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I love the quote by the poet Muriel Rukeyser that says “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” Humans live for stories. We learn from stories at home, school, from friends, and also very compellingly at work. Humans within a work culture are motivated by stories. Look at the famous founding myths of HP and Apple in the garages, of Fred Smith and FedEx, and ...

Notes from a keynote speech from The Market Research Event By Jonah Berger, Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania Berger starts the keynote session by playing a game, Which is Tastier? Where two images are shown: broccoli and a cheeseburger. The vote is cast: the majority vote, you guessed it, for the cheeseburger. The point is ...

This column was based on a presentation by Scott Jenkins, SVP of Innovation and Product Development of Deckers. Scott began this talk insisting on blending work and play.  His journey into “the sin of corporate innovation” happened eight years ago. At an early age Scott became fascinated with running shoes.  He met an inventor in 1978, when he was 18.  ...

Here are notes from the Back End of Innovation conference, 2015, in San Jose. These tips come from a workshop led by Tamara Carleton, Innovation Leadership Board, LLC. This session focuses on strategic foresight, which is the ability to build the future we envision. Strategic foresight is based on choices made today intended to influence future action. The goal is ...

When Netflix put the Video Rental Retail stores in their coffins, there was still a sizable segment of people who missed the convenience, were suspect of a mail-order or streaming subscription service, or simply didn’t have the connectivity to enjoy it. Enter, RedBox. A new smart-automated adaptation of the Blockbuster model, scaled down to be easy-to-manage, easy-to-implement, and easy to ...

Anxiety floods the boardroom, the conference rooms, every decision. Costs are rising. Returns are flat. Margins are thinning. Now, private label competitors are beating us in every area: technology, price, placement, design, and sales. Worse, they have turned the category that we invented...

A fallacy about organizational management prevents many firms from getting the best out of their best people: the notion that everyone who excels in their jobs will eventually become managers, directors, etc. True, some may have a talent for management, while others flourish in active roles that have nothing to do with managing. Yet, the “up or out” paradigm that exists in ...

According to AcuPoll more than 95-percent of new products fail each year. This harrowing statistic should sound an alarm, one that says the way we approach the conceptualization and launch of new products does not work. Every year, billions of dollars shrivel down to zero. Careers and jobs lost. So much talent and energy gets wasted in the misdirected compulsion ...

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.

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.