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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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. […]
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 […]
