When we launched the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation last year, we aimed to enlist the most progressive practitioners and thinkers in the collective effort of reinventing what we call “the technology of human accomplishment.” We believed that people from all over the world in every realm of endeavor were launching initiatives and experimenting with radical practices to advance the cause of making all organizations more resilient, inventive, inspiring, and accountable.
What leader today doesn't want more innovation? Yet, producing more (of anything) inside an organization generally leads to more process, which smothers individual creativity and all-too-often kills organizational innovation. Innovation isn't about structuring a process to lead to an outcome so much as it's about creating space—both elbow room, the space to roam free of bureaucratic rules and red tape, and head room, the freedom to see differently, think wildly, and aim higher. The leaders who generate more creative energy and innovation are always wrestling with the question: How do we design in more slack? Or, how do we cultivate an environment and support work that enlists people as drivers of their own destiny and inventors of the company's future?
Our big goal here at the MIX is to inspire and unleash as much collective aspiration, audacity, imagination, energy, and passion as possible when it comes to making all of our organizations fit for the future--and fit for human beings. We've said it before: so much is broken when it comes to how...
Back in September I was lucky enough to participate in IBM's centennial THINK forum in New York City . The lineup included a staggering array of CEOs of the biggest, oldest, and most influential companies in the world, several heads of state (on loan from the General Assembly sessions at the UN across town), and a handful of boldface journalists and thought leaders. For all of the power on display in that room, the real topic of the moment was insurrection.
This post originally appeared in Tim O'Reilly's Google+ feed and on O'Reilly Radar . This tweet by Steve Case ( @stevecase ) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death I've been thinking a lot about O'Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that...
We know that if we want to close the gap between the status quo and our big dream of creating companies that are fundamentally fit for the future (and fit for human beings), we need to enlist the ideas and energies of the most progressive thinkers and radical doers from every realm of endeavor.
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 Management 2.0 Challenge . In this first leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation, we asked the most progressive thinkers and radical doers from every realm of endeavor to share a Story (a real-world case study of a single practice, an initiative, or a broad-based transformation) or a Hack (a disruptive idea, radical fix, or experimental design) that illustrates how the principles and tools of the Web can help to overcome the limits of conventional management and help to create Management 2.0.
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.
-- 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 third post in a series where pilot members...
