Book Brief: The Art of Agile Development

A couple of months ago I reviewed The Agile Pocket Guide in hopes that it would provide a good executive-level introduction to Agile development. At the time, I said that I was disappointed that the book wasn’t designed to serve that purpose. So, I decided to pick back up The Art of Agile Development, a book I had previously bought and referenced at times in my consulting work.

The Art of Agile Development by James Shore is NOT a “pocket guide”. It is a hefty 500 pages of rich content, broken into four parts structured around the Agile Fluency Model. In the Preface the author explains that the book is designed to be used both as a reference book as well as to read cover-to-cover. He spends 6 paragraphs explaining how different audiences should approach the book. He suggests that managers and executives who want “to understand how Agile can or should work in your company” read Part I. Since that’s my audience, the review linked below focuses on Part I and the first couple of chapters in Part II to give a sense for the rest of the content in the book.

Part I is titled “Improving Agility” and provides an introduction into how to get started with Agile development. The other three sections of the book are organized around the Agile Fluency Model, which identifies four “zones” of agile maturity. The Focusing Zone is all about the fundamentals of establishing the team dynamics and values behind Agile. The Delivering Zone is focused on technical excellence and designing code to respond to frequent changes. The Optimizing Zone is about being highly responsive to changing market conditions and being able to outmaneuver the competition. The author describes the Strengthening Zone as “largely speculative: a possible future for Agile.” Part II of the book is about the Focusing Zone. Part III is about the Delivering Zone. Part IV is about the Optimizing Zone. The final chapter, titled “Into the Future” touches on the Strengthening Zone.

Overall, The Art of Agile Development is a detailed guide to implementing Agile in an organization. Those charged with doing so will benefit greatly from the experience, perspectives and resources the author brings to guiding them through the journey. Others in the organization will benefit from the strong introduction to Agile in Part I, and the availability of Parts II-IV as a future reference as they become increasingly exposed to the concepts and practices that make Agile special. 

Part I answers most of the questions an executive new to Agile will have.

If that’s you, click here for my detailed review and summary of that part of the book.

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The Mobility Revolution Nearly Complete

Yesterday I received another reminder of the dramatic impact of the Mobility Revolution on how we live our lives. My wife received a text about my brother-in-law’s attempt to have his landline telephone service repaired. Although he’s had a cellphone for years, he wanted to keep his landline. 

The home has been in the family and has had continuous telephone service for over 50 years, first provided by AT&T. In 1984 AT&T was forced by regulators to separate out the company’s local telephone operations and so the local provider changed names to Southwestern Bell Telephone. After Congress passed the Telecom Act of 1996, the various divested Regional Bell Operation Companies began reconsolidating. Southwestern Bell renamed itself SBC Communications to sound more like a national (not regional) company. The company acquired Pacific Telesis in 1997, Ameritech in 1998, and BellSouth in 2006. In 2005, SBC Communications acquired AT&T, it’s former parent company, and renamed itself back to AT&T. Although the names have changed, the phone service has been continuously provided by the same operating entity over all those decades.

The quality of service, however, has degraded significantly over the past few years and has become almost unusable. My brother-in-law called AT&T to ask if anything could be done to fix the static on the line. He was informed that his line was the last one being served out of the pedestal in their neighborhood and AT&T (understandably) wasn’t willing to invest to maintain quality service in that location. Instead the company has provided my brother-in-law with a wireless analog telephone adapter (ATA) called the AT&T Phone — Advanced (AP-A). It connects wirelessly to the AT&T cellular network and has a normal RJ-11 telephone jack that he plugs his telephone into. This seems like a reasonable solution that hopefully will prove reliable service for decades to come (at least until wireless network upgrades force a technology update).

Today, it may seem more shocking to us that someone still wants a landline phone, but that is just an indication of how quickly things have changed. My book on the Mobility Revolution was published in 2007. At that time at Sprint we had been tracking “cord cutting” for a few years, but it was still seen as a fringe activity. Less than 20% of households had given up their landline, and most people couldn’t imagine ever doing so.

Today the script has flipped. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reports that residential reliance on traditional wireline telephone service fell 71% between December 2008 and June 2017. Today, according to CDC data, more than 73% of Americans live in a home without a landline and only 2% rely solely on a landline. In the 4th quarter of 2023, AT&T reported $22B in mobility revenues and only $3B in consumer wireline revenues. In 2022, the company announced plans to cut its copper footprint by 50%, pushing those customers onto either fiber-based or wireless connections. My brother-in-law is just one of those impacted.

