Why It’s Time to Become Your Company’s Chief Laziness Officer
Most of the work you do is not important and in fact slows you down… My first real job was working for a large computer manufacturer in their production control department. After two months there, the department head called me into his office and told me I was the laziest person he’d ever met. And […]
The Big Problem With Personality Tests
Just because your personality test seems accurate, doesn’t mean it is…. Many years back, while working with a client, I was asked to take a written personality test that was required for all executives in the company. Eight senior leaders took this test, costing the company more than $10,000, not including the time invested by […]
The Big Problem With Customer Satisfaction Surveys – and What to Use Instead
To gather real insights, you want stories, not surveys… Many years ago, I gave a 90-minute speech to 400 non-military researchers at the US Air Force. These scientists create planes and weapons for our military. The first 45 minutes of the presentation seemed to go really well. The audience was high energy, laughing when I […]
Why Your Own Expertise Can Be Your Enemy
What worked for your company in the past may be the wrong strategy for the long term… Many advertisements for investment opportunities warn that past success is no guarantee of future results. The reality is much worse than that. Past success may actually lead to future failure. In the 1960s, Sears accounted for one percent […]
The Best Way to Know if Your ‘Brilliant’ Idea Actually Stinks
“Yeah, but.” That’s the enemy of innovation. Right? We’ve all been told that we need to stop uttering those words and replace them with “Yes, and.” But what if “yeah, but” is not the problem. What if there is something more insidious–and less obvious? A bigger enemy of innovation is, “Wow, this is a great […]
Why Following Someone Else’s Success Can Lead to Your Failure
You attend conferences. You read books. You take training classes. All with the goal of learning strategies from those who have paved the path to success before you. But what if following in their steps could lead you down the wrong track? 3M talks about its 15 percent rule–a philosophy that allows anyone in the […]
Coming Soon! Inc.com Articles
If you visit this blog often, you will have noticed that I slowed my writing down a bit over the last month. That is because I just launched my new Inc.com column on innovation. If you want to read the article as they are posted, you can go to my author’s page. All of my articles […]
Start 2018 with a Innovation Retreat Week
How do you spend the first week of the New Year? For many, it is back to the grind stone, picking up where you left off in 2017. The new year becomes an extrapolation of the past year. My intention is to use the new year as a chance to innovate and create. Therefore, I […]
Why You Should Ditch Your Goals
10 years ago I write Goal-Free Living. The book as impacted more lives than any book I’ve written. But at the same time, it has remained relatively obscure in the scheme of things. When it was published, someone told me the book was a decade ahead of its time. It seems as though they were […]
So Many Websites Gone in the Past Decade
The other day I decided to check “broken links” on my website. Basically these are links from my site to other sites. In most cases, these were articles I referenced, books I promoted, or interesting people I highlighted. Since 2006, I have posted over 800 blog entries. ( I started my website back in 2001) […]