Featured Guest: Jonah Keri, sports and stock market writer. He is the author of The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First. Download this podcast... More »
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Being an online media consumer in Canada is a lot like living your life with your nose pressed up against the glass of a really tempting candy shop. But instead of candy, the shelves are stocked with text, audio and video content to die for. This wonderful store we Canadians peer into, longingly, is usually referred to as The United States. Ooh, look! They've got an online radio station that will play music customized to... More »
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Editor's note: This post is part of a three-week series examining educational innovation and technology, published in partnership with the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. I have decided to spend the remainder of my career helping to replace industrial era schooling with educational structures better suited to our 21st century, global, innovation-based economy. This sweeping goal of total educational transformation may seem overly ambitious for someone whose work centers in learning technologies. However, in... More »
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As anyone with the slightest interest in the consulting business knows by now, the SEC has brought civil charges against Rajat Gupta in the Galleon insider-trading case. What makes the matter fascinating to industry watchers, approximately their equivalent of the Charlie Sheen supernova, is that Gupta served three terms as managing director of McKinsey & Co., from 1994 to 2003. Let us be fair to the man and the firm he headed. These are not... More »
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Singapore, although far from Silicon Valley, has a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem, and I've been impressed by passion and talent of its entrepreneurs since my wife and I moved here a year ago. The government plays a big role in the city's ecosystem — administering grants and programs that provide financial support for startup companies. Innosight benefits directly from one of these programs. Our IDEAS Ventures fund is a joint arrangement with the National Research Foundation... More »
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If you need to make an argument about an issue about which you feel very strongly, don't use rhetoric. Tell a story instead. For a recent example, think of how Representative Keith Ellison spoke to the press before hearings convened by Representative Peter King to investigate the radicalization of American Muslims in the United States. After making his case about why Muslims were being unjustly singled out by the hearings, Ellison closed his statement with... More »
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Several hours into the first day of our paddle down the Grand Canyon, we came to our first significant rapid of the trip, House Rock Rapid. To give you an idea, here is a 25-second YouTube video of a kayaker running the rapid. We got out of our boats — we were 15 kayakers and three support rafts — and scouted the rapid from the right bank of the river. So far, I hadn't been... More »
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Beyond the devastating and saddening human costs, the earthquake in Japan is another reminder of the complexity of the world's supply chains and the great interdependencies in global production systems. The world's supply chains are complex and highly optimized to deliver products efficiently at the lowest cost. They are characterized by a sequential mode of production where goods are produced in a series of stages in different countries by vertical specialists who pass them across... More »
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Over the last year, I've been doing a lot of research on how organizations will need to evolve to meet the demands of the 21st century. The central premise of this work is that new technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. The frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration — the ability to... More »
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Natural disasters, nuclear meltdowns, financial chaos, terrorist attacks, Gen Y liberal uprisings, counter-revolutionary clampdowns, sudden commodity scarcity, social media disruptions, emergent nation corporate competition, deep-sea-oil-well blow-ups, rising nations, falling nations — by now we know that early 21st century is different from late 20th century. But how? The answer is the sharp and unexpected rise of existential risk. Every half century or so, the risk assumptions underlying our economic, social and political foundations change dramatically.... More »
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Orchestra conductors are surely overexploited by management thinkers to describe what effective leaders do in organizations. They attract and inspire talent, strive for excellence, discipline improvisation, foster innovation, set pace, build and resolve tension, and transform potential cacophony into melodious harmony—all with unique, personal style. Riccardo Muti, the temperamental Italian conductor currently heading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is a prime example—one of a handful of maestros roughly equivalent, and often compared, to celebrity CEOs. Earlier... More »
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A few weeks ago, I was in Barcelona for a business trip, and I carved out one day to visit the city. I wanted to feel, if only for a few hours, the atmosphere of the Ramblas (the typical, animated and often crowded streets that connect Plaça de Catalunya with the harbor) and of the Barri Gòtic (the Gothic quarter). And I just had to see the Sagrada Família. The "Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada... More »
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Organizations are overrun with improvement initiatives, from infrastructure overhauls to sales programs. And they often add new ones, spearheaded by new leaders who want to make their mark. The good news is that new initiatives can energize people to attack organizational problems. But the bad news is that they have to learn a new improvement approach — one that can conflict with others that have worked in the past. The result: Employees get confused and... More »
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Oregon's Attorney General John Kroger has introduced a bill that would strip the tax-deductible status from donations made to charities that spend less than 30% of their annual budget on services over the course of a three-year period. The law is intended to weed out scams. And that's a problem. The fact that a charity spends less than 30% of donations on services doesn't mean it's a scam, and the fact that it spends more... More »
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Nick Morgan, CEO of Public Words, explains five key steps to engage any audience.... More »