More than 50 years ago, U.S. President John F. Kennedy captured the world’s imagination when he said, “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” And thus, the term moonshot entered the lexicon as shorthand [...]
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There’s no harder job for a corporate leader than transformation. One key to success is recognizing that transforming a business involves three activities: Transforming the core business to maximize its resilience (“Transformation A”) Creating a disruptive growth engine (“Transformation B”) Building a mechanism to share capabilities between the two (“Capabilities Exchange”) Those three activities (detailed [...]
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When Karl Ronn recently said, “Companies that think they have an innovation problem don’t have an innovation problem. They have a leadership problem,” I listened carefully. I featured Ronn, a former P&G executive (and current executive coach and entrepreneur), in several places in The Little Black Book of Innovation, most notably for his rant against [...]
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Take a look at your innovation pipeline. Odds are it is overflowing with rich ideas brimming with growth potential… on paper at least. Look deeper. Identify the projects that are the most different and disruptive, the ones with the greatest potential to create new growth. How are they staffed? If you are like all too [...]
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The other week I met with the leader of a new growth business for a large Asian company. The meeting was miles away from the corporate headquarters. The leader proudly showed me around her office, pointing out how the open, energetic feel compared to the closed-door, corporate nature of headquarters. The young staff certainly seemed [...]
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Over the last three years I have consistently stated my belief that Asia was emerging as a global innovation powerhouse. It’s one of the primary reasons why I moved to Singapore in early 2010. In late 2011, I even wrote, “The overarching trend I continue to see is a shift in the world’s innovation energy [...]
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An acquaintance of mine (let’s call him George) is an acknowledged thought leader on a topic that the senior-most executives at a particular company had placed high on their agenda. But the middle managers who contacted George to give a talk balked at his regular speaking fee, instead treating him like “a silicon chip supplier.” [...]
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In my latest Harvard Business Review article, “The New Corporate Garage,” I argue that we’re transitioning into a new age where forward-thinking corporations that blend entrepreneurial behaviors with existing capabilities can have massive impact. The article is a call to arms for corporate innovators to seize the opportunities that only a big company can realize [...]
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There’s a popular ice breaker called Two Lies and a Truth — you state three semi-outlandish things about yourself and a group tries to guess which of the statements is true. The last time I played the game, I said that I was a professional software programmer at the age of 14, I pitched a [...]
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The other day I had coffee with a friend who was complaining about her company’s ability to innovate. “That iteration-itis post you wrote really hit home,” she said. “That’s just what my life is like. But you know, my leadership team is smart. And they’ve been hugely successful. So why are they doing things that [...]
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