Category: innovation
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Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners
After posting about the composition of multidisciplinary teams, (friend of ODF) Mike Baxter sent me a link to Simon Wardly’s post on Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners, which describies a unique combination of characteristics needed to bring products and services to life. The concept, says Simon, is adapted from Robert X. Cringely's book Accidental Empires which describes companies…
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On MultiDisciplinary Teams
"To work through the whole business stack at high velocity and not explode, you need a cross-functional workflow delivered through truly multi-disciplinary teams." Tim Malbon One of the interesting aspects that Tim talked about in his post on the solution to Design Thinking (which was shortlisted for Post of the Month) is the composition of…
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The Best Place in the World to Fail
Jeff Bezos on being bold and why Amazon is the best place in the world to fail: 'We all know that if you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a…
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The Streetlight Effect, And The Tyranny of Best Practice
‘Best practice’ is one of those terms that whilst not inherently bad has become so overused as to be stretched beyond its rightful application. So it gets applied generically to any scenario where an understanding of the most effective methods to solve a problem are desired. Our wish to create certainty out of ambiguity, and…
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Reinforcement Learning
Deepmind's amazing victories against Go world champion Lee Se-dol have led many to acclaim a new era in AI. As the FT said, the achievement was in a different class to previous machine/human clashes (like IBM Deep Blue/Chess and Watson/Jeopardy): 'Unlike chess, Go permits too many possible moves for a computer to calculate. As a result,…
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Productive Informality
Matt Edgar had an exceptional post that a few people have shared about the value of what he calls 'productive informality'. How, in the current environment, overly formal or restrictive language, behaviours and controls are harmful to the conditions that most closely correlate with team success. There were echoes in Matt's piece of a point I made…
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Burberry Show How You Embrace Disruption
It was really interesting to read about Burberry's new strategy to combine its men’s and women’s collections together into one unified 'seasonless' collection to be shown at two annual runway events with the clothes available to buy straight after the shows. This is a big departure from decades of tradition. The established fashion calendar positioned…
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Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast
Lots to take out from this a16z podcast with Eric Ries (of the Lean Startup fame of-course) including the title of this post (which it seems comes from an old customer-service oriented strategy from McDonalds). Believe it or not the book is five years old now (and the fundamental ideas even older), setting out a more…
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Organisational Flow, Speed and Momentum
The case for organisations to become far more agile in how they operate in response to the impact of digital technologies has been well made. But it’s worth exploring what agility really means in this context. One of my favourite ways of describing this from a cultural perspective comes from Pinterest: Agility = velocity x…
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From Descriptive to Prescriptive Analytics
How do most businesses project likely future scenarios? I suspect that most currently use conventional techniques like brainstorming, maybe predictive analytics, and limited numbers of external sources like thought leaders, and market research. In fact the latest IBM C-Suite study (which surveyed 5,000+ business leaders from around the globe) indicates that that's exactly what they do. Far…