Harvard Business Review on Rebuilding Your Business Model

Why Business Models Matter

by Joan Magretta

“BUSINESS MODEL” WAS ONE of the great buzzwords of the Internet boom, routinely invoked, as the writer Michael Lewis put it, “to glorify all manner of half-baked plans.” A company didn’t need a strategy, or a special competence, or even any customers—all it needed was a Web-based business model that promised wild profits in some distant, ill-defined future. Many people—investors, entrepreneurs, and executives alike—bought the fantasy and got burned. And as the inevitable counterreaction played out, the concept of the business model fell out of fashion nearly as quickly as the .com appendage itself.

That’s a shame. For while it’s true that a lot of capital was raised to fund flawed business models, ...