Complementary webinar tomorrow (January 31) “How the Growth Outliers Do It”
Just back from Davos! Tomorrow, Columbia Executive Education will be hosting a complementary webinar on an article that is in this months' Harvard Business Review on growth outliers. The webinar will explore the seemingly contradictory practices that these firms use to create an enviable ten-year track record of success. To sign up, click here.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 30, 2012
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Davos 2012
I am in Davos at the World Economic Forum where I facilitated a session on Entrepreneurship and Intelligent Failure. View my impressions here on YouTube.
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- Posted Admin on January 29, 2012
Controlling complex systems - insights from Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
In another fascinating session at the World Economic forum, Barabasi who is a distinguished Professor of Physics at Northeastern, presented some of his work on how one can 'control' a complex system. We all know that our traditional command and control approaches fail utterly when a system's complexity increases. Instead, if we want to drive a system from an intial state to some other final state, we do better by influencing critical nodes. He used the analogy of driving a car - once you have the brake, steering wheel and acceleration system sorted out you can drive it without having to know all the complexity that lies underneath.
You can find links to his work at this link.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 25, 2012
Davos: Using complexity to fight cyber-criminals
This morning, I moderated a panel on "Managing Complexity with the Santa Fe Institute at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. One of the featured thought leaders was Stephanie Forrest, a computer scientist who is among the world's leading thinkers on the topic of cyber crime and how to fight it. She makes a fascinating suggestion - that by fostering consistency and homogeneity in our systems, they are hugely more vulnerable to single attacks. Instead, she's working on developing systems in which the interfaces and functionality of various systems is the same, but within the system unique programming makes it difficult for a single virus to propogate across multiple systems, mimicking in some ways the way the immune system works in biological systems.
She explained what were undoubtedly incredibly complex ideas in a most accessible way. You can read more about Professor Forrest and her work at this link.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 25, 2012
What are we to use to replace industry analysis in strategy?
In my blog over at the Harvard business review web site, I noted that industry boundaries are blurring and that this can lead to serious strategy miscalculations. Several people wrote in to say that they thought the 'jobs to be done' perspective offered a better vantage point. Couldn't agree more!
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 19, 2012
