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Umair Haque

Umair Haque focuses on how next-generation economics demand new approaches to strategy. His posts help managers anticipate and take advantage of these changes.

What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn'tAugust 20

Today, platform wars ain't what they used to be. On the one hand, there's Facebook - playing a textbook game of platform strategy, but slowly suffocating the utility of its own network. On the other, there's Apple - ignoring many of the rules of platform strategy, but radically redesigning the long-suffering mobile value chain with the iPhone App Store.

How do we make sense of this? Why do Facebook's elaborate games of platform strategy seem to be destroying value, while Apple's platform anti-strategy promises to explode the boundaries of value creation in an industry where those boundaries have long been held to be fixed and immutable?

Yesterday, we saw platforms as mechanisms to strategically control complements. Strategists and economists studied platform wars intensely - with Annabelle Gawer and Michael Cusumano's excellent Platform Leadership being perhaps the reference work for strategists.

Today, I think there's perhaps a simpler and more powerful way to think strategically about platforms.

Let me advance a simplifying proposition: platforms are markets. T

Video Response: A Manifesto for the Next Industrial RevolutionAugust 8

What is the Facebook Endgame?August 6

Is Facebook going to go private before it ever goes public? Insiders selling stock at this stage of a company's evolution openly is unexpected, irregular, and almost irrational. So perhaps we should take it as a strong signal from management that pressures for liquidity - because of dampened systematic and idiosyncratic growth expectations - are amplifying.

Unfortunately, the IPO window is closed - especially for players as seemingly lost in the wilderness as Facebook is. Where does that leave Facebook? A peculiar -- but not unlikely -- outcome may simply be a transfer to private equity. That's a restructuring or turnaround by any other name.

Alternatively, I might put my money on a Viacom acquisition: after a decade of dumbing down nearly all of its once awesome assets, teenagers are increasingly lamed out by me-too value propositions. But they're hanging out on Facebook in droves.

I don't want to bang on about it - I've raised the spectre of poor management at Facebook too many times already. So take the floor and fire away - what's the next step in the evolution of Facebook?

Four Challenges for Tomorrow's CEOsAugust 6

A few weeks ago, I got a response that went something like this: "Look, I agree with you - but how do I explain this to my Dad?!"

 

That's a deceptively good question - because there's a deeper issue behind it. Today's corporate picture looks darker and bleaker than ever. And especially among those of us in our 20s and 30s, the feeling that business as usual cannot go on is growing.

But is that just youthful naivete? Does business as usual ever really change?

Recessions breed cynics like wars breed profiteers. So let's step back for a second and examine, as the macro crisis deepens, just how intense the global challenges confronting tomorrow's business leaders are.

Here are four of the most critical.

A crippled global financial system.

Open Thread: OverinnovationAugust 4

Here’s a hypothesis to chew on: innovation and sustainability are at odds.

Innovation is premised on force-feeding people more junk; on fuelling artificial needs for super-size meals, Hummers, and a new pair of sweatshop-produced fast-fashion jeans every weekend.

Sustainability, on the other hand, is premised on helping people finally step off that creaking treadmill of consumption.

Is sustainability the long-overdue nemesis of the innovation fever that’s gripped boardrooms for the last decade – and led to a banal consumptionscape of gewgaw-filled warehouses littering asset-stripped suburbs? Conversely, is sustainability just a crutch for players – like Wal-Mart –can’t innovate in the first place?

Or can sustainability drive a better kind of innovation?

Let’s discuss – and no flip answers please. These are tough questions – let’s think seriously about them (last week’s discussion might be a good point of reference).