Category: innovation
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The Creative Company
I thought this Scientific American piece on the messy minds of creative people (based on research by Psychologists Guillaume Furst, Paolo Ghisletta and Todd Lubart) was the best thing I’d read on how creativity works in ages. What was fascinating about it was that it acknowledged the many different (and sometimes contradictory) components, characteristics and…
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Google Firestarters Comes to Australia
I'm really excited to announce that, on the heels of our events in New York and our recent one in Austin at SXSW, Google Firestarters is coming to Australia. We'll be running two events in one week – one in Melbourne on the 21st April, and one in Sydney on the 22nd April – both on the theme…
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Why Small Teams Work
(N.B. This post is part of an occasional series I'm doing, drawing from some of the thinking that's going into the book I'm writing - any feedback is appreciated) 'From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense…
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Google Firestarters Austin – Engineering Strategy – The Event
Saturday saw our first ever Firestarters event in Austin, held in the Google Fiber space during SXSWi. We'd themed the event around the intersection of user experience design and strategy which, judging from the audience feedback and debate on the night is rich territory for discussion right now. Perhaps unsurprising given the growth in importance…
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The Connector That Disconnects
I saw a charming talk here yesterday at SXSW by Dutch designer Daniel Disselkoen who themed his session around the idea that familiarity with a subject, our environment, surroundings or routine can limit discovery. This provides the basis for Daniel's work in exploring ways to encourage people to notice and observe more, and to be…
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Disrupting Wall Street
I've been in Austin at SXSWi for the past few days putting on our first Google Firestarters here (more on that soon) and so have been attending some of the sessions whilst I'm here. Someone said to me before I came out that it was better to go to the smaller, off-topic (i.e. non branding/marketing/content)…
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Mullet Strategy
21st Century Strategy from Neil Perkin The following is a notated version of a talk I gave last night at the APG Noisy Thinking event on 21st Century Strategy. When the APG asked me talk about '21st Century Strategy' I’d not long before read Emily Bell’s brilliant Hugh Cudlipp lecture about the future of journalism.…
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The Role of Short-Term Wins in Organisational Change
I'm a big fan of the value of short-term wins in helping to support, and generate momentum for, change in companies. In Leading Change, John Kotter has a pithy summary of why they work. The role of short-term wins:, he says, is to (and I quote): Provide evidence that sacrifices are worth it: Wins greatly help…
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The Difference Between Management and Leadership
Reading John Kotter's 'Leading Change', he makes the point that many organisations conflate management with leadership, yet they are far from being the same thing: "Management makes a system work. It helps you do what you know how to do. Leadership builds systems or transforms old ones." …and… "Management is a set of processes that…
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The Digital Board
"If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near." Jack Welch (N.B. This post is part of an occasional series I'm doing, drawing from some of the thinking that's going into the book I'm writing – any feedback is appreciated) In today's world, slow…