Now, let me be clear. I have nothing against delight. But the notion that it should be the goal of a business to delight its customers is folly. Delight, after all, is an evanescent experience that comes and goes pretty much as it pleases. It cannot be reliably evoked. More importantly, your customers, and particularly your B2B customers, are not paying you in order to be delighted. Indeed, while ostensibly they are purchasing your products and services, what they really want to buy is outcomes.

AI is the number one topic in the boardroom this year, and everybody wants to know how it is going to play out and what that means for their enterprise. Well, it’s not as if we have never seen versions of this movie before. How did the Internet play out? The Worldwide Web? eCommerce? Cloud computing? Smartphones? Digital marketing? Ride-sharing? Streaming media?

Crossing the chasm is the single most important goal for a B2B application that seeks to disrupt the status quo. The playbook has held up for more than 30 years because it continues to just work. That said, it does not say anything about what to do if you’re stuck in the mud on the other side. So, let’s suppose your enterprise has successfully crossed the chasm, achieved tens of millions of dollars in ARR, but is no longer growing at a rate to keep pace with the Rule of 40 percent (the sum of your profit and your growth rate).

In a time of increasing polarization, amplified by social media and exacerbated by malicious actors, we all need to deepen our understanding of just what we are into. Polarization, as I described in a previous blog on this subject, is best understood as an artifact of people binding

Category creation is a critical success factor for start-ups bringing to market a disruptive innovation that calls for a new ecosystem, to support a new class of use cases, funded by a new budget line item. If the category does not form, the start-ups have no place to hang their hat.