You only need to look at any Apple product to understand our fascination with simplicity. The sleek lines, intuitive user interface and human centered design give us a feeling of power over our technology. You don’t need a complicated user manual to instruct you, you just pick it up and go. Unfortunately though, that simplicity is mostly a mirage. Underneath ...

The underlying premise of any organization is to create value. Historically, firms have done so through engineering ever greater efficiency. By honing internal processes, optimizing the supply chain and reducing product inventories, managers could improve margins and create a sustainable competitive advantage. That’s created a bias for simple, linear thinking. Adding extra variables to any process is bound to increase ...

There are always too many things to do, too much to work on. And because of this, we must choose. Some have more choice than others, but we all have choice. And to choose, there are several lenses we look through. What’s good enough?

The Holy Grail of marketing is to identify emerging customer needs before anyone else and satisfy them to create new markets. It has been a long and fruitless slog as emerging needs have proven themselves elusive. And once candidates are identified, it’s a challenge...

It was notable, to say the least, when Roger Martin recently wrote in Harvard Business Review that he thinks that all the talk about adaptive strategy is a cop-out. In his mind, it is just a way for managers to get out of making hard, dangerous choices.

Productivity generates profit. No argument. But it has two sides – it can be achieved through maximization by increasing output with constant resources (machines and people) or through minimization with constant output and decreasing machines and people. And the main pillars of both flavors are data, tools, and process.

Our society and workforce have been built on the premise of specialization, often dismissing the value of individuals who are perceived as 'Generalists'. With problems getting bigger and more complex than ever, specialists bring limited perspective and the lack of the capability to connect the dots. The result: problems are not getting fixed.

Finding success in these endeavors requires navigating a series of complex forces like garnering internal resources, defining decision making criteria, and avoiding the landmines of corporate politics just to name a few.

I have pointed out the importance of diversity for innovation and organizational adaptability. Diversity is a crucial precursor to serendipity. In the Power of Pull, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison emphasize the rising need for serendipity...

"Tomorrow's management systems will need to value diversity, dissent and divergence as highly as conformance, consensus and cohesion" -- a tweet by Gary Hamel leads Ralph Ohr into the importance of Innovation and Diversity.