As recently as 20 years ago, we simply assumed that there would always be a telephone on the wall or countertop in almost every home. We regularly went to Radio Shack if we needed the materials to run a new line or replace a phone jack. We went to Circuit City to buy an answering machine to plug into that phone jack. We marveled over cordless handsets from companies like V-Tech. But things change. Some companies anticipate the changes and thrive. Others don’t and fail to survive.

What changes are coming that will impact your industry and your business? Do you need help envisioning the future? Let’s talk!

Read this article at ClearPurpose.

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Book Brief: The Sacredness of Secular Work

I really enjoyed Jordan Raynor’s previous book, Redeeming Your Time, and gave it a glowing review. It was well written, founded in Biblical truths, yet very practical today (leveraging/responding to modern technologies), and Raynor is funny and easy to read. When I saw that he was coming out with a new book that he wrote “to help you see how 100% of your time at work can matter for eternity and not just the 1% of time you spend ‘sharing the gospel,’” I knew I had to read it.

The Sacredness of Secular Work releases today and is broken into two parts. The first part introduces three theological concepts that challenge what the author believes most churches teach. The second part teaches four ways that our work can have eternal impact.

Click the link below to read my full review, but bottom line, the book offers valuable practical ways that we can be intentional in making our daily work have more of an eternal impact. In fact, I might go so far as to say that this book is essential reading for anyone interested in better integrating their faith into their work. Unfortunately, nearly half the book is spent putting forth theological arguments seemingly meant to be controversial. While I think I largely agree with the author on most theological points, I fear that the positioning and posturing of this theological content may keep many readers from ever benefitting from the very useful practices taught in the second half of the book (and in the downloadable accompanying workbook). 

In other words, if you care about integrating your faith into your work, read this book, and don’t let the first half scare you away.

Read my full review here.

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Relaunching SDG Strategy

Over the holiday season I had some time to work on my “side gig” — SDG Games — my business designing and selling educational board and card games for the glory of God. I originally launched SDG Games in February 2021 with the release of Journeys with Jesus. Over the past three years I’ve launched an additional 4 board and card game products and a free web-based game.

Heading into 2024, the SDG Games business faced a number of challenges:

– The games are too expensive and delivery times are too long

– Margins are incredibly thin

– Product awareness is very low in the target market

If a client described a business like this to me, my natural response would be “why are you even in this business?” To answer my own question — most of the games I’ve created first for me — to help me learn specific Biblical truths. I enjoy designing them, enjoy playing them with family and friends, have learned a lot, and want other families to be similarly blessed by the games. Given my commitment to my main consulting business, I can’t spend too much time on SDG Games, but I do want it to operate better and bless more families.

With that context, I put on my consultant’s hat and set about solving the performance challenges while keeping it a simple business that won’t distract me from my main focus on consulting. Over the past few weeks I’ve specifically focused on improvements in three areas:

– Production

– Distribution

– Marketing

Click the link below to read the full article, but the short version of those improvements involve:

– a major refresh of the flagship game, 

– a new production approach for a brand new game, 

– a new supplier, 

– a new website, and 

– a new online store. 

It was a lot of work over a few weeks but I think it sets the business up to be more successful without requiring much of my attention.

Click here to read more about how I approached the challenges.

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How SiTime is Redefining the “Heartbeat” of Electronics

Over the past few months, I’ve told the stories of various companies that have successfully launched new categories that fundamentally improved how industries operate and the world works. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a company in the midst of launching a new category today.

Electronics can’t work without a healthy “heartbeat”. That heartbeat is in the form of clock signals that tell processors when to execute the next instruction, tell networking equipment when to send the next packet, and place highly precise timestamps on data so that it can be correctly interpreted and correlated by intelligent software. For nearly a century this heartbeat has most often been provided by a quartz crystal oscillator.

However, the Connected Intelligence revolution has placed tremendous new demands on electronics, demands that quartz crystals are struggling to meet:

– Everything is getting faster. 

– Today, as connected intelligence is built into every type of product, processors and networking (with their clock sources) are increasingly expected to operate reliably in harsh environments, with wide and rapid temperature swings, constant vibrations, and regular shocks. 

