ClearPurpose

Today, AT&T announced that they are merging their WarnerMedia business into Discovery in a deal that values AT&T’s contribution at $43B. The company had to fight hard against regulatory concerns in order to complete the Time Warner acquisition just 3 years ago. At the time they paid $85B for the company.

AT&T seems to be returning to the strategy they articulated in 2015, just before they started pursuing major transactions not aligned with that strategy. Let’s see if they can demonstrate the discipline this time to stay focused on what they have always been great at doing.

Click here to read the full article.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Charley Donaldson, Co-founder and CEO of CaringBand about their encouragement platform. I’ve published that interview on the ClearPurpose podcast. Click here to listen.

Ash Fontana is a managing director of Zetta Venture Partners, an investment fund focused on AI. In The AI-First Company he draws upon the lessons he’s learned through the companies he’s invested in and worked with to share a very broad array of observations about how companies should think about, leverage, and manage data and artificial intelligence. He introduces a new concept, data learning effects, as the driving value creator in what I call the Connected Intelligence age.

In the book’s conclusion, Fontana describes the contents of The AI-First Company as “fresh data” that leaders can “process” and combine with other inputs as they iteratively create reinforcing learning loops that enable them to create their own competitive advantage. As such, the broad array of information in the book shouldn’t be viewed as perfect or a step-by-step roadmap for building a winning AI-led strategy, but rather one input among others that can help inform your strategy, if appropriately filtered and evaluated.

Click here to read the full review.

Cynthia Montgomery taught the strategy unit of Harvard’s Entrepreneur, Owner, President (EOP) program for five years. The Strategist summarizes the lessons she taught, and the lessons she learned, in this program. Her starting thesis is that leaders need to be strategists and she then walks through the fundamental components of what it takes to lead your organization strategically. Throughout, she uses many relevant and engaging stories to prove her points and to provide examples for how to be strategic.

Read the full review here.

Today Verizon confirmed the rumors. They are selling Verizon Media, the collection of assets anchored by Yahoo and AOL that the company had acquired in 2015–2017. They are getting $4.5B for 90% of the combined business. They spent nearly $10B to acquire them in the first place. 

And yet, this is a win for the company.

Read the full article to understand why.

Making Great Strategy says that strategy should be developed in the form of a formal logical argument, and then goes on to provide a primer on formalized arguments. The authors also commend the practice of executive teams engaging in constructive argumentation over these formalized logical structures.

Read the the full review here.

The Family Business tells the story of Ingram Content Group, a division of the Ingram family business empire in Nashville, Tennessee. Along the journey, the company deals with the opportunities and threats posed by the microprocessor revolution, the Internet revolution, and the mobility revolution. The decisions the company made helped the business to survive and even thrive (not without challenging times) and to become a very different business than originally envisioned. Others in business, especially those that started as family businesses, will be able to relate and perhaps even learn from this journey.

Read the full review here.