We often think of art as being innovative by its nature – but what about curating art? A couple of weeks ago Nancy and I went to a talk Amanda Pagliarino, the Queensland Art Gallery’s Head of Conservation. She was discussing some the challenges that her team faced in getting all the exhibits ready for […]
What is the biggest challenge facing an entrepreneur? There’s coming up with a great idea, which can be hard. There’s finding funding, which is definitely a challenge. There’s getting your idea to work, and we’ve been arguing here for quite a while that execution is critical. But I think that the biggest challenge is actually […]
Innovation is all about executing ideas so that they have economic or social value. John and I have both talked frequently about how many firms overemphasise generating ideas when they try to increase innovation. When they make this mistake, they end up with a lot of stockpiled ideas, but the amount that they have successfully […]
We know the story by now: as it becomes less and less expensive to transfer digital content, the price firms can get for information-based products and services is being driven down. This has led to chaos in the music, news and publishing industries. So everyone in these industries is doomed, right? Wrong. I believe that […]
How do we create value when we’re busy tweeting, blogging, reading and writing? I have been arguing that to create value from information, we need to have systems in place that allow us to aggregate, filter and connect information – and that this is true for people, and for business models. These are the things […]
The biggest problem with the idea of ‘networking’ is that it is a bad idea. Why? Because as it is usually practiced, networking consists of going out and making a whole bunch of new connections, and then hoping that something good will come of them. It is much more productive to think about your position […]
We had some rain here over the weekend. Here is what was reported in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review (emphasis added): Heavy rains fell across NSW and south-east Queensland over the weekend, which flooded homes and roads, brought down trees and caused motor accidents. But in good news for Sydney, 115 millimetres of rain fell across […]
I was at the mall yesterday eating lunch, and I took a moment to listen to the conversations going on around me. They were, without exception, utterly banal. Consequently, I concluded that conversation is a useless tool, and the widespread use of it is nothing more than a symptom of the widespread decline of intellectual […]
How do we deal with complexity? A while ago I suggested that one strategy that we use to handle complexity is that we outsource some of the rote memorisation of facts and routines that we need regularly. This is essentially the strategy that Atul Gawande also advocates in his outstanding book The Checklist Manifesto: How […]