– Increasingly Artificial Intelligence-driven systems are making life-and-death decisions based on data collected from a variety of distributed systems. 

In 2003 Aaron Partridge and Markus Lutz saw the opportunity to build a better resonator and timing oscillator using MEMS technology. They decided to name their company SiTime because they were going to build timing products entirely using silicon (Si is the scientific symbol for silicon) and semiconductor processes. Like most disruptive technologies, their first products weren’t nearly as good as the best oscillators on the market. But, while quartz-based oscillators were barely improving (constrained by the industrial-age processes around physically cutting crystals), SiTime’s products were improving much more rapidly (benefitting from the computer-age/Moore’s Law advances in semiconductor technology).

Click here to read how, over the next two decades, SiTime continued to improve MEMS-based oscillators so that they are at least at parity with quartz oscillators on all the factors that have traditionally mattered most to engineers and significantly (2x or more) outperform on the factors that matter most in the Connected Intelligence revolution: size, resilience, reliability, and stability.

Today SiTime is in the midst of launching the Precision Timing category. Click here to read how they have:

1. Defined the problem, the solution, and the category.

2. Launched the category with a “lightning strike”.

3. Are continuing to lead and expand the category.

Are you redefining your industry? Do you need help defining and launching a new category? Reach out, maybe I can help.

Read the full story here.

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Most Popular Articles in 2023

I started ClearPurpose in 2020, making 2023 our 4th year. Each year I like to look back and see which of the ClearPurpose articles caught your attention. I specifically look at the full catalog and identify the articles that got the most attention in this calendar year.

It’s fascinating to me how balanced your favorite articles are. There are either 2 or 3 from each of the 4 years we’ve been publishing. There also are a range of different types of articles: 4 book reviews, 2 stories of companies working through strategic decisions, 2 articles about specific tools used in strategy work, and 2 articles more broadly covering strategic topics.

With that brief overview, here’s the countdown of your top 10 articles of 2023, with a brief snippet from each:

#10: Book Brief: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution (2023)

Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution is full of insights and advice for entrepreneurs based on one man’s experience at some very successful startups. There’s a lot in it that I agree with and would probably give the same advice to companies I was advising. There are some things I disagree with and I would give counter-advice. As long as the reader takes the content for what it is — one man’s opinion — this can be a very valuable book for entrepreneurs.

#9: T-Mobile Finally Sells Sprint Fiber (2022)

According to Fierce Wireless, T-Mobile has agreed to sell the wireline business the company gained as part of its acquisition of Sprint to Cogent Communications for $1. In 2004, when I was director of strategic planning for the division of Sprint that managed the wireline business, we first seriously looked at selling this asset. Over the next 10 years in that role and as vice president of corporate strategy, we considered the possibility of selling Wireline several more times, even going so far as holding exploratory conversations with potential buyers.

#8: The Customer Network Strategy Generator (2021)

Some strategy tools are analysis focused. They collect and present information to help drive clarity for decision making (e.g. the BCG Growth Share Matrix). Some provide a framework for developing and representing strategic hypotheses (e.g. the Business Model Canvas). Still others can help identify resource and capability mismatches that can lead to strategic failures (e.g. the Diamond and Square Framework).

The Customer Network Strategy Generator, on the other hand, is more like a pilot’s pre-flight checklist, walking a strategist through the steps necessary to develop winning customer-facing strategies in the new digital age.

#7: What is a Business Operating System (2022)

I think the analogy of a computer operating system to a business operating system is valid. … With that analogy in mind, here’s my working definition of a business operating system.

A Business Operation System is the intentionally designed, consistent set of business practices that optimize business operations in alignment with the business’ strategy and culture.

#6: Book Brief: Competing in the Age of AI (2020)

Bottom line, I strongly recommend Competing in the Age of AI to anyone wanting to understand how the digital revolutions are transforming how firms operate and industries compete. As with any book, there are areas where I don’t completely agree with the authors, but in general, they provide perhaps the best treatment of the topic to date.

