If people try to tell you that pivoting is the new thing, that it’s the fresh Silicon Valley approach to business designed for today’s fast-paced digital world, don’t believe them.
If a 2,000-Year-Old Organization Can Pivot … So Can You
The Payoff of Liberating People to Innovate
As a leader, encouraging your employees to innovate isn’t just a nice thing to do for them. It also delivers tangible value for your business. But what exactly can you do to motivate innovation from within your organization?
How To Stop Making Assumptions—And Start Seeing Around Corners
Last month, I was thrilled to attend Parliament’s PowerShift, a gathering of diverse opinion leaders, change-makers, creatives, and corporates seeking to find interesting solutions to some of today’s biggest challenges. At the event, I had the opportunity to speak with Peter Sims, CEO of Parliament, about some of the themes of my forthcoming book, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen.
We Get Innovation Wrong Because We Measure the Wrong Thing
What you measure matters. Consider a bridge built in Laufenburg, a town that straddles Germany and Switzerland. As the two halves of the bridge being built came together, it became (embarrassingly) clear that they would not align because they were at different heights.
The Power Of Selfish And Selfless Purpose – And Walking To the South Pole
In 1986, when Robert Swan first reached the South Pole after a 70-day, 900-mile walk — leading the first team to do so — his irises bleached by ultraviolet radiation passing through the newly opened hole in the ozone, he reported having had two thoughts: “We’re not dead,” and “Now what?”
The Future of Netflix: Why Critics Were Looking in the Wrong Places
Netflix made headlines recently for their unexpected decline in new subscription growth and drop in subscriptions in the US, which pushed their stock price down. Critics are asking if Netflix’s business model is relevant in the changing competitive environment, when Disney and other content owners have started pulling back their content from streaming services like Netflix in order to build their own.
Taking A Human-Led Approach To Navigating Technological Change
With technology’s modern pace of change, how can companies (and humans) best adapt? In March, I had the pleasure of leading a workshop with Tracey Zimmerman, President of Robots & Pencils, to answer this very question and offer a few potential solutions for today’s executives.
When Fosbury Flopped: Three Lessons for Disruptors
In 1968, Olympic fans and athletes watched in bemusement as a college sophomore jumped over the high bar backward. Until that day, every gold medal winner, indeed every Olympic athlete, who had competed in the high bar had gone over forward. Dick Fosbury literally turned his back on that tradition … won the Olympics … and forever changed the way the competition is played. Within eight years, 90% of high jumpers were using what came to be called the “Fosbury Flop.” Today, the Fosbury Flop is just the way you do things.
How Artificial Intelligence Changes Us
Professor Moran Cerf contributed research and insights for this article.
I’ve had a few conversations with Sophia the Robot, an invention of Hanson Robotics making the rounds of tech conferences worldwide. Preparing for a session at Webit 2018 in Sofia, Bulgaria, I had a surprisingly engaging exchange with Sophie. (Unfortunately, she didn’t cooperate during our interview in front of 5,000 people. Stage fright, perhaps?) It’s unsettlingly easy to see how one day, after the clunkiness resolves, it will feel natural to engage with our technological colleagues. I feel I’ve gotten to “know” Sophia in a way and look forward to our next conversation.
How Inflection Points In The Hotel Business Change Where You Lay Your Head
In 1977, James Eyster, then a Ph.D. student at Cornell, published a book that would completely change the nature of the hotel business worldwide. His idea could not sound more boring—unless you saw the impact it would have. It involved the negotiation and administration of hotel management contracts.