When You Hire on Price You Pay For It
Red Adair, the oil well firefighter, once said, “If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” Over the years, I’ve learned this the hard way. When I’ve hired freelancers based primarily on price, the quality suffered. I paid dearly in terms of iterations and […]
What to Ditch to Improve Your Life and Business
You’ve heard it before: To get more done, work smarter, not harder. One business innovator reveals what 3 things you can eliminate to help you do just that… For the past year, I’ve been experimenting with the concept of working less by telling myself that I only have one hour a day to get things […]
Webinar with InnoCentive
For those of you interested in making internal collaboration a reality within your organization, I am conducting a free webinar in conjunction with InnoCentive, the premier open innovation platform. Although some of the content will be similar to what I have presented in the past, there will be some new content specific to internal cultural […]
Line Thinking at 3M
From my experience, 80% of innovations within most companies are “dot solutions.” That is, innovations are typically developed by individuals from a single domain of expertise. Deep expertise is valued. Dig deep wells. (for more on my perspectives on dot vs line thinking, please read my article from a while back – this is a […]
Book Review by Gartner
Jake Sorofman, a Research Director at Gartner, just reviewed “Best Practices Are Stupid.” His review started… Don’t let its compact size—or snarky title—fool you. It’s a worthwhile read. Unlike so many other books in this particular genre, it doesn’t disguise otherwise straightforward concepts with overwrought explanation. Shapiro gets straight to the point with 40 often […]
Avoid Technology for the Sake of Technology
It seems that all too often, innovation has become synonymous with technology. I was recently working with a company that had a number of challenges they wanted to solve. Most of them looked something like this… “How can we use big data in order to better understand customer needs?” Of course, this is a common […]
Free Quick Reference Card
On my Monday July 22 at 11AM EDT free webinar, I will be giving attendees my latest creation: The 10x Innovation ROI Quick Reference Card. This 2-page checklist summarizes four important innovation concepts: Ask the Right Challenge [FOCUS] Frame Challenges the Right Way [FRAME] Ask the Right People for Solutions [FIND] Treat Innovation as an […]
Do Not Develop Breakthrough Innovation
A client recently asked me why large companies never develop “breakthrough” innovations, and instead rely on buying small companies or licensing their technologies. He felt that the game changing innovations were always the result of someone “tinkering in a garage,” like Michael Dell or Mark Zuckerberg. He wondered how his organization could replicate the innovation […]
Types of Crowdsourcing
Today’s Wednesday Work Wisdom… Yesterday I spoke at an event called Crowdopolis. The topic was crowdsourcing. This has become one of the hot buzzwords in business. Companies of all sizes are dipping their toes into crowdsourcing. But what is it really? Well, crowdsourcing is a lot of different things and can’t easily by lumped into one small […]
Innovating Masterminds (transcript)
Here is a transcript of yesterday’s Monday Morning Movie… When I started my business 12 years ago, one of the first things I did was join a mastermind group. Basically “mastermind” is just a fancy word for a group of people who come together that work on each other’s business. So we learn from each […]