#5: Book Brief: The Discipline of Market Leaders (2020)

What It Teaches: Companies must choose to provide the best offering in the marketplace by excelling in one of three specific dimensions of value while maintaining threshold standards on the other two dimensions. Those three dimensions are best total cost, best product, and best total solution.
When To Use It: The Discipline of Market Leaders is all about competitive strategy. Review the key lessons in the book when preparing for discussions about competitive strategy and the follow-on planning around culture, organizational structure, core processes, management systems, and information technology necessary to achieve the chosen competitive strategy.

#4: Book Brief: HBRs 10 Must Reads on Strategy (2020)

What It Teaches: As the title implies, this book contains 10 classic articles on strategy from Harvard Business Review. Many of these articles became full length books, so to some extent, this one small book serves as a much quicker way to learn the key messages contained in some of the top strategy books.
When To Use It: The ten articles featured in this book roughly break down into five on strategy development and five on strategy execution. The topics covered range from industry analysis to vision development to management scorecarding to front line decisions and actions. So, in effect, the book covers the entire strategy lifecycle and may prove useful in many diverse situations. It’s certainly worth becoming familiar with the content once and then keeping it handy for quick reference when needed.

#3: What is Strategy (2022)

So, to hit on all the things we’ve talked about so far, a strategy:

Is a framework with depth and dimensionality to deal with uncertainty

Provides long-term vision

Defines the goal being pursued

Sets a direction forward

Identifies critical near-term objectives

Communicates all of the above clearly and coherently, and therefore

Enables decision making

#2: Nextel Helped Work Get Done (2023)

I like to describe the value that carriers like Nextel brought to pre-iPhone software developers as being in three buckets: bits, bills, and bags. First, Nextel provided the core data capabilities (bits) including the packet data network, the development platform, and the GPS data. Second, the company provided the business infrastructure (bills) including the “bill on behalf of” capability and frontline customer support. Third, Nextel served as a sales channel for the software companies (bags), both through the download site as well as through the growing Nextel salesforce, many of whom were focused on the specific industry verticals being targeted by the mobile business application developers.

#1: The Diamond-and-Square Framework (2021)

Eisenmann introduces the first tool this way: “how can an aspiring entrepreneur know whether she has actually identified an attractive opportunity and determine what types of resources are required to successfully capitalize on it? The diamond-and-square framework provides the answers.”

I’m glad that articles from years ago are still providing value to you, my readers. Every week I receive a report letting me know which articles received the most attention that week. These reports are typically dominated by my most recently published pieces, but it’s always a joy to see ones from deep in the archives receiving new attention. I’m glad that my book reviews are helpful, that the stories I share might be inspiring you in your strategic journeys, and that tools I’ve uncovered are helping you day by day.

Most of all, I’m thankful for you and your continued encouragement. Let me know if there are any topics you’d like to see me cover, and feel free to reach out at anytime if there are ways that I can help you as you wrestle with the hard decisions leaders are continuously facing.

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ClearPurpose 2023 Wrap-up

So far this year I’ve published 52 articles at ClearPurpose.media. These can be grouped into four categories:

  • Founder to CEO
  • Category Making
  • Book Reviews
  • Miscellaneous Observations

Let me cover each of these topics separately:

Founder to CEO

In 2022 I began a series on the transition from startup founder to CEO of a growing enterprise. I wrapped up this series at the beginning of the year with four final articles:

Cash Matters! (2023–01–23)

Where Does Cash Come From? (2023–01–31)

Founder to CEO: Chief Cash Officer (2023–02–13)

Founder to CEO: A Recap (2023–02–20)

Category Making

The discipline of creating a new category also continued to be a major focus of mine in 2023 with 15 new articles on the topic:

Defining a New Category (2023–03–10)

Creating the Un-Carrier Category (2023–05–01)

How to Launch a New Category (2023–05–08)

Making the Case for Something Different (2023–05–15)

Your Category’s Grand Entrance (2023–05–22)

Owning Your Category (2023–05–29)

How Nvidia Created the GPU Category (2023–07–04)

When It Takes Collaboration to Create a Category (2023–09–05)

Collaborating to Create the Commercial Internet Category (2023–09–12)

A Coalition Creates the Competitive Communications Carrier Category (2023–09–28)

Non-Aggression as the Key to Establishing the Frame Relay Category (2023–10–11)

Nextel Helped Work Get Done (2023–10–24)

How Tech Giants Teamed Up to Establish 4G (2023–11–7)

