A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step Lǎozi 老子 I just had lunch with Shenwei, one of my ex-students who had just taken a job in a mid-sized consulting firm. After a bit of catching up I offered he was looking a bit lost. “I just…

This article previously appeared in The National Interest. Last month the U.S. passed the CHIPS and Science Act, one of the first pieces of national industrial policy — government planning and intervention in a specific industry — in the last 50 years, in this case for semiconductors. After the celebratory…

You think startups are hard? Try innovating inside a large company where 99% of the company is executing the current business model, while you’re trying to figure out and build what comes next. Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman coined the term an “Ambidextrous Organization” to describe how some companies…

A week ago I got invited to an “innovation hero” award ceremony at a government agency. I don’t know how many of these I’ve been to in the last couple years, but this one just made my head explode. The award was for an entrepreneur who worked against all…

This article first appeared in Poets and Quants Revolutions start by overturning the status quo. By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. Here’s why and what we did about it. The Rise of Business Schools — Management…

We just finished the 11th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford — our first version focused on deep science and technology. I’ve always thought of the class as a minimal viable product — testing new ideas and changing the class as we learn. This year was no exception as we…

We just finished our 6th annual Hacking for Defense class at Stanford. What a year. With the pandemic winding down it finally feels like the beginning of the end. This was my sixth time teaching a virtual class during the lockdown — and for our students likely their 15th…

I was pleasantly surprised to hear from Suresh, an ex-student I’ve known for a long time. A U.S. citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices to hospitals in the UK National Health Service. His boss had identified the U.S…

There are no facts inside your building, so get the heck outside I just had a call with Lorenz, a former business school student who started a job at a biotech startup making bacteria to take CO2 out of the air. His job was to find new commercial markets for…