Culture is the hard part. Like the muscle memory of 2,000-plus people, culture can keep doing what it always does, never implement concepts, or reject them stillborn.
Read More »Monthly Archives: January 2017
Your Phone is Trying to Control Your Life [Editor’s Choice]
Whether you're killing time in line at Starbucks or scrolling through an endless meme stream on Twitter, your smartphone is trying to seduce you. Former Google employee Tristan Harris felt something needed to be done to combat tech designers' relentless efforts to influence our behavior. Special correspondent Cat Wise talks to Harris as part of a collaboration with The Atlantic.
Read More »Illuminating Collaborative Innovation: Sarah Miller Caldicott (1957-2017)
The innovation community has unexpectedly lost a dear friend, colleague, and collaborator. Sarah Miller Caldicott was a great-grandniece of Thomas Alva Edison and, in several books and insightful presentations, she illuminated Edison's collaborative genius and further reignited his relevance today. Sarah Miller Caldicott (1957-2017) will be dearly missed.
Read More »How Product Managers and Innovators Can Speak with GRAVITAS
Have you ever wondered why some people earn attention and respect when they speak, and others don’t? Such people are said to have gravitas. With gravitas, you can express yourself clearly and with the passion and confidence to persuade, influence and engage listeners. While a few people appear to be born with a natural influence over others, gravitas is actually ...
Read More »Driving Business Impact from Retail Innovation Labs
As retailers strive to reinvent their customer experience and drive loyalty, many are opening innovation labs or centers that are focused exclusively on digital efforts or product innovation. While some view labs as a ‘skunkworks’ effort, at some point in time, they will need to demonstrate value and show that the lab is impacting the business – and driving results. ...
Read More »The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Change Leaders
What does it mean to be a change leader? What behaviors must they engage in day in and day out to drive real and meaningful change? Having worked in the change and process improvement for 15 years, and worked with dozens of clients, since I launched my consulting business, I have identified seven behaviors and habits which help to identify whether ...
Read More »The One Big Reason Every Business Needs to Embrace Complexity
The underlying premise of any organization is to create value. Historically, firms have done so through engineering ever greater efficiency. By honing internal processes, optimizing the supply chain and reducing product inventories, managers could improve margins and create a sustainable competitive advantage. That’s created a bias for simple, linear thinking. Adding extra variables to any process is bound to increase ...
Read More »Six Symptoms that Signal a Need for Portfolio Management
I’ve only been really sick once in my life. And by “really sick”, I mean ready-to-hang-it-up kind of sick. It happened at the worst time and in an unfortunate place. I was living in the Amazon in northern Brazil. One day, I took a seven hour boat ride down the Amazon River, from one small city to another. This boat ...
Read More »Culture Trumps Concepts
When many people hear the word “Innovation” they think of a service that created a category: Xerox or FedEx. Or, they think of one that made bold, brilliant moves to earn a leadership position in an emerging space: Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb.
Read More »Six Habits of Highly Innovative Retailers
As retailers look to drive profitable growth through loyalty and differentiation, innovation usually plays a prominent role. Innovation can take many different forms, such as product, customer experience, business model, service and process innovation. However, becoming innovative is not easy. Innovative retailers are those that excel at solving high-priority problems for their target customer and help meet unmet customer needs – often ...
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