“What’s next” is the question on everyone’s mind. The reality is, we don’t – and can’t – know for sure. What we can do is articulate our best hypotheses and assumptions and then pay close attention to the early warnings that might suggest which are bearing out. This thought spark is based on a recent…
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Upcoming Friday Fireside Chats
I’m hosting a series of fireside chats with people who have insightful ideas and actionable suggestions about how we navigate this unprecedented crisis. Do join us! About me: I’m a faculty member at Columbia Business School. My work is at the intersection of strategy and innovation, and I’m honored to be in the top ten…
Steering Your Organization is Like Flying a Kite!
Steering Your Organization is Like Flying a Kite! When speed and agility are at a premium, having a well-aligned operating model is absolutely crucial. Having one that doesn’t depend on constant reinforcement by leadership is even better! And yet, many leaders struggle with thinking through, let alone designing, what such a model should look like. …
In Good Company with Top Leadership Books!
This is a nice surprise! My book, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen, was recently awarded one of the Top Must-Read Leadership Books of 2020. The award recognizes books on leadership that are “must-reads.” It outlines 33 Best Leadership Books of 2020. My book was recognized as one…
Unanticipated Consequences of a Potential Baby Bust
Although the early warning signs that an inflection point is on the way are often detectable years, even decades, in advance, trying to time most inflection points is incredibly frustrating. Not so with demographics. In this month’s newsletter, I’ll explore the implications of a potential baby bust and see what else might be lurking around…
Newsletter Anniversary Edition – Not A Moment Too Soon!
Seeing Around Corners: Anniversary Edition – Not a Moment too Soon! Hard as it is to believe it, Seeing Around Corners celebrated its first anniversary on September 3rd and even I could not have predicted its timeliness. The book, which covers strategic inflection points, looks at how you can see them coming, how to…
Team Effectiveness in a World Turned Virtual
Productively managing groups of human beings who have to produce some kind of joint output was tough enough in the “before times.” Today, it’s exponentially harder, with issues compounded by the reality that many of us are working virtually, for the foreseeable future. We’re also dealing with far more in trying to get jobs done…
Too Important to Ignore: Team Effectiveness
It’s hard to know how to respond to events of the magnitude of those that have been in the headlines, except to acknowledge that the quest for social justice feels really, really, enormous. As readers will know, I have been arguing for some time that the allocation of corporate profits away from shared prosperity and…
Designing Business Experiments
As the COVID crisis drags on, casting us all into the world of having to make assumptions, rather than being able to rely on facts, a question I get a lot is how to design checkpoints or experiments to learn more about our new reality. Here, I’ll introduce you to some design principles and describe…
Hello, Uncertainty!
Like so many of us, I had a well-crafted plan for what I’d be doing right about now. In between traveling, speaking, and teaching at Columbia, I’d work on picking a sector of the economy that was poised for an inflection point and use some of the tools from my book Seeing Around Corners to…