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 [...]
Tag Archives | Innovation
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Speed Over Greed
Anyone who wonders why we don’t have more start-ups hasn’t noticed that it is the hardest job in the world. You start from nothing. One team I was working with in the spring of this year just oozed joy when they had earned their first $49 from someone they didn’t know. Getting to this point…building [...]
Must-Read Weekend Reading …
Wall Street rewards New Product Lines “There’s tremendous pressure on companies, particularly publicly traded companies, to grow and grow. You see, for the most part shareholders don’t profit from steadily profitable business, but unexpected growth. Microsoft grew profit by 30% year over year, and the stock market said meh. For a company as successful as [...]
Calling: The Fighter
There’s been enough research to show that buy-in happens when people shape the decision. There’s been enough clarity on knowing the “why” causes people to align behind decisions. There’s been enough qualitative and quantitative work to show the value of collective networks in accomplishing real change. If you followed the 3 links, you know that [...]
Release Ideas Into The Wild
Sometimes I hold onto ideas as mine alone, almost as if I might have held onto my first baby blanket – tightly – for fear I might lose it. When I came to meetings early in my career, I came into meetings more wanting to show the idea, than share the idea. But at some [...]
TEDx: How We Deny Innovation
Innovation! Isn’t it Great?! We just love talking about innovation and thinking about innovation, and tweeting about innovation. But we actually suck at it, for entirely human reasons. There are 3 things we need to understand about our own humanness in order for us to unleash our own potential (and the potential of our organizations): [...]