For this interview, I have with me Thales Teixeira, professor at Harvard Business School and author of “Unlocking the Customer Value Chain,” which is an incredible book and an incredible reading, especially if you’re trying to understand how today’s business world works.

I asked Thales a few critical questions to understand the business landscape and each of them uncovers insights that will make you a better business person!

Contents

• What brought you to study business model disruption and business innovation?
• What’s for you that the most effective definition of a business model?
• What is the customer value chain and how does that work?
• What is decoupling and why is it so important?
• How did Birchbox break the customer value chain?
• Is disruption about business model innovation?
• Didn’t Uber start as a tech company?
• What are the three phases of digital business disruption?
  • Unbundling in a nutshell
  • Disintermediation in a nutshell
  • Summarizing the three waves of unbundling, disintermediation and decoupling
• How do we know what the consumer is looking for? And how to use decoupling in our favor?
  • The three customers’ currencies
• How important is branding in consumers’ choices?
• In this context, are traditional business tools, like Porter’s Five Forces, still useful?
• How should I start a disruptive company today?
• Is specialization the key to decoupling?
• What’s next? Is decoupling the main disruptive force in the coming decade?
• Key takeaways