Firms often view doing good and making a profit as trade-offs – if you do well at one, its at the expense of the other. However, the story of the Herman Miller company is just one that shows that the two actually often go hand in hand.
There is often a gap between how fast technology changes, and how fast human institutions respond to this change. This Governance Gap is one of the core problems of management today.
Innovation is making new ideas real, to create value. If we’re not innovating to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, are we really creating value?
Many people want to act empathetically, but you can’t do this if you don’t first build empathy. And that’s the hard part.
A lot of times, if you see someone that’s good at something, we believe their skill comes naturally. But often, it’s the result of hours and hours of hard work, and practice. This is great news, because it means that all of us can better at things that we love.
Do we need managers, or do we need good managers? There’s evidence that they’re not exactly the same thing – and some of the best-managed organisations have very few people in formal management positions. Instead, they get management done by having everyone involved. This is a repost of something I originally wrote for Harvard Business Review Blogs.
A repost of something I wrote for Harvard Business Review Blogs a while ago, looking at the connections between innovation and strategy.
Innovation is not a linear process of invent-build-commercialise, and if we act like it is, we will waste a lot of energy building the wrong things.
People often wait for permission before they’ll try out new ideas. Now you have it.
I just launched a short course on the University of Queensland website on entrepreneurial thinking and innovation.
As reiterated by Tim Kastelle in the previous post, it’s imperative to distinguish discovery from execution when it comes to startup and innovation activities – bearing in mind that both purposes are complementary and equally important. This suggests following a dual approach for balanced corporate innovation management. The main objective of dual approaches is to sufficiently separate exploration-/discovery-oriented initiatives from exploitation-/execution-oriented ones […]
Discovery and execution are two different things, and we must treat them differently in order to succeed at innovation.