Business Needs More Art
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Business needs more art, as simple as that. Art teaches many critical skills, including risk taking, dealing with ambiguities, discovering patterns, and the use of analogy and metaphor. And we need all of those.
Category Archives: book riffs
Change Your Frame of Reference for Better Innovation
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What we can accomplish is enabled by how we view the world. It’s also constrained by how we view the world. Figuring out how to change our frame of view is a powerful innovation tool.
Are You Ready for the #SocialEra?
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What are the implications of the new ways that technology allows people to connect and interact? Nilofer Merchant explores this in her book 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra – it’s a good book with some important lessons.
Apple is a Manic Pixie Dream Firm
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The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Nancy and I saw Ruby Sparks last night, and really enjoyed it. It’s written by Zoe Kazan, who also stars, and it absolutely skewers the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Nathan Rabin defined Manic Pixie Dreams Girls (MPDG) in his review of Elizabethtown: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely […]
Why Your Business Model Must Evolve
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Culturematic by Grant McCracken Makes a Great Case for Experimenting
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Experiments are a critical innovation skill, and it’s one that you can use to build your Innovation Competence. A culture of experimentation is one of the elements that distinguishes highly innovative firms from those that arene’t quite as good at it. The best thing that I’ve run across recently on the importance of experimentation is […]
Are You Solving a Puzzle or a Mystery?
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Innovation is all about coming up with new solutions to solve problems. But here’s an interesting question: is the problem that you’re trying to solve a puzzle or a mystery? The distinction was made by Gregory Treverton and highlighted by Malcolm Gladwell in a piece he wrote on Enron a few years ago. According to […]
How to Improve Your Innovation Competence – Experiment!
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Note: This is part of a series of posts explaining the individual parts of The Innovation Matrix. See this post for a description of the full model and what can be done with it. I presented The Innovation Matrix at a conference last week. After the other three speakers in my session had given their […]
If Not Excellence, What? Tom Peters & Business Models
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Better business models lead to better businesses. One critical part of building a better business model is getting your value proposition right. An excellent value proposition means that you have to be excellent at, well, something. But what? One framework that John uses a lot in his classes is this from The Discipline of Market […]
Innovation is the Source of the Variation that You Need to Adapt & Survive
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Innovation is an evolutionary process. Here is John explaining what that means: <p. Generic evolutionary processes have three parts – generation of variety, selection, and replication. This maps on to the three steps in the innovation value chain. The Innovation Value Chain also has three steps – idea generation, idea selection and execution, and idea […]
How to Improve Your Information Diet with Better Filtering
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There’s so much information around these days, how can we possibly deal with it all? Many of us are overwhelmed just by our email, so when you add in everything else (TV, books, newspapers, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.), it’s just too much. And yet, we’ve always been faced with more information than we’re capable of […]
