I was in a meeting with a CEO the other day who is confronting the possibility that what sustained the business for the last few decades is probably not going to deliver growth for the future. Tim and I have been working with him for over a year and we both rate him very highly […]

Tim and I are on the road for a few weeks at the moment. I think Tim is in Rome and I am at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University. Judge is a very large business school and is usually placed in the top 10 of any business school ranking. Just for this week, […]

I’m probably going to get in trouble for this post because the answer to the title question is yes and no. I am employed by the University of Queensland which prides itself as being the most successful commercializer of research in Australia. However, I have never been convinced by the simple argument that univerisities matter […]

Ten years ago, Jim Collins published his book “Good to Great” to give exectutives an insight into what seperated leading companies from the mediocre ones. From a researcher’s point of view, the study is deeply flawed and would never get past the desk of a serious business journal. The biggest mistake is that it selects […]

Innovation is a complex process and I’m always sceptical about simple solutions to encourage companies to be more innovative. Recently I have written about some evidence against the widely-held assumption that creating industry clusters will make firms in these clusters more innovative. It turns out the the relationship between industry clusters and innovation depends a […]

When I was a boy I used to enjoy visiting my grandparents and one of my favorite objects in their living room was a globe where the countries would light up as different colours when I switched the globe on. After seeing all of these countries I would often go to the trusty Encyclopaedia Brittanica […]

How can we make businesses more innovative? That’s easy isn’t it? We just group them together into clusters (preferably in science park developments) and it will happen… won’t it? The trouble with this cluster theory of innovation is that it confuses cause and effect. When we see a successful cluster like Silicon Valley it’s tempting […]

One of the ‘quick facts’ that I like to mention in my strategy seminars is that only two of the top 100 US firms in 1900 are still around today. In Australia, the stat isn’t much improved and it points to the extreme difficulty of maintaining the performance of organizations over extended time frames. Of […]

We all get caught up in the day-to-day activities of work and life but have you really stopped to think about how extraordinary your life is? Don’t worry, I’m not about to do one of those self-help/motivational rants but I do want to make the point that we may be in the middle of a […]

Well…. I have finally discovered Ebay (please don’t snigger). A consequence of my children growing up is that that there is now a lot of stuff that we no-longer need in the house. Just to see if the Ebay thing would work, I put a baby bouncer on Ebay and to my amazement the bids […]