Innovation Minute #26: Are You Playing with a Full Deck?

People know they need to play to their strong suit. But did you know that a team should play with a full deck; that is, a complement of people with different personalities/experiences that work seamlessly together? In this Innovation Minute, I start the conversation about organizational culture and collaboration. Be sure to watch the previous […]

Innovation for Mid-Sized Companies

I was recently interviewed by Chuck Leddy for the National Center for the Middle Market. We discussed, as you may guess, what middle market companies need to do in order to innovate and why it is critical. In addition to a written article (where I answer 9 questions), the page also includes a much longer audio […]

The Ignorance of the Masses Cancels Out the Knowledgeable Minority

Crowdsourcing has always been a popular method of problem solving. In a nutshell, crowdsourcing is when you ask a large group of people (the crowd) for their answers to a question. Polling and surveys are forms of crowdsourcing. Social media posts that ask for your opinion are another. And now companies are using this technique more and more […]

The Best Protection is Being Known for Your Innovation

best practices = copying someone else = plagiarism   Recently I discovered that someone wrote a 1,000 word article that included passages lifted straight from my book, “Best Practices are Stupid.” The examples were the same. The language was the same. The only original part to the article were the first two lines. After that it […]

My Amazing Race to Brazil

Have you ever had a trip that felt more like you were a contestant on The Amazing Race? That was the case for me a few weeks back when I was scheduled to be the keynote speaker in Brazil at a marketing conference for 1,500 people. This turned out to be an adventure that looked […]

My D’Oh Moment!

It is so difficult to see our own blind spots, which is why clients hire me to help illuminate theirs. Of course that’s stating the obvious since if we could see them they wouldn’t be blind spots! So let’s call them “missed opportunities that are right in front of our noses” – or MOTARIFOON. Sadly […]

Themes for the New Year

It is that time of year. Many of you created your New Year’s Resolutions last week. And although we are less than 2 weeks into the new year, I suspect that many of you have already failed in keeping your resolution. This would not be surprising as a study I conducted showed that only 8% of people are […]

How “The Gun That Won the West” Was Invented

I was recently listening to an old-time radio broadcast and heard a commercial that ran back in 1959. It shared the story of how the Colt Revolver was invented. As it is told, when he was younger, Samuel Colt, was fascinated with gun powder and weapons. However, he was dissatisfied with the “one-shot” pistols that were […]

Donglegate is Hype

[see update below] I received my new MacBook Pro 13″ the other day. I was both excited and hesitant. I’ve had my old 2010 unibody MBP for a number of years and it has served me really well. I maxed out it memory and added a 1T SSD. It is great and relatively fast for […]

7 Disruptive Forces

I was recently asked by a European magazine to provide my list of the most disruptive companies of 2015/2016. I thought about it and struggled to answer. For me, companies don’t disrupt; platforms, industries, and other macro forces do. Given that I provided my top 7 disruptive forces… Peer-to-peer – This is causing disruption to all […]