward Landry


The next wave of profitability for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies will come from zero-based trade (ZBT). This adaptation of zero-based budgeting goes beyond cost management of trade promotion. It helps manufacturers rethink their patterns of spending and increase the profitability of this all-important way of reaching end consumers in retail stores. Trade promotion, which directs shopper awareness at the point of sale, is a valuable strategic capability. In the annual expenses of a CPG company, it typically ranks second; only the cost of goods sold is greater.

ZBT represents a five-step process for raising the impact of that spending. The first step is to diagnose your situation and look for previously unseen opportunities for improvement. Second, develop trade promotion strategies that are aligned with your business strategy, reflecting both the financial returns you expect from your trade promotion investment and the level of freedom you have to redeploy it. Third, employ trade optimization levers — budgeting, pricing, analytic planning, and post-event analysis — to implement these new strategies. Fourth, bring your overall trade budgets in line with your new approach. Finally, give this new ZBT practice the enabling capabilities needed to sustain it over time. Together, these steps add up to a new overall trade promotion strategy that can yield millions in savings for your CPG company and give it a customer-facing competitive edge. Download the white paper here.

RSA 2017: 5 Takeaways From the Biggest Cybersecurity Conference

Lent an editorial hand here:

WSJ.CustomStudios, March 2, 2017

by David B. Burg and Grant Waterfall, PwC

The annual RSA Conference acts like a microcosm of the global cybersecurity ecosystem: everyone’s there, and it’s as kinetic and chaotic as the industry itself. Yet the industry’s biggest cybersecurity conference also provides some valuable insights, as we recently found.

Since returning from RSA in mid February, where PwC maintained a lively presence amid the hubbub, we’ve condensed our takeaway into five key points:

Efficiency: A record 43,000 information security professionals attended this year’s RSA, roaming 550 vendor booths and choosing among more than 500 educational sessions to attend. As the cybersecurity world continues to expand and grow in importance and relevance, this event continues to grow as well — just five years ago, only 17,000 information security professionals attended RSA, according to the event managers. So for anyone who wants to find out just about anything about cybersecurity, it’s all there. Someone new to the cybersecurity and privacy industry could theoretically cram months of research and learning into just a few days in San Francisco. Read the rest here.

The Sisyphean Task of Activating Boards of Directors

strategy+business, Feb. 22, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

Ira M. Millstein opens his new book, The Activist Director (Columbia University Press, 2016), a mashup of memoir and handbook, as if he were standing in front of a jury. “I will build the case for adopting a board-centric approach to corporate governance by placing more activist directors in the boardroom — people who will ask the tough questions, challenge management practices, and resist those who put their own agendas ahead of those of the corporation and investors like you,” writes Millstein, the senior partner at corporate law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges and adjunct professor at Columbia Law School. “Some will call this pie-in-the-sky idealism. I prefer to call it pragmatic optimism.”

In addition to being an optimist, 90-year-old Millstein is a patient man. He has been making this particular argument for nearly 40 years, since the late 1970s, when he began helping the Business Roundtable draft a series of reports that defined the role and responsibilities of boards. At the time, shareholder activism was starting to manifest itself in leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers, and Millstein wanted “to ensure that boards exert some initiative to restore corporate competitiveness.”

Toward this end, Millstein didn’t simply write about boards — he advised them. And he advised them to be aggressive. Most notably, he served as external counsel to the board of General Motors for about a decade starting in 1985. During that period, GM was losing money and market share. Yet chairman and CEO Roger Smith, the “Roger” in Michael Moore’s scathing documentary Roger and Me, refused to treat the board as anything more than a rubber stamp — which was the de rigueur role of most corporate boards. Braving Smith’s legendary temper, Millstein helped GM’s board find its feet. And when Smith retired, he advised the board as it took a more active role in governance — hiring Robert Stempel as CEO and then, within two years, firing him and other members of GM’s senior management team when they did not move quickly enough to right the ship. Read the rest here.

Susan David’s Required Reading

strategy+business, Feb. 8, 2017

by Theodore Kinni

“Emotions can be harnessed to live and lead in better ways,” says Susan David. “For so long, we’ve treated emotions in organizations as warm, fluffy, and disruptive. Now we’re recognizing how powerfully they affect outcomes.”

A psychologist at Harvard Medical School, cofounder and codirector of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, and CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, an organizational development consultancy, David is a leader in the effort to transform how we view emotion in the workplace. This is especially important in business today, as organizations face unprecedented complexity, competition, globalization, and disruptive technologies. Managing in this context requires the ability to adapt and flourish in changing circumstances. “The truth is,” notes David, “that organizations can never be truly agile unless the people who work within them are agile — and more specifically, emotionally agile.”

David introduced the concept of emotional agility to the business world in a 2013 article, written with Christina Congleton, in Harvard Business Review, which heralded it as a “Management Idea of the Year.” Her acclaimed book, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (Avery, 2016), outlines how to identify and accept our emotions and respond to them in ways that ultimately make us happier and more successful. (You can assess your emotional agility here.)

When I asked David about the books that influenced her thinking on emotional agility and that executives should read to learn how to effectively use emotions in leading themselves and others, she responded with four titles. Read the rest here. 

Exaggerated Truth-Telling Is Commonplace, But Not Admirable

LinkedIn Pulse, Feb. 7, 2017

by Theodore Kinni


In 1919, as the White and Red armies fought a brutal, seesaw war for control of Russia, British War Secretary Winston Churchill prodded his government to commit troops to the fight. The Bolsheviks, he declared, were “swarms of typhus bearing vermin.” They “hop and caper like ferocious baboons amid the ruins of their cities and the corpses of their victims.” Churchill’s rhetoric was so inflammatory that, after he addressed the House of Commons on the topic, Tory Party leader A.J. Balfour felt compelled to comment. With quintessential British coolness, the former Prime Minister told the future Prime Minister, “I admire the exaggerated way you tell the truth.”

