Big flashy billion-dollar investments. Leaders optimistically pronouncing totally unrealistic launch dates. Geeky engineers becoming the darlings of the moment. Yes, the story of Ford’s foray into autonomous cars has it all! The autonomous driving bubble… Read more »
Innovation Flops
When Business Cases Teach the Wrong Lessons
Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his great book “The 7 Rules of Power” declares that “success excuses (almost) everything.” Success also determines which stories about the origins of that success get told and which headlines are buried. … Read more »
Say what???? The optimistic launch and ignominious end of CNN+
The announcement that after an expenditure of something like $300 million, CNN was going to pull its CNN+ streaming service after just a month in operation sent shock waves through the media and entertainment ecosystem…. Read more »
Thought Sparks Wrap Up – August 2021
Dear colleagues, Welcome to the monthly newsletter, with a wrap-up of my weekly Thought Sparks and some things to watch out for in September. If you’d like to get the weekly Thought Sparks delivered right… Read more »
Thought Sparks Wrap Up – July 2021
Dear Colleagues, Welcome to the monthly wrap-up of my weekly Thought Sparks newsletters. A no-nonsense guide to measuring innovation mastery (July 6, 2021) What is it like to work in an organization that has attained… Read more »
Thought Sparks Wrap Up – June 2021
Dear Colleagues, We’re changing things up a little with the RMG newsletter! I’ll be summarizing my weekly Thought Sparks and pointing you to other useful resources as we go, Not Buying It – When your biggest… Read more »
Focus and the Mission Driven Organization; It Doesn’t Have to be So Hard
Nonprofit organizations are expected to deliver results on multiple fronts. The result can be a nightmare for prioritization. A simple framework that spells out the tradeoffs between mission, resources, advantages and impact can help sort… Read more »
The Inside Baseball of Corporate Transformation
Rita McGrath and Ron Boire Hired to transform a company? The odds are against you A recent McKinsey global survey found that only 26% of executives they questioned considered their efforts to address specific performance… Read more »
Looking forward to the mach49 Mothership Blitz on Friday
As someone who has spent much of my life watching organizations fall victim to what I call the ‘transient advantage‘ economy, I’ve always been puzzled that despite its obvious importance, large organizations do a lot more… Read more »
Why the failure of Google Glass Might be a Boon to Google
It’s official. The nerdy glasses with augmented reality and all kinds of image capturing technologies have been pulled from the market. Already, the pundits are dissecting what went wrong. It is indeed a juicy story,… Read more »
Tata Awards for Intelligent Failure
This blog post offers a nice description of Tata's awards for intelligent failure. Under the rubric "Dare To Try" the company encourages people to be willing to take intelligent risks. It's one of many company practices… Read more »
Questions from my webinar on Intelligent Failure
I just wrapped up a webinar on the topic of failing by design, which is the subject of a recent artilce in the Harvard Business Review. There were some quite interesting questions asked during the… Read more »