Innovation Insights
by Stephen Shapiro

“Work smarter not harder.” This dreadfully overused phrase is meant to address the apparent lack of time, money and resources we experience in our work and personal lives. But how do we translate these words

If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness is sometimes its father.* Some of the greatest innovations were developed by people who were too lazy to do a particular task. Professor John Atanasoff, along

Think about this problem. You run an airport. It takes on average 8 minutes for luggage to go from plane to baggage claim. Customers can walk to baggage claim in one minute, resulting in 7

Richard Wiseman is the author of many great books, including The Luck Factor. I’ve spoken with Richard on several occasions, and we share a similar perspective: a myopic focus on goals can reduce how lucky

My next article in the series on success… You can mathematically increase the likelihood of your success when you are not obsessed with specific goals or approaches to achieving those goals. Let me illustrate this

Given my recent articles on success, I felt it was appropriate to dig up an old one (from 2007) which talks about how we never really know what made us successful…. A couple of nights

Best Practices Are Stupid is now available in Portuguese. One version is for Brazil and the other for Portugal.

In an earlier article, I discussed the Sliding Doors Success model. It is worth noting that there is a corollary to this: The Sliding Doors Failure model. Just as an opportunity can appear that can

This is the 5th article in a series on alternative paths to success… I was once told a story while working at UPS. At its Louisville, Kentucky, air hub, hundreds of thousands of packages go

This is the 4th in series of articles about alternative paths to success; ones that go beyond the traditional approach of goal-setting and years of hard work. Back in 1987, I was working for Accenture

Today is my father’s birthday. To celebrate, today’s blog entry is dedicated to him, and one of the (many) ways he helped me be more successful. This is the third in my series of blog

This is the 2nd in a series of articles on different paths to success… In the movie “Sliding Doors,” Gwyneth Paltrow runs to catch a train. If she misses it, she will miss an important

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