In 1990, Peter Senge, rocked more than a few organizational worlds when he wrote, The Fifth Discipline. Senge is the Director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Harvard Business Review identified The Fifth Discipline as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years.
Innovation is a one the great Rorschach words. Nearly everyone defines it a bit differently. It has been overused, (293,000,000 results on a single Google Search) over-hyped, and often misunderstood. At Solution People in Chicago, leading innovation coach Gerald Haman defined it as simply as "ideas that create value."
Imagine for a moment that you are a newly-minted executive coach. Now suppose your first clients were the three most recent U.S. Presidents - Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Now imagine how you would approach each of them. They all possess distinctive and powerful positive strengths and equally compelling weaknesses.
Just for the sake of argument, let's say that on both the public stage and in private rooms, we haven't raised the level of oral argument and rhetoric in general. While often used in the pejorative, rhetoric is rightfully defined as the "art of influence, friendship, and eloquence - and "it harnesses the most powerful of social forces, argument."
When the idea first appeared on my radar, it had me at hello. The term was "choice architecture." Admittedly, the phrase may not leap off the page; it has at its core, a compelling insight about human behavior. I discovered the idea in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's excellent book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
There is often a business process de jour - an idea or method that is adopted and then often discarded as other ideas fill the "newest" gap. Gary Klein's Premortem concept is one of those ideas that deserves a second and third look.
One of great revelations of behavioral economics is the study of how people actually behave rather than how we think they should behave. A classic example is shrouded in a term that might make your eyes glaze over -- the theory of relative positioning.
Recently, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor talked with Charlie Rose to discuss her new memoir, "My Beloved World." There was moment in the interview about 12 minutes into the interview that resonated with me. It was an answer to Rose's question "Have you had great mentors?" She answered simply and confidently: "Tremendous mentors.
"In the effort to create a personalized web experience, data is the driver. And companies who mine that data are in the driver's seat." Marty Baker On July 30 2010, Julia Angwin -- the award-winning investigative journalist at The Wall Street Journal - pried open window on the invisible side of the web.
Arthur Miller created the archetype of the insecure, self-deluded traveling salesman in his Pulitzer-Prize winning play, Death of a Salesman. I have my own Willy Loman story. When I was in high school, I earned extra money by lugging around a sample case of candles and selling door to door.
Everyone was confident that A Charlie Brown Christmas was going to be a hit, right? Not CBS in 1965. Network executives were not at all keen on several aspects of the show, forcing Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and producer/director Bill Melendez, to fight to preserve their vision.
This may be one of my favorite spots. I was able to get Jim Kirby and Marvin Kaplan (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World) in the same room along with two other talents to create a mutual boasting session about banking. Boaster's Club. Starring Jim Kirby and Marvin Kaplan written and produced by Marty Baker.
Here is a continuation of Part 1 with a radio spot called Birds starring the great Alan Barzman wr...
Here is the continuation of Part I with a spot written and produced (and starring) my old ment...
If there is a media food chain, radio has probably plummeted just slightly above carrier pigeon and skywriting. But there was a golden age of radio and a golden age of radio commercials. Surprisingly, there is a very small family tree for some of the funniest radio commercials ever created.
Bill Taylor turned a passion for business ideas into one of publishing's great success stories - Fast Company Magazine. Recently, I met Bill at BIF-8 and he talked about passion (idea) brands. His talk was an extension of a company he profiled in his terrific book, Practically Radical.
I recently met one of my favorite innovation/design thinkers - Dave Gray. Dave is the author co-author of Game Storming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers.He just published The Connected Company with Thomas Vander Wal. Gray has a remarkable facility to make the complex more approachable.
Shakespeare is a right of passage for virtually every student and not always a welcome one. The language is aracane and unfamiliar. But it is this language -- florabundant and ingenious that continues to fascinate. In his collected works, he used over 21,000 separate words.
My friend Corinne Miller wrote a Change This Manifesto a few years ago that's as relevant (or even more so) today. It's called "Questionating." I have attached a PDF below that contains the entire e-book. I met Corinne at the Thinkubator in Chicago where she and Gerald Haman were developing the concept and working on a series of QuestionBanks.
Courtesy of the great Michael Michalko, I discovered The Phoenix Checklist in 1991 and have used it in Inotivity Workshops as a great method understanding and reframing a problem or challenge. Michalko is one of the most highly acclaimed creativity experts in the world and author of what I consider one of the best books on creative thinking techniques.
Most creatives in advertising have a curious relationship with Lurzer's Archive. It's equal parts love, awe, envy and unbridled bafflement. For those who aren't familiar with Lurzer's Archive, it's a magazine that curates and shows print ads, TV commercials and digital media from around the world.
That's a weighty and undoubtedly SEO unfriendly title, but let me explain. I once listened to a lecture by Joseph Ellis, the Pulitzer-prize winning historian, called Brotherhood of the Revolution. He artfully described what he called the "Liberal Recipe," as understood and practiced by the founding brothers.
Most innovations arrive in public in dress clothes. They are bangles and baubles that don't reflect the often-perilous road it takes to success. You also don't hear the words innovation and courage used together. If so, you probably haven't met Jeffrey Sparr.
If you wanted to find a single, defining "wow" moment at BIF8, chances are you wouldn't have to look beyond John Donoghue's amazing video of a paralyzed woman moving a robotic arm simply by thinking. It wasn't science fiction, it was science.
If you spend a few hours at BIF's annual summit, you realize that innovation is an equal opportunity, well, opportunity. Its remarkable bounty does not discriminate between genders, nationalities, race, or age. It does, however, require passion, persistence; and as storyteller and food critic, Simon Majumdar calls it, dumb luck.
