DISRUPTORS' ARTICLES
We often forget it is our people that really make innovation work. They determine the ideas, drive these forward to deliver them as new innovative concepts into the world. People connect the fragmented pieces or dots within innovation from being random and intangible, into being explicit and tangible. In the past, we have often believed…
In 1931, a 25 year-old Austrian named Kurt Gödel defied logic, literally, with his incompleteness theorems which proved that every formal system eventually fails. What made this discovery even more devastating was that Gödel himself was a logician and his theorems took the form of a logical proof. Essentially, he used logic to kill logic. Of course,…
Creative and collaborative teamwork will only take place if there is a high level of trust among team members. Trust allows members of the team to do three things that produce true collaboration. The first is to be vulnerable with each other, ask stupid questions, and propose stupid ideas. Without this vulnerability, team members are reserved and will keep…
If I were to ask you what your company/unit/team strategy is, could you answer in a single sentence? Is that even possible? And even if it is, why would you want to (other than to respond to some smart-aleck strategy facilitator)? I know it’s possible, and there are several worth reasons for stating strategy in…
Sick care is a wicked problem. By that, I don’t mean just scary. A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these…
We all have a bucket list, but what about your un-bucket list? Courage is not a personality trait; it is a discipline. I worked my way through college as a nurse’s aid in a spinal chord injury unit of a local Boston hospital. I had zero qualifications for the job other than being strong enough…
A few years back I published an article on LinkedIn on the The 7 Magic Roles for Creating Sustainable Innovation Culture based on my experiences in working for, building and putting to work effective innovation teams. What dawned on me recently is that what made those teams effective (or not) was not so much the…
A decade ago, Apple looked unbeatable. It’s launch of the iPhone completely revolutionized mobile phones and made good on Steve Jobs’ vision of creating a hub of devices that connected people to technology. What’s more, he did it with just a fraction of the research budget of other tech giants. Yet now Apple seems stagnant.…
“There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.†“But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has…
Back in 1997 some of you reading this were not even born, but Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple. It was 12 years since he had been fired from the company he had created with Steve Wozniak in 1976. At that point, one of the greatest marketing campaigns in the history of technology was…