Unfortunately, exaggerated truth-telling is as commonplace in business as in politics. Walter Isaacson cites Steve Job’s “reality-distortion field” repeatedly in his go-to biography of the Apple’s mercurial chief. “[Jobs] would assert something—be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting—without considering the truth,” writes Isaacson. He would conjure up an impossible production date, for instance, and demand it be met. Surprisingly, as Isaacson recounts, it often was.

Elon Musk seems to have picked up Job’s penchant for exaggerated truth-telling. Musk says that Tesla’s factory in Fremont, CA will produce as many as 500,000 vehicles in 2018—an “extraordinary leap in production” from less than 84,000 in 2016, according to Jeff Rothfeder’s insightful analysis in The New Yorker. Can Musk’s employees and suppliers deliver on his promise or is this exaggerated truth-telling? Well, as The Wall Street Journal calculates it, Tesla has missed Musk’s projections more than 20 times in the past five years. Read the rest here.

2017 Chemicals Trends

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, January, 2017

By Vijay Sarathy, Marcus Morawietz, Jayant Gotpagar, and Jeremy Bebiak

Chemicals companies face a formidable challenge: delivering profitable growth in a hypercompetitive, low-growth world.

The structural headwinds in the chemicals industry are blowing like a gale out of the global economy. In a funk since peaking in 2007, global economies have been unable to reach the 35-year GDP growth average of 3.5 percent in six of the past eight years. And the two years of “high” growth were more of a bounce back from the sharp downturn of 2009 than precursors of a sustained turnaround.

Within this problematic macroeconomic environment, made worse for many multinationals by the strong dollar, demand for chemicals has fallen. Overall industry sales growth increased an anemic 2.1 percent in 2016 as the sector faced declining industrial production and broad inventory rightsizing by many of its customers. Chemicals companies that sell petroleum-based products often fell short of these industry averages because lower oil prices led to sharp top-line declines, sometimes in the range of 30 to 40 percent. Only naphtha-based producers benefited from oil price weakness, because it translated into materials cost reductions of about 60 percent for some companies, which greatly improved profit margins. Read the rest here.

Private-sector participation in the GCC: Building foundations for success

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, Jan. 30, 2017

by Hilal Halaoui, Salim Ghazaly, Karim Aly, Joe Youssef Malek, and Rawia Abdel Samad

The governments of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have decided to change their economic development model. The state-led approach which relied upon natural resources successfully raised incomes from developing to developed country levels in a little over a generation. However, that model is no longer appropriate as it is undermined by oil dependence, a lack of workforce diversity and skills, a growing need for public services, and insufficient innovation.

One effective response is private-sector participation (PSP). GCC states are already using PSP, but have wielded it tactically and ad hoc. As a result, they have not tapped its full potential. Instead, a comprehensive strategic program of public–private partnerships (PPPs) and privatization initiatives that covers all major sectors of the economy is needed to define a country’s PSP plan. If GCC states can successfully develop, launch, and execute such a PSP program, they can transform their economies. The GCC states could avoid US$164 billion in capital expenditures by 2021 and generate $114 billion in revenues from sales of utility and airport assets alone, and up to $287 billion from sales of shares in publicly listed companies.

Furthermore, GCC states could narrow the innovation gap with other countries, enhance the delivery of and access to government services, and improve their infrastructure. To capture these benefits, GCC governments will need a rigorous and comprehensive approach to PSP and a clearly articulated, long-term implementation plan that encompasses all economic sectors. Such an approach rests on three foundational elements: A governing policy for PSP that is either a standalone policy or part of a broader national policy; a legal framework that encompasses the new laws or modifications to existing laws necessary to facilitate PSP activities; and an institutional setup that clearly defines and allocates authority over PSP to existing government entities or establishes new entities to govern it. Download the white paper here.

Peter Diamandis’s Excellent Adventure

strategy+business, January 25, 2017

by Theodore Kinni


Stephen Hawking believes we humans won’t survive another thousand years unless we colonize space. And if we do colonize space, people will probably erect statues of Peter Diamandis in town squares across the universe. At least that’s the impression that ex–San Francisco Chronicle reporter Julian Guthrie gives in How to Make a Spaceship (Penguin, 2016).

In Spaceship, Guthrie tells the story of the Ansari XPrize and of SpaceShipOne — the privately developed, piloted craft that, in 2004, won the US$10 million competition by flying into space and back twice within two weeks. Although it was an inspirational feat, the book is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s a terrific yarn, to be sure. But it’s also an overly detailed biography of Diamandis that verges on hagiography and a missed opportunity to explore how new industries emerge from the intersection of government and the private sector.

Diamandis was 8 years old when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969. Like millions of American kids of similar age, he dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Unlike almost all those other kids, he never outgrew the dream — even as he attended Harvard Medical School, where he graduated only after promising the school’s dean never to actually practice medicine.

Instead, Diamandis became a serial entrepreneur in the space business. Among the numerous ventures he cofounded and led from the late 1980s to the 2000s were International Microspace, which provided low-cost satellite launch services; Zero Gravity, which offered well-to-do thrill-seekers parabolic “weightlessness” flights in a Boeing jet; and BlastOff, which aimed to fly a mission to the moon. The business results of his ventures were mixed at best: Zero Gravity is the only one of these three still operating independently. But in zooming from one business to another, Diamandis got the idea to jumpstart a private-sector space race with a prize — a competition modeled on the $25,000 Orteig Prize that prompted Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. Read the rest here.