In 2004, I was managing a major news organization during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. One of the things I noticed was that thousands of people, who would normally be doing thousands of different things, would stop what they were doing and start doing the same things all at once, in nearly complete unison, with no clear authority guiding them.
What struck me was how difficult it was for me to coordinate action among the people in my company. I thought if I could harness the forces I saw at work in the Orange Revolution, it could be a powerful model for business transformation. That’s what started me out on the 15-year journey that led to my book, Cascades.
What I found was that many of the principles of successful movements can be applied to business transformation. Also, because social and political movements so well documented—there are often thousands of contemporary accounts from every conceivable perspective—we can gain insights that a traditional case studies miss. Here are four principles you can apply.
read more…
In 1900, most people lived much like their ancestors had for millennia. They lived and worked on farms, using animal power and hand tools to augment their own abilities. They inhabited small communities and rarely, if ever, travelled far from home. They engaged in small scale violence and lived short, hard lives.
That would all change over the next century as we learned to harness the power of internal combustion, electricity and atoms. These advancements allowed us to automate physical labor on a large scale, engage in mass production, travel globally and wage violence that could level entire cities.
Today, at the beginning of a new century, we are seeing similar shifts that are far more powerful and are moving far more quickly. Disruption is no longer seen as merely an event, but a way of life and the fissures are there for all to see. Our future will depend on our determination to solve problems faster than our proclivity to continually create them.
read more…
Today, everybody needs to innovate. So it shouldn’t be surprising that corporate innovation programs have become wildly popular. There is an inherent tradeoff between innovation and the type of optimization that operational executives excel at. Creating a separate unit to address innovation just makes intuitive sense.
Yet corporate innovation programs often fail and it’s not hard to see why. Unlike other business functions, like marketing or finance, in a healthy organization everybody takes pride in their ability to innovate. Setting up a separate innovation unit can often seem like an affront to those who work hard to innovate in operational units.
Make no mistake, a corporate innovation program is no panacea. It doesn’t replace the need to innovate every day. Yet a well designed program can augment those efforts, take the business in new directions and create real value. The key to a successful innovation program is to develop a clear purpose built on a shared purpose that can solve important problems.
read more…
In a recent New York Times column, Bret Stephens argued that the political opposition needs to “celebrate prosperity, not deny or trivialize it.” He has a point. We are in the midst of a historic expansion, with record low unemployment, rising wages and low inflation. That is something to celebrate.
However, what Stephens failed to address is that, in the midst of all this prosperity, there is considerable anxiety about the economy. Some of this anxiety can be quantified in statistics like rising income inequality, national debt, credit card debt and the fact that 40% of Americans can’t cover a $400 emergency expense.
Yet the problems go deeper than that. As I explained in Barron’s, our economy can be thought of as having two key activities, capacity building and maximizing that capacity to produce output. While we are clear producing a lot of output, there are worrying signs that we are not building capacity the way we should. We need to right the ship before it’s too late.
read more…
By 1980, IBM had hit an inflection point. It had already missed out on the minicomputer revolution. Now, with new, even smaller “microcomputers” evolving into a growing market, it was about to miss out again. So it set up a “skunk works” in Boca Raton, FL and, in less than a year, launched the IBM PC.
Today, at the end of the digital revolution, IBM is at a similar juncture. Yet its approach is the polar opposite than it took four decades ago. Rather than operating in secret, it is building a collaborative network to develop quantum computing. The reason: the technology is simply too complex for anyone to go it alone.
It’s not just IBM either. A recent report by Accenture Strategy found that found that ecosystems are increasingly seen as a “cornerstone” of future growth. In fact, almost half of the executives it surveyed are actively seeking to participate in ecosystems to create new business models. Today, if you want to compete effectively, you need an ecosystem strategy.
read more…
In 2013, a study at Oxford University found that 47% of jobs in the United States are likely to be replaced by robots over the next two decades. As if that doesn’t seem bad enough, Yuval Noah Harari, in his bestselling book Homo Deus, writes that “humans might become militarily and economically useless.” Yeesh! That doesn’t sound good.
Yet today, six years after the Oxford Study, we are experiencing a serious labor shortage. Even more puzzling is that the shortage is especially acute in manufacturing, where automation is most pervasive. If robots are truly taking over, then why are having trouble finding enough humans to do work that needs being done?
The truth is that automation doesn’t replace jobs, it replaces tasks and when tasks become automated, they largely become commoditized. So while there are significant causes for concern about automation, such as increasing returns to capital amid decreasing returns to labor, the real danger isn’t with automation itself, but what we choose to do with it.
read more…
Many say that coding is the new literacy. Kids are encouraged to learn programming in school and take coding courses online. In that famous scene in The Graduate Dustin Hoffman’s character was encouraged by a family friend to go into plastics. If it were shot today, it would have probably been computer code.
This isn’t actually that new. I remember first being taught how to code in middle school in the early 80s in BASIC (a mostly defunct language now). Yet even today, coding is far from an essential skill. In fact, with the rise of no-code platforms, there is a strong argument to be made that code is becoming less important.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of coding to be done on the back end and programming is certainly a perfectly reasonable thing to learn. However, there’s no reason people need to learn it to have a successful, productive career. On the other hand writing, as well as other communication skills, will only become more important in the decades to com.
read more…
Summer is finally here! Time to break out the sunblock, beach towels and get some time to relax. If you’re anything like me, it’s also a time to get some serious reading done. There’s just something about laying out in the sun that makes the pages turn faster and helps information to sink in.
This summer, I have a feeling that change will be on a lot of people’s minds and not just political change. Revolutions in technologies, from clean energy to genomics to artificial intelligence, are reshaping the world as we know it. The disruptions over the next decade will likely dwarf those in the last.
In some ways, the forces of change today are unprecedented. We’ve likely never had so many powerful forces swirling around at the same time. You would have to go back to the turn of the 20th century to find anything remotely similar. However, we can learn a lot from those who came before us. So I offer you these 17 books that will help you chart a path forward.
read more…
Ever since Eric Reis published his bestselling book, The Lean Startup, the idea of a minimum viable product (MVP) has captured the imagination of entrepreneurs and product developers everywhere. The idea of testing products faster and cheaper has an intuitive logic that simply can’t be denied.
Yet what is often missed is that a minimum viable product isn’t merely a stripped down version of a prototype. It is a method to test assumptions and that’s something very different. A single product often has multiple MVPs, because any product development effort is based on multiple assumptions.
Developing an MVP isn’t just about moving faster and cheaper, but also minimizing risk. In order to test assumptions, you first need to identify them and that’s a soul searching process. You have to take a hard look at what you believe, why you believe it and how those ideas can be evaluated. Essentially, MVP’s work because they force you to do the hard thinking early.
read more…
I recently bought a book that I was really excited about. It’s one of those books that’s created a lot of buzz and it was highly recommended by someone I respect. The author’s pedigree included Harvard, Stanford, McKinsey and a career as a successful entrepreneur and CEO.
Yet about halfway in I noticed that he was choosing facts to fit his story and ignoring critical truths that would indicate otherwise, much like Malcolm Gladwell’s often does in his books. Once I noticed a few of these glaring oversights I found myself not being able to fully trust anything the author wrote and set the book aside.
Stories are important and facts matter. When we begin to believe in false stories, we begin to make decisions based on them. When these decisions go awry, we’re likely to blame other factors, such as ourselves, those around us or other elements of context and not the false story. That’s how many businesses fail. They make decisions based on the wrong stories.
read more…