How Salesforce Collaborated with Startups to Create the SaaS Category (2023–11–28)

How Tech Titans Teamed To Create the Gen-AI Category (2023–12–05)

Book Reviews

This year I wrote 29 book reviews. That included a burst of reviews written in the middle of the year revisiting classic business books I’ve read in prior years but had never reviewed. If you’re looking for your next book to read, I recommend quickly purusing this list — there’s something for almost everyone here:

Book Brief: Unleash Your Cash Flow Mojo (2023–01–10)

Book Brief: Financial Intelligence (2023–01–18)

Book Brief: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution (2023–02–08)

Book Brief: The Ecosystem Economy (2023–03–14)

Book Brief: Unwired (2023–03–28)

Book Brief: Soul Work (2023–04–03)

Book Brief: Switch (2023–04–10)

Book Brief: Unconventional Business (2023–04–24)

Book Brief: The Unconventional Leader (2023–06–05)

Book Brief: The Design of Business (2023–06–12)

Book Brief: REWIRED (2023–06–20)

Book Brief: Strategy in the Digital Age (2023–06–27)

Book Brief: Leadership Not By The Book (2023–07–11)

Book Brief: Business Model Generation (2023–07–19)

Book Brief: The Lean Startup (2023–07–25)

Book Brief: Wireless Nation (2023–07–31)

Book Brief: Madison Avenue Makeover (2023–08–07)

Book Brief: Good to Great (2023–08–15)

Book Brief: Going On Offense (2023–08–22)

Book Brief: Every Good Endeavor (2023–08–29)

Book Brief: There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics (2023–09–19)

Book Brief: Whatever You Do (2023–10–17)

Book Brief: Playing to Win (2023–10–04)

Book Brief: Startup Nation (2023–10–31)

Book Brief: Product Roadmaps Relaunched (2023–11–14)

Book Brief: Behind the Cloud(2023–11–21)

Book Brief: The Agile Pocket Guide (2023–12–13)

Book Brief: The Signal and the Noise (2023–12–19)

Miscellaneous Observations

Surprisingly, there were only three articles this year that didn’t fit into one of the above categories:

My 10 Most Referenced Books (2023–01–02)

The Semiconductor Industry 101 (2023–03–23)

 “Ready Golf” (2023–04–17)

To see a more complete representation of my writing on different topics, visit my website.

welcome any input on topics I should cover heading into 2024!

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Book Brief: The Signal and the Noise

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silverexplains how data is used to make predictions in many different fields; why some of those have failed to show meaningful advances in accuracy; why a few have; and what we can learn from both the successes and failures. The book is not an easy read. There’s nothing in the book that is overly hard to understand, at least not when Silver explains it. The problem is that he covers such a broad landscape and he does so in such great detail that the overall experience is somewhat overwhelming.

Even with being more than a decade old, The Signal and the Noise is still worth reading. There are a few helpful over-arching concepts that Silver introduces that will continue to be relevant, a bunch of real-world examples that demonstrate those concepts, and a few general suggestions that will continue to be helpful as experts in any field seek to use data to make hard predictions about the future.

In my full review linked below, I briefly describe three over-arching concepts: signal/noise, uncertainty/probability/confidence, and Bayes theorem. If you want to know what each of these concepts reference, click the link below. These three concepts are foundational to the book, but they are mostly presented through a series of detailed examples from different industries. The author has professionally applied data analysis in a variety of different fields. He started his career as a pricing analyst for KPMG, built a system to predict the performance of Major League Baseball players (which he sold to Baseball Prospectus), became a professional gambler, accurately predicted the 2008 presidential and Senate elections, and turned that into a successful business called FiveThirtyEight (which he sold to Disney/ESPN/ABC). 

Each chapter in The Signal and the Noise digs into a different domain and the challenges and opportunities for applying data analysis to make accurate predictions in that domain. I can’t possibly do justice in summarizing these detailed analyses, but I can tell you the domains covered: economic forecasting, political punditry, baseball analysis, weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, health epidemic management, chess and poker playing, stock market investing, climate change warning, geo-political intelligence.

The final chapter in The Signal and the Noise is titled “Conclusion” and helps the reader to pull together the important lessons taught throughout the book. “This book is less about what we know than about the difference between what we know and what we think we know. It recommends a strategy so that we might close that gap. The strategy requires one giant leap and then some small steps forward. The leap is into the Bayesian way of thinking about prediction and probability.” The small steps are best summarized by the sub-section titles that follow in the chapter: think probabilistically, know where you’re coming from, try, and err.

