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 […]
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 […]
I ran across an interesting quote from Will Wilkinson in an article he wrote about wikileaks: The basic question is not whether we think Julian Assange is a terrorist or a hero. The basic question certainly is not whether we think exposing the chatter of the diplomatic corps helps or hinders their efforts, and whether […]
Almost every single time you are offered a black or white choice, the real answer is grey. This is inconvenient, because we like things to either white or black, right or wrong, easy or hard, incremental or radical. But the simple fact is that all of these are false dichotomies. Nearly everything that is presented […]