Our thanks to those MIXers who have given us their thoughts, in 140 characters or less, about how to take the work out of work. From Play-doh and musical instruments at meetings to praising risk-takers, you've crammed a lot of good suggestions into a tiny bit of space. Each one of these is a great...
Innovation can happen by chance, without a determined effort or specific methodology. But when it does, it's more like luck than strategic progress. While there is a role for serendipity in strategy – being able to take advantage of pleasant surprises -- too often, that's the only way companies approach innovation: with fingers crossed.
China has been a fascinating destination for me. I have visited once, and it was a humbling experience to see myself as a small man on the Great Wall. Now I'm on my way to the World Economic Meeting in Tianjin, the summer Davos as it's called. I'm excited about going there because it's a confluence...
Over the last decade, the Internet has had a profound impact on business. It has spawned a slew of new business models and has helped make operating models vastly more efficient. By contrast, the Web’s impact on management models has been relatively modest.
by Joy Kosta Two articles in the business section of last Sunday’s New York Times got me to thinking... ”Does It Pass the Smell Test” was about the position a person is in when their leader asks them to bend or break the rules and do something unethical at work. Has the economy moved people to take...
Creativity is less an art than a discipline--and surprisingly practical and accessible If you think creativity is the province of a privileged few--the proverbial black turtleneck and pony tail crowd--think again. Our work with hundreds of teams, from CEOs to customer service reps, has convinced us...
The authorities at Merriam-Webster have declared “austerity” the defining word of 2010 . That may be an appropriate reaction to all that’s transpired this year (and built up over this decade), but the word—and, more to the point, the feeling —that permeates this shabby, hangdog year is loss. Look...
Just a few weeks ago Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Co. opened the first leg of their 2012/13 M-Prize challenge: " Innovating Innovation ." The M-Prize's overall goal is to "surface the world's most progressive management practices and most provocative management ideas" and connect and celebrate individuals reinventing management. This particular challenge — where I'm serving as a judge — seeks "real-world case studies and bold ideas that demonstrate how every element of a company's management model can be retooled to make it innovation-friendly."
-- A few weeks ago, we kicked off the Hackathon Pilot, an experiment enabling passionate MIXers to collaboratively "write the chapter" on how to enable communities of passion within our organizations (learn more about the pilot here and here ). This is the second post in a series where pilot...
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.