Read my full review of The Signal and the Noise here.

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Book Brief: The Agile Pocket Guide

The Agile Pocket Guide by Peter Saddington is a helpful guide for experienced software developers who have been asked to lead their first Agile project.

The book is roughly broken into four parts. 

Chapters 1–4 teach general principles that will serve the leader well and each chapter ends with a list of three “Leader Questions” aimed at helping the reader internalize the lessons taught.

Chapters 5–16 get more into the actual tools and processes used in Scrum. The chapters include these tools, processes, and concepts, and sometimes include examples from the author’s experience. Each chapter ends with a list of three questions for either the leader or the entire team.

Chapters 17–24 get into the dynamics of the Agile team (and its leader) interacting with other parts of the business. Each chapter ends with a specific “Example Case” from the author’s personal experience.

Chapters 25–28 deal with Kaizen at the personal, team, product, and cultural levels. Kaizen is a Japanese term roughly meaning “continuous improvement”. Each of these chapters is primarily a long list of things that leaders, teams, and organizations can focus on to integrate the Kaizen concept into how they operate.

Bottom line, The Agile Pocket Guide is written by an experienced Agile practitioner based on coaching he’s provided to many who are new to the framework. It serves as a broad-ranging introduction to many of the terms, concepts, and practices that a leader of an Agile team will need to learn to become successful. If you’ve been asked to lead an Agile team, this short book might prove helpful to you.

Read the full review here.

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How Tech Titans Teamed To Create the Gen-AI Category

OpenAI has been in the news lately for how its unique corporate governance model and conflicting agendas caused a bitter split. In contrast, the company’s foundation in 2015 was the result of a unique collaboration between some of the most powerful people in the tech industry working together with a clear shared purpose. In 8 short years OpenAI has dramatically demonstrated to the world the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), created the Generative AI category, and captured $tens of billions in value.

The article linked below tells this story. Here’s a little teaser…

In the years leading up to the formation of OpenAI, the stage was being set for the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Leading technology thinkers began to both get excited about the potential benefits of these advances and become worried about their potential negative implications. In December 2015 Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Greg Brockman, Jessica Livingston, AWS, and Infosys committed $1B to form OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company whose goal was to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” The company promised to share their work with the world. Thanks to the unique combination of individuals involved, the organization’s mission, and the funds available to pay competitive salaries, OpenAI was able to recruit top AI researchers.

During 2016 and 2017, the OpenAI team made significant progress in their research. As promised, the products of these efforts were released as Open Source software. They also shared their research extensively through published papers. In 2017, the Google Brain team published a paper titled “Attention is All You Need” which introduced the concept of Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs). The OpenAI team also began working on GPTs.

While OpenAI had done a great job of building one of the most impressive research teams in the world, they were competing to retain those employees with companies like Google who could offer stock-based compensation. In March 2019, OpenAI announced that they were shifting from a non-profit to a “capped profit” model in order to be able to take direct investments to fund their computing needs. In July of that year Microsoft announced a $1B investment in the company as part of a broader partnership.

Most new categories involve a new approach to solving an old problem. The world embraces the new category because the new approach dramatically improves on old approaches, is radically different — not just better (and therefore is defensible), can easily be adopted by the target users, and finds some way to get users’ attention. 

The Generative AI (Gen-AI) category solves the very old and very broad problem of creating something new. Humans by their very nature are creative. God made us that way. Over the years, men have invented tools to help those being creative. But the greatest tool we’ve had in the creative process is that of collaboration — working with other humans to make our creative works better.

As standalone creators, Gen-AI bots are mediocre at best, but they truly shine when collaborating with a flesh-and-blood human creator. The problem that this new category solves is that it provides an always-available, untiring, patient, affordable, infinitely knowledgeable, reasonably skilled (and yet still imperfect) collaborator for our creative endeavors.

So, what did OpenAI do to create the category? Category creation typically follows three major steps: 1) Define the problem, the solution, and the category. 2) Launch the category, often with a “lightning strike”. 3) Own the category by continuing to lead in capability, mind-share, and market-share.

Read the full story here.

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