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. […]
Since the revelations that many stars of silicon valley are alumni of Montessori schools there has been a lot of interest in what managers can learn from the Montessori approach to education. I hadn’t realized this until Tim told me but the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and […]
We repeatedly see survey results that say that CEOs think that innovation is a top priority for their firm. And yet, these same surveys also say that most CEOs are unhappy with their innovation efforts. Why is this so? Here’s an example – a report from a couple years ago in McKinsey Quarterly. They surveyed […]
I remember that when Gillette came out with their double-bladed razor, I started joking about how it wouldn’t stop until razors had five blades. At the time, that seemed absurd, but sure enough, now we can buy razors with five blades. Now, while this may seem ridiculous, it’s actually a pretty smart response to a […]
Often when people have an idea for a great new product or service, they rush to be first to market with it. We keep hearing about first-mover advantage and how you need it. The only problem with first-move advantage is that it doesn’t seem to exist. The academic research on the topic shows that there […]
The economist Rudi Dornbusch succinctly describes the way that ideas spread: Things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you thought they could. It’s the innovation S-Curve in words, this is what that looks like graphically: And the problem is that the value for X is larger […]
Most of you would know the Nietzsche quote “that which doesn’t kill is makes us stronger” (or it could be a Kelly Clarkson quote, depending on your age). My main point for today is that quote also applies to innovation and this has far reaching implications for anyone trying to make a firm or industry […]
I ran across an outstanding post today by John Battelle reviewing Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.by Steven Johnson. It’s one of my favourite books from the last couple of years, and Battelle does a great job of highlighting the key points in it. He also reminded me of a table […]
The Shift Index 2011 is out now, and as with the previous two editions, it is a must-read. I am always skeptical of “everything is different now” type arguments, but in this series of reports, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and a number of other contributors have done a fantastic job of documenting exactly what […]
There’s a big problem with innovation: ideas spread much more slowly than we expect them to. Ideas follow an S-Curve as they spread that looks like this: They pick up steam very slowly, until they either die off or hit a tipping point and take off. The slow build-up is the time I’ve indicated as […]
There are two popular quotes that often get used when discussing innovation that were never actually said or written by the people to whom they are attributed. Despite the fact that they are fake quotes, there are still things that we can learn from them. The first common quote is attributed to Henry Ford: If […]