Business Strategy After Sam Altman Firing

Turmoil is rocking the artificial intelligence industry. Business leaders developing an AI strategy should—in most but not all cases—continue as before the recent big news.

The board of OpenAI fired Sam Altman as CEO on November 17, and the company’s president, Greg Brockman, resigned soon after. Three days later, Microsoft announced, “Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft
MSFT
 to lead a new advanced AI research team.”

The business world was stunned by the rapid turnaround, but maybe should not have been too surprised. The latest advances in AI came quickly, throwing a great deal of computing activity into a state of flux. The technical capabilities of large language models have grown rapidly, with fast-moving implications for business practices of end-users of AI. In between, new relationships between the AI startups and the major tech companies were forged. AI businesses such as OpenAI and Anthropic need cloud computing providers, and the corporations with cloud operations need AI for their other business lines.

Rapid change is not surprising for a fast-growing industry using new technology to power sales. Past generations saw it with railroads, petroleum and automobiles. This will not be the last change in the industry. It might be the last change for the week of Thanksgiving, but probably not even the last change of 2023.

Key people, such as Sam Altman, matter. But how much they matter is quite debatable. Historians argue this issue. Do great people make history, or does history make great people? Most of the top business innovations developed as technological opportunities advanced. A great leader may see the opportunity and implement it first, but someone else would eventually have come along to do the same.

Business leaders about to ink a major deal with OpenAI or Microsoft related to AI might want to pause and learn more. In all other cases, companies should continue developing AI implementation strategies. The best advice right now is to focus on specific apps that utilize AI to improve employee productivity in narrow activities. Microsoft has been incorporating ChatGPT into its current products, while many startups have developed very specific apps that utilize a large language model to help with very specific business tasks.

Those specific apps will be far

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Is Your Business Model Part of Your Innovation Strategy?

June 14, 2023

The theory of disruptive innovation, first introduced in a 1995 HBR article, endures as a way to make a complicated and expensive product simpler and more affordable. Think about how Netflix disrupted video rental stores with video streaming.

But the originator of disruptive innovation, the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, argued that disruptive innovation isn’t just about simplifying technology — it also requires a new business model to deliver the solution cost-effectively.

“If you’re actually trying to create a new business model because the world is changing on you, then you don’t want to leverage what’s already in place,” he told IdeaCast guest host Sarah Cliffe in 2008. “The reason why entrant companies so readily beat the incumbents is [that they don’t] have anything that exists that they are tempted to leverage, and so they just create what needs to be created.”

The episode also explains why it’s important to build a disruptive business model that avoids falling into the trap of marginal costs, which can be the difference between success or failure.

Key episode topics include: innovation, disruptive innovation, business models, technology, value proposition, marginal costs, new products, incumbents, new entrants, computer industry, IBM.

HBR On Strategy curates the best case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, to help you unlock new ways of doing business. New episodes every week.

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. The theory of disruptive innovation, first introduced in 1995 right here at HBR, has proven to be an enduring way to think about innovations that make a complicated and expensive product simpler and more affordable. Think about how Netflix disrupted video rental stores with streaming video.  But the originator of disruptive innovation, Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen, says many managers overlook a crucial component: business model innovation. This episode will help you understand when and how to create a whole new business model for innovative activities – with plenty of real-world examples. And you’ll learn why it’s important to build a disruptive business model that avoids falling into the trap of marginal costs — which can be the difference between success or failure. This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in November 2008. Here it is.

SARAH

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A Business Coach Who Makes $1 Million Shares Her Growth Strategy

  • Jereshia Hawk is the founder of Leverage, an online coaching business for women of color.
  • She quit her engineering job to pursue coaching full time and started by identifying her clientele.
  • To grow from there, she hired a support team and started shaping the business to run without her.

In July 2017, Jereshia Hawk quit her engineering job at Consumers Energy to grow her online coaching business, Leverage. Since then, Hawk has given hundreds of women of color working as entrepreneurs and coaches the tools to design, market, sell, and scale their own group-coaching programs.

Hawk knows firsthand the challenges her clients have to navigate because when she started coaching, she didn’t know how to turn her knowledge of marketing, sales, and promotion into a profitable product.

After seeking out online communities for coaches and learning the basics, Hawk started by selling PDFs and digital courses. She went on to launch a $60-a-month group-coaching program in 2016, but the model was unsustainable and required her to trade too much time for money. About nine months into business, Hawk hired a coach to teach her how to develop a more viable strategy to package and deliver her expertise while maximizing her income.

Now Leverage is a seven-figure brand. She shared with Insider the growth strategies she used to transform from a new entrepreneur into a million-dollar coach.

Shifting from expert to teacher to coach

For coaches, expertise is the product. Hawk struggled at first to package her knowledge in a way her clients could connect with and replicate. As her client list grew, Hawk learned how to deliver knowledge based on what people already understood and which gaps she needed to fill for them.

“In the very beginning, you have to go from being an expert to learning how to be a good coach,” Hawk told Insider. “You have to become consciously aware of where your competencies are, know how to articulate them, and learn the practice of meeting your clients or prospects where they are instead of where we assume they are or where we wish they were.”

Hawk refined her ability to teach by spending a lot of one-on-one time with clients through “done with you” training, where she worked alongside clients to reach

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