Ignore All Advice

I decided to get with the 21st century.  Starting today, in addition to my regular writing, I will be recording videos for this blog.  Today’s video is a rant about a topic that has been on my mind lately.  Although, this covers content from earlier blog entries, I am going into a bit more detail […]

Best Practices Are Stupid Infographic

Sacha Chua, a “sketchnote artist and experimenter-at-large” from Toronto, developed this very cool infographic of my Best Practices Are Stupid book. And she was kind enough to allow us to share it under the Creative Commons Attribution License.  So spread the love, and visit Sacha’s site to show your appreciation.  (click on the picture to […]

Reframe Tedious Experiences

I have now spoken in 43 countries (#44 coming soon).  As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time in airports and going through security.  TSA Pre is amazing, and has sped up how quickly I get through the lines. One of the (many) nice things about TSA Pre is that you don’t have […]

Focus on Usefulness, Not Validity

About 10 years ago, I developed the Personality Poker® system. Since then, I gathered a mountain of anecdotal evidence supporting its value.  But one question remained in my mind: Is Personality Poker truly valid? That is, do the words actually measure what they are supposed to measure? Or is it just a fun game? To help assess […]

7 Ways to Outsmart Your Brain And Be More Innovative

You are alive today.  You were alive yesterday.  You were alive the day before that. This is good news from a survival perspective.  Unfortunately it is bad news from an innovation perspective. Your brain is wired to keep you alive. Your brain makes the assumption that because you were alive yesterday, what you did previously is […]

Stalin Was Right…Statistics Don’t Matter

Back in 1995, I was driving Accenture’s (then Andersen Consulting) business process reengineering practice. I traveled the world helping companies downsize. Although downsizing wasn’t the objective of reengineering, it was often the outcome. While working on one particular project, I knew that 10,000 people were going to lose their jobs as a result of our […]

Overcoming Writer’s Block

For the past couple of months, I have suffered from writer’s block.  I have not been motivated to write. That is until this week, when I wrote five articles in three days.  My rut has ended. Why? The issue stemmed from my inability to find interesting topics. More accurately, it was from my inability to […]

What is Your Deep Structure?

The other day I was speaking with a CEO who wanted me to help facilitate a conversation around the crafting of the company’s purpose statement. I asked her, “Why do you want to do this?” She explained that she wanted everyone on her team to fully understand and be aligned behind the purpose of the […]

TopCoder is Tops

TopCoder is one of the best-kept secrets in open innovation.  I had the pleasure of spending time with them.  They are a fun bunch that is passionate about what they do. After a full-day deep dive in their Connecticut offices, I traveled to Orlando to spend two days at their “TopCoder Open,” a competition they […]

3 Steps for Creating Leverage in Your Business

“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 into something actionable? Here are three methods I have used in my business to accomplish this: 1. Focus on what […]