No matter how great an innovation is, it is only useful if people notice it, understand it, desire it, acquire it and use (and reuse) it. To achieve this, we need to understand human perception, motivations, decision making and ultimately, influence behavior. Below, in no particular order, are my favorite eleven books that have taught me about human behavior. Why ...

What Did You Learn From 2017? Around the end of the year, most of us, and our businesses, tend to slow down just a bit from the normal dawn-to-dusk mad dash. We smile a bit more. We wave people in before us in traffic, and let others with less in their shopping carts go first in the grocery store. And ...

The path to success may be paved with dreams but navigating it requires more than wishful thinking. Abdul Kalam, President of India from 2002-2007, loved to talk about dreams. My favorite of his many quotes about them is, “Dream is not the thing you see in sleep, but is that thing that doesn’t let you sleep.” Indeed, I suspect the ...

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 ideas and insightful questions to ...

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 roles that we established and ...

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” — Albert Einstein You would think by publishing a book entitled Winning the Brain ...

The best way to combat a cognitive bias is to have awareness of its existence and how you or those around you will react to certain informational stimuli. In business, these cognitive biases can actually work in your favor as you provide people with justification for their shopping decisions.

Obviously the stock market, and more importantly, the economy in general has a big impact on innovation.   But whether or not it makes sense from a long term vision, investment in innovation is often one of the first places to get hit when money gets tight.  We have all got somewhat used to a goldilocks stock market. It’s not ...

The proper motivation… For a long time it was accepted that incentives, and specifically financial incentives, would motivate any type of desired business behavior. In other words–everyone has a price. There are two main types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within the task itself, and directly by the value of the benefit from completing it. Extrinsic motivation has nothing to ...

The world is filled with threats to your success, but the greatest of these is much closer to home than you might think. I’ve worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses during my career, and in all of those interactions one thing is the greatest determinant of success, the founders ability to overcome their own fear of achieving ...