Author Archives: Braden Kelley
What may have started with a question from @evanjacobs at Amazon.com’s 2011 shareholder meeting, ended with interesting commentary from Amazon’s CEO – Jeff Bezos – on their philosophy around invention, innovation, and risk taking. The key insights I extracted from Bezos’ response to the question about their lack of big visible market failures and whether Amazon is continuing to take bold enough risks are as follows: Continue reading
A recent post by Jeffrey Phillips titled Velocity is the Only Innovation Outcome That Matters sparked respectful disagreement inside me. I believe that when it comes to innovation, veracity is more important than velocity. Let’s look at the definition of the word veracity from our friends over at Merriam-Webster:
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Innovation is everywhere. Or at least the word is. CEOs talk about innovation, every technology company claims to be innovative (or to want innovative employees) and now we’re even seeing advertisements on television talk about innovation. Continue reading
As I was speaking with several of the innovation leaders at Intuit on their campus in Mountain View recently, it came to me that organizations should be seeking to build and strengthen relationships with their customers, suppliers, and other potential innovation partners in ways similar to their approach to traditional relationship marketing. Continue reading
We all know that innovation is about challenging the status quo. Because of this, there are many barriers to innovation that exist within organizations that try to prevent innovators from storming the castle gates and disrupting what is safe, comfortable, and successful. So what is an innovator to do? Continue reading
There is a lot of chatter out there about the concept of ‘failing fast’ as a way of fostering innovation and reducing risk. Sometimes the concept of ‘failing fast’ is merged with ‘failing cheap’ to form the following refrain – ‘fail fast, fail cheap, fail often’. The problem that I have with all of this chatter about failing fast is that does not take into account the power of language. The language focuses people on failing instead of on the goal – learning. Continue reading
When it comes to education, we should adopt Nike’s famous motto and ‘Just Do It’. In the United States (and probably many other countries around the world), it has become a popular pastime to complain about the state of the public schools. People complain about school funding, teacher performance, curriculum, class sizes, and more things than I care to remember right now. So what are parents to do? Continue reading
