Nancy Duarte beautifully tells the story of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and how he won the right to build the Dome for the magnificent Cathedral in Florence. It’s a terrific story, and you should go read it – it’s ok, I’ll wait. … So, the climax of the story is that Brunelleschi does something clever […]
Three posts jumped out at me today, so I thought I’d share them with you and add some thoughts: First, John Borthwick wrote a fascinating and thoughtful review of the iPad. He says that the native applications that will make it a genuinely unique device haven’t emerged yet, but that when they do, they will […]
Here’s an actual conversation I had a few years ago with a programmer for whom I was doing some work: Tim: I did some usability testing on your website. Tim’s Friend: Great! Tim: There are some problems though – it renders poorly on Netscape and looks like garbage on a Mac. Tim’s Friend: I don’t […]
In a brilliant post this week, Charlie Stross asks what’s the minimum world population needed to maintain the current level of the technology available to us today. Not long ago I talked about how isolation from the mainland made Tasmanian technology go backwards for a significant period of time – this is exactly the issue […]
When I run strategy seminars, I usually do a session on long-run trends in the macroenvironment. While firms can’t usually influence macro-trends such as interest rates, demographics and legislation, changes and trends can open up strategic opportunities and threats. While some of these can be predicted with a degree of certainty, such as an aging […]
Superconnect, the new book by Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, includes this great quote from Denis Diderot in his Encyclopédie: Everything is linked together… beings are connected with each other by a chain of which… some parts are continuous, though in the greater number of points continuity escapes us… the art of the philosopher consists […]
Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act of innovation. Trying to harness this creativity within ourselves and our organisations is the first step in managing innovation as a process. Of course, this is a step that resists systematisation – as Simon Bostock points out, innovation is a cloud not a clock. In that post he […]
We had winter graduations today. I really enjoy graduations. The ceremony itself is a bit tedious, but the joy and celebration of the event always makes it worth going to (plus I get to wear the puffy hat!). Sitting on stage watching the graduates get their diplomas always makes me think of the how the […]
I love the Old Spice Guy as much as the next man (which means, of course, that I enjoy his commercials greatly in a shared spirit of manliness and a joint appreciation of expensive magnifying glasses). The original commercial is inventive and funny, and the social-media-based campaign that they ran last week is enormously innovative. […]
Yesterday I went to a seminar from Bill Eggers, hosted by Deloitte. Bill is a specialist in thinking about governmental reform and the digital economy, but most of his messages about innovation apply to all organizations. It’s been a long time since I took three pages of notes in a seminar so I might do […]