The most successful ad campaign that I ever designed only ran two weeks before the owner of my company killed it. I was working for a software company at the time, but our parent company also had a consumer hardware division. I was asked to help with their advertising. The budget was extremely limited – […]
Uncertainty is one thing that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Unfortunately, in most business situations, uncertainty is a fact of life. Graham Hill made an interesting response to my post yesterday about simplistic, complex and simple models. He said: The real world is complex . Most businesses simplify the complexity to ‘manage’ it. Complex […]
I was watching some MBA presentations this week, and they reminded me of a section of “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges. In this short story, Borges describes a map the size of the world (From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999): . . . In that […]
What do you do if the tools you use to improve your innovation process actually make it worse? I had a meeting yesterday with one of our research partners to go over some of the results of our recent survey. The research has two parts – we are mapping the innovation and knowledge-sharing networks within […]
We often talk about how innovation occurs along a spectrum. At one end there are relatively small, incremental innovations – taking things that we currently do and figuring out how to do them better. At the other end we have disruptive innovations – those ideas that attack existing market segments in a completely new way. […]
There’s been a lot of buzz about Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From. An article in Foreign Policy by Stephen Walt addresses the opposite question: Where Do Bad Ideas Come From? He is talking about bad ideas in foreign policy, such as the domino effect, which have been used to justify policy but […]
In his thought-provoking new book Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand has this interesting passage: In Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000), he quotes William Blake – Without contraries is no progression” – and ventures that Blake came to that view from his immersion in London. “Wherever you go in the city,” Ackroyd observes, “you are […]