Monthly Archives: February 2012
Psychology and Spreading Ideas
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The Best Social Media Strategy of All Time!
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I constantly run across blog posts, emails, and spam comments on the blog that promise to tell you the perfect strategy for getting a higher PageRank for your website, or more twitter followers, or a higher Klout score. And the problem with all of these strategies is that they are faulty. They might results in […]
To Innovate You Must Live With Uncertainty
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I’m starting up a couple of live consulting projects with some of our MBA students. Even though we are very early in the projects, they have already reminded me of just how critical it is to develop the ability to live with uncertainty. This is the fundamental point that Jonathan Fields makes in Uncertainty: Turning […]
Your Customer Isn’t “Everyone” – Seven Innovation Thoughts Triggered by Peter Drucker
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Of all the management writers I’ve read, Peter Drucker probably generates more interesting quotes per page than anyone. Tom Peters and Joseph Schumpeter come close too. Here are six thoughts triggered by reading his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century: And yet very few institutions know anything about the noncustomers—very few of them even […]
You Are Responsible for Getting Your Ideas to Spread
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How to Take Advantage of Surprises
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If the budget that you’re managing blows out one month and you’ve spent 200% of your allocated funds, what happens? In most organisations, a negative surprise like this leads to painful forensic investigations. To improve efficiency, it is important to stamp out negative surprises like this. Conversely, what happens if one of your revenue areas […]
Why Innovation is Less Risky Than You Think
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One of the most common excuses I run across for not innovating is risk aversion. Organisations don’t innovate because they’re risk averse, or so they say. But is innovation really so risky? Yes, a new idea might not work. But in many cases, not innovating is even riskier. Here is how Peter Drucker puts it […]
Do You Need a Team of Innovators or an Innovative Team?
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I’ve been working on a research project looking at innovativeness in project teams and it’s given me the opportunity to go back through the evidence of what makes innovative teams. Without giving you the long literature review I can tell you that this is a really well worked area over more than two decades. However, […]
Don’t Be Surprised, Prepare the Surprise Yourself
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Here is a great quote from Ioan Tenner in a post on the strategy of surprise: Significant surprise is a life event. Neglect this subject and your fate may be of the led and of the losers. The surprised lose initiative, stumble and take hasty decisions they will regret. They submit to choices crafted by […]
Evidence-Based Innovation Management
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Yesterday I made the case for evidence-based management in general. Today I’d like to talk about what this means for managing innovation. The case in favour of evidence-based management is made in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Managementby Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton. They talk about a few innovation examples, […]
The Case for Evidence-Based Management
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How can we be better managers? I just finished reading Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Managementby Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton. It is a must-read book, and they have one simple recommendation for managing more effectively: make better use of the evidence that shows us how to be better managers. […]
