We often find ourselves in a position where we need to influence other people. We might want to change their mind, to sell them on an idea or to secure their agreement to a proposal. A fruitful way to approach these situations is to use the three Greeks, ancient concepts that are proven to work. In my experience most people use only one of the three Greeks and they would be much more effective if they used all three. Continue reading
One of the most common excuses I run across for not innovating is risk aversion. Organisations don’t innovate because they’re risk averse, or so they say. But is innovation really so risky? Yes, a new idea might not work. But in many cases, not innovating is even riskier. Continue reading
A client asked me this question recently, and it has been much on my mind. The question, when boiled down, was this – we know the costs of “business as usual” and we think we know what it will cost to innovate. Often, the costs and uncertainties related to innovation block our innovation efforts. But we have no way of measuring the cost of failing to innovate. Is there a way to measure the opportunity costs of not innovating? Continue reading
In the quest to unlock innovation in organizations, it may be beneficial or even mandatory to learn how to unlock the internal children in our employees. I’m sure we can all remember as children being told “don’t” do this or you “can’t” do that, and the result growing up was to reinforce the idea that there is one “right” way to do anything. Continue reading
EMC has a number of data scientists that are part of EMC Labs China. They have been experimenting with different analytics packages as part of our efforts to characterize and improve the creative culture across our global innovation ecosystem. Continue reading
While a generation ago the focus among economists was shareholder value, it’s become clear that’s not enough. Businesses have a variety of stakeholders, including employees, customers and society at large. While it may be expedient to overlook such things in the short-term, companies that do will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Continue reading
