Tag Archives | Innovation

Social Means Freedom, For Better or Worse

This is part II of a series on how the social era affects every business model, from how we organize, what we produce, and what we sell.  (Part I, the foundational rules of the social era can be found here.) Do let me know what you think.. and especially what you want to see addressed [...]

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Without a Clear Vision

Vision is crucial. It is utterly irreplaceable. No amount of execution or financial success can replace vision. Why? Because, vision can lead the creative work of an entire tribe. (Not just of a few people who think about it all the time, but for everyone.) Vision is the art of seeing things invisible, Jonathan Swift [...]

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Yahoo’s ShakeUp Demands Fearlessness

Four longtime Yahoo board members, including the chairman, are leaving the company. In this one move, Yahoo is trying to make a clean break from the past — signaling that they are primed to reboot. It’s a much-needed and long-overdue step on the path to shifting trajectories. The Pattern of Failing Organizations Larger organizations follow [...]

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What Barack Obama Could Learn from Vivek Wadhwa

Ever since the presidential election of 2008, I’ve been getting progressively mad about something. I got enthralled with an administration that wanted to connect with people in the social era to create change. Perhaps unrealistically, I had this hope it would carry beyond the election cycle. I knew it wouldn’t be easy but I thought [...]

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8 Dangers of Collaboration

Most of what is written about collaboration is positive. Even hip. Collaboration is championed enthusiastically by the Enterprise 2.0 experts, as well as leading thinkers like Don Tapscott as the crucial approach for the 21st century. Collaboration creates once-elusive “buy-in, or “empowerment”, improves problem solving, increases creativity, is key to innovation at companies like Legos, [...]

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Who You Are Is What You Make

Sharing another talk I’ve recently done on innovation and igniting performance inside our firms. Innovations like pyramids, paper, gunpowder and silicon are the direct result of the cultures that introduced them — empire, nation-state, kingdom, democracy, theocracy, technocracy, etc. Innovation happens when human beings have a series of ideas together that they manifest into something [...]

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Kill the Meetings

After coming off a 6-month sabbatical from Apple, I returned to work at about 5:30 am, cleared my inbox by 8 a.m. (hey, it was 1994 – this was still humanly possible, back then). By 8:30, I was sitting bright and cheery in the conference room for the regular weekly kickoff meeting that our work [...]

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Must Read Weekend Reading

Seems like most of the content we find online starts with a list as in 6 ways to do X, or 5 ways to improve Y. Curating the more thoughtful pieces worth reading in full is what this post theme of must-read work is all about. This week’s assortment has a very corporate theme.  Must [...]

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Upside Down, Shake It Up

About 18 months ago, I was sitting teary-eyed and fatigued with my peer CEO group, explaining that I was going to give up. I felt like such a failure. While there were many good things, a bunch of stuff in my life wasn’t working. As I tried to fix each thing at a time, I [...]

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What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Growth

Finding that first market — a few customers willing to pay for your early product – is hard enough. But there’s one thing that may be even harder. And that’s finding the second market.   Especially because companies are often so focused on protecting what they already have. In 1996 when Steve Jobs first returned to [...]

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