Category: insight
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When Companies Become Boring
There was a great quote from one of the interviewees for the agility and innovation research I did recently for Econsultancy: “A lot of data-driven companies become boring – they repeat the best performing thing again and again. But we’re trying to create an environment where people feel empowered to make change” This came from…
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Agility and Innovation
I've been taking a short break but whilst I was away the good folk at Econsultancy published a report that I'd been working on focusing on the convergence of two topics that have never been more important to just about every company: Agility and Innovation. The report pulls together feedback from a range of interviews…
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Google Firestarters 10: Planning For Good – The Event
//instagram.com/p/ffsOzAIuC3 Last week saw our tenth Google Firestarters event. I can hardly believe it's been over two years since we had our first event. Since then we've built some pretty significant momentum, had some amazing and thought provoking talks (too many to mention individually) and a real sense of community has built around the events…
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Technical and Adaptive Change
Dr Ronald Heifetz of the Center For Public Leadership at Harvard University is known for delineating a clear differentiation between what he calls ‘technical change’ (broadly speaking the type of change that addresses more tangible things such as products, procedures or processes) and ‘adaptive change’ (that which is more concerned with less tangible human aspects…
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On Company Longevity
Thanks to Tim Kastelle for telling me about this fascinating piece of work (PDF) by Professor Richard Foster of Yale University. Foster found that the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500 index has decreased from 61 years in 1958 to just 18 years today. His estimation at the current churn rate is that by 2027,…
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Digital and the Magpie Syndrome
There's a salutary lesson from this research released by MIT Sloan and Cap Gemini late last year that I've referred back to a few times in work with clients. The lengthy (two years) study of around 400 companies was designed to assess the impact of digital technologes on large, traditional companies, and how they are…
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On Empowerment and Creativity
I loved this talk by Ben Chestnut, co-founder of Mailchimp, on how he creates an environment for creativity and empowerment at his company. I love his point about time. So true about how that can be the biggest catalyst for breaking down barriers and silos. The idea about empowerment through autonomy (creating a culture that encourages people to be daring…
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Why Don’t Big Companies Innovate More?
I loved this answer from Matt Edgar to the above question, which I found via a tweet from Aden: 'My favourite observation on innovation is in Bruno Latour's 'Aramis': "a project is considered innovative when the number of actors is not known at the outset." Apply this to small and large companies.A start-up enters the world…
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Dealing With Worry
"Set aside 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening to do nothing but worry about the future." Playing catch up post-holiday (and not entirely unconcerned about the volume of email I would face whilst firing up my Gmail after a two week hiatus) I happened across Maria Popova's excellent post on…
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The Myth of the Eureka Moment
An intriguing addendum to last week's Google Firestarters event on creativity. Eric Barker posts about a story featured in Keith Sawyer's book Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. Researcher Vera John-Steiner interviewed over 70 living 'creative geniuses' and analysed the notebooks of a further 50 that were no longer alive (including people like…