On Wednesday February 9 th at 1PM Eastern (tomorrow!) all MIX members are invited to attend a webinar discussion between Gary Hamel and the HCI Human Capital M-Prize semifinalists. The semifinalists will share a short summary of their idea or story, and Gary will give feedback on developing each...
In a WSJ post I promised that I’d lay out a blueprint for building a company that’s as nimble as change itself—and I will, but first I’d like to share an anecdote about a simple experiment in workplace freedom. In most organizations, the decision-making freedoms of frontline employees are highly...
Only a third of excellent companies remain excellent over the long term. Even fewer change programs succeed. These are the facts, yet these need not be the odds of success for your organization. Insightful advice (beyond common sense) and pragmatic methods (readily applicable) are available to help...
In 1961, Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen wrote a PDP-1 program to create a game they called SpaceWar! – oft-cited as the first video game. In 1972, Nolan Bushnell famously created PONG to rock our world. Space Invaders showed up in 1977. PacMan entered the lexicon in 1980, about...
What would it look like if the rapidly-evolving social world of Web 2.0 collided with the sterile and static corporate Intranet? What would happen if information flowed from the outside in, instead of inside out? Those are the questions at the heart of an interesting experiment unfolding at global...
For all of the fervor around innovation, far too many organizations are hostile places for new ideas (not to mention the people that harbor them). All too often, new ideas are cooked up in a hothouse environment—the executive inner sanctum, an invitation-only innovation offsite, a limited-access “war room”—and not shared widely until they’ve been sanctioned from on high. When they are offered up by some hardy soul in the trenches, they generally have just one place to go: up the chain of command. In other words, they get the hot lights of judgment before they get a chance to breathe.
Innovation poses two enormous problems for most leaders given the way they are trained to think. First, it’s a time-based form of value. It goes sour like milk. This year’s “must-have” gadget will end up in a landfill next Christmas or at least be overwritten by Version 2.0. Second, innovation only pays in the future for which you presently have no data. As Kierkegaard put it “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor was a mechanical engineer who, according to Peter Drucker, “was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study.” Taylor...
One of the things that attracted me to Red Hat in the first place was that it was a company with a strong sense of purpose. Red Hat was a company full of believers, people who felt that the open source development model was simply a better way. During my first few months as CEO, I traveled to Red...
We’re delighted to announce the semifinalists for the HCI Human Capital M-Prize —a rich set of bold and original Hacks and inspiring and instructive Stories. We asked MIXers to tackle one of the toughest—and most important questions in the realm of management innovation: How do you mobilize and...
