When you ask why large companies have a problem building an innovation proficiency, you get back all the usual suspects: “We have silos.” “It’s nobody’s job.” “We’re afraid of failure.” “It’s unpredictable.” And what do all of these things have in common? Every single one of them is self-imposed. While there are some true barriers to…
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The Changing Business of People
HR has always wanted a seat at the table. That day may finally be here. Be careful what you wish for! HR Challenges in a Tour of Duty Context HR used to be pretty straightforward. People “ended up” in HR after starting in other careers, which I’ve always thought was a bit of an oddity—I…
Big Food and the Revolution in the Ingredients Business
The rules of the game used to be pretty simple for large food companies: Make massive quantities of tasty and inexpensive (if not particularly nutritious) food products, create memorable brands around them, and use their market clout to get them within arms’ reach of the everyday consumer. For my mother’s generation, the germ-free, safe, and…
Finding your arena – a new book and new toolkit
I was delighted to read Steve Blank’s great post featuring the work of my friend and colleague Marc Gruber. Marc and I have been colleagues since my days in the entrepreneurship program at Wharton and he continues with his research and teaching in this area at EPFL. Steve has recently discovered Marc’s 2017 book Where…
How to Stop Making Assumptions—and Start Seeing Around Corners
Last month, I was thrilled to attend Parliament’s PowerShift, a gathering of diverse opinion leaders, change-makers, creatives, and corporates seeking to find interesting solutions to some of today’s biggest challenges. At the event, I had the opportunity to speak with Peter Sims, CEO of Parliament, about some of the themes of my forthcoming book, Seeing…
Let’s Go Back to Boring Banking
After the Great Depression and through the 1980s, the financial sector was regulated to serve the rest of the economy. Today, it serves mostly itself. It’s time that changed. When even Larry Fink is talking about too much short-termism in our economic lives, you know something important is going on—perhaps an inflection point in the…
Taking a Human-Led Approach to Navigating Technological Change
With technology’s modern pace of change, how can companies (and humans) best adapt? In March, I had the pleasure of leading a workshop with Tracey Zimmerman, President of Robots & Pencils, to answer this very question and offer a few potential solutions for today’s executives. PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2018 Technology Industry Trend Report revealed that 61 percent…
How Inflection Points in the Hotel Business Change Where You Lay Your Head
In 1977, James Eyster, then a Ph.D. student at Cornell, published a book that would completely change the nature of the hotel business worldwide. His idea could not sound more boring—unless you saw the impact it would have. It involved the negotiation and administration of hotel management contracts. Eyster’s groundbreaking insight was that by using…
Final Thoughts From BRITE 2019
After beginning the day with talks on competition, social robots, and attention, and then learning about the power of simplicity, the banking industry’s existential crisis, and why machine learning is not vibranium, we wrapped up BRITE 2019 with a series of fascinating conversations. 1. We’re finally ready for XR. The third session began with Ori…
Machine Learning Is Not Vibranium (and Other Takeaways from BRITE 2019)
After a stimulating start to the conference, BRITE 2019 continued with a series of fascinating presentations that demonstrated the power of simplicity, reimagined the future of banking, and debunked some major myths around artificial intelligence and machine learning. These are the three biggest takeaways from the second session: 1. Simplicity pays off. Session two was…