We all hear that innovation is a key to long term success. Be innovative and all will be well. Unfortunately most of the conversation about innovation is lacking in a process to ensure ideas appear, are evaluated, and the best actually get tried out and implemented. Recently I was part...

Many of the most disruptive events are unpredicted until they appear. Yet they change the world. Disruptive events can be hugely positive...iPhone, or hugely negative...HIV/AIDS. As you look back through history you see such events over and over. With hindsight the disruptive impact is crystal clear. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has...

In the last few weeks I made several international trips and so saw not only unending hours of fellow airplane passenger behavior but also how wherever I was so many were in their own impervious bubble. It's an odd phenomenon how at the same time we are able to access...

I often find great leadership wisdom in short quotes from great people. Perhaps part of their greatness is their ability to share their wisdom with so few words. Something to think about. As I sat to write this I noticed a pile of such quotes I've pulled out of various things...

Our brains have am amazing ability to delete information. In particular, we tend to rapidly, very rapidly, delete the memory of completed activities while remembering those that are uncompleted or interrupted. This was first investigated in the late 1920s by psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, hence the name...Zeigarnik Effect. At first this...

In a break from my normal musings, I'm offering some thoughts about my recent trip to Santiago Chile. As well all know, air travel has become among the most irritating, time wasting, and irrational things an executive can do. Yet, in spite of all the technology we carry around...

...a new idea was raised. Organizations are wonderful at building up their insularity, at raising a wall surrounded by a moat to keep disruptive ideas from getting in.  They develop their own conventional wisdom, their own collection of things that everyone knows. Since everyone knows these things, no one ever...

Forty years ago The Economist wrote the following while describing something said by Harold Wilson: "Like many of Mr Wilson's speeches it contained difficult passages in which it is impossible to disentangle what the words really meant to him from what they were intended to mean to others and what they...