Leap year is an apt metaphor for what we must navigate now – exponential change in a world designed for linear evolution. Despite everyone’s hunger for finding some kind of stable new normal, it seems… Read more »
Thought Sparks
An Artist, An Author and an Inventor Go Into a Bar…
Peter Sims, author of the new book “Black Sheep: The Quest to be Human in an Inhuman Time” regularly convenes a group of artists, thought leaders, inventors, and authors to chat about how we might… Read more »
Could you benefit from Belonging to a Peer-to-Peer Network?
The old recipes for making a firm a talent factory have eroded. Executive development programs provided formal training specific to organizational levels, and employees were expected to remain with their organizations for long careers. Today,… Read more »
Why are so few people talking about the massive wealth transfer to women?
Until astonishingly recently in the sweep of human history, women in the United States had little control over their financial assets, and despite the reality that they make fundamental spending decisions, many sectors of our… Read more »
Thought Sparks Wrap Up – January 2024
Somehow, we’re already a month into 2024! It seemed that January 2024 was setting the stage for what is sure to be tumultuous year. Some of the trends we’re watching: Pending frameworks for the fractured… Read more »
Our lizard lateral brains and the exponential world we’re confronting
Human brains were designed for a world of lateral change. But, as Ray Kurzweil and others remind us, learning-by-trial-and-error systems introduce the potential for exponential change. This has huge implications for how we design and… Read more »
Anticipating today’s smart devices – in 1999!
In the late 1990s, my colleague and I were invited to write a book which eventually became “The Entrepreneurial Mindset.” I had reason to go back and revisit some of what we wrote about then,… Read more »
Fighting Back against the algorithms – Community and the redemption of Taylorism?
As algorithms have come to dominate the lives of gig workers, treating many like poorly performing robots, community structures are emerging that allow workers to spontaneously organize – and create a potentially powerful counterforce. Piecework… Read more »
An inflection point comes for Pharmaceutical Companies
The Inflation Reduction Act for the first time allowed Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate with drugmakers for pharmaceutical prices. It also contained a much less discussed provision regarding patent protections. The law sets different exemption… Read more »
2023: The Year of Living Cautiously
It’s going to be a while before we truly make sense of 2023. A pervasive sense of uncertainty seemed to linger in the atmosphere. New projects got put on hold, once-exuberant tech companies laid people… Read more »
Thought Sparks Wrap Up – December 2023
The field of strategy, as I’m fond of saying, had its intellectual roots in Industrial Economics. That way of thinking suggests two assumptions that I think are often a trap, when used in the wrong… Read more »
WFH? RTO? Remembering the Allen Curve and Why It Matters Now
A robust scientific finding from decades ago mapped the richness of information flows against how far apart people sat at work. Called the Allen Curve after MIT’s Thomas J. Allen, who discovered it, it shows… Read more »