Overview: Innovation Strategy

"My advice: Jump headfirst into AI with everything you’ve got."

Is your organization more like a jellyfish or a flatworm?The author's "Jellyfish and Flatworm story has been remarkably effective at helping ... [executives] visualize the impact of AI on their customers, their products, and their employees... this story is about why Knowledge Representation (KR) must be the core of any cost-effective lo…

insights into the complex relationship between AI and knowledge work, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of AI's role in enhancing productivity and quality in different task domains - Harpa

"effectively deploying these capabilities for our organization... build skills, processes, and structures to effectively leverage these tools’ advantages:"identify processes benefiting from LLMs (content)implement processes to ensure content accuracy, security"identify roles that will be displaced and identify upskilling" requi…

"But all good comes with new risks. With conversational AI, this includes data leakage, IP ownership conflicts and reproducibility requirements. Team members must be aware ... how and when to use it and the corporate policies around appropriate use... key questions your organization should be asking:"what can(not) you ask an AI tool?how …

Systems with Design from Trust: assume most (not all) people have good intent."initially feel counterintuitive, even risky...social: they rely on human relationships. appealing: once you wrap your head around them, you want more."The discomfort is a symptom of how today's default setting is mistrust: "we’ve internalized the ass…

Liberating Structures is a pattern language that "provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices... [which are] either too inhibiting (presentations, status reports and managed discussions) or too loose and disorganized (open discussions and brainstorms) to creatively engage people ... to…

"forecasting the future is a complex and absolutely critical job. So how do you do it—and what comes next?"Fascinating series of short interviews with futurists. Some selected quotes:"When it comes to the future, you have two choices: ... build a great big wall to keep out all the bad news. Or you can build windmills and harness the…

Analysing the impact of cultural diversity on corporate performance by feeding half-million Glassdoor reviews through a "Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling" machine learning algorithm: "the “bag of words” approach... inductively infers categories... a statistical model that looks for words that tend to co-occur."Step 1:…

the GEM framework... to deliver value ... the company must never lose sight of ... growth, engagement, and monetization.... Growth is all about how a company finds new users or customers.... getting the right message in front of people who need what you have... “external triggers.” ... delivered through various channels.... The growth question to…

managers always have to balance the merits of teamwork... with the dangers of “groupthink”... Large groups are remarkably good, on average, at estimating such things as the number of beans in a jar or the weight of a prize calf. But that accuracy relies on the guesses being independent.... Modern communication methods mean that collaboration is mo…

In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them.... They often procrastinate, and that's how they incubate ideas.... Their parents focus more on values than rules... One of the risks is, you know, you have everybody marching in a different…

ad-hoc collaboration alienates top contributors, gobbles up time, and makes organizations less effective... an exhaustive study from the Harvard Business Review just revealed that, far from a panacea, collaboration is actually productivity poison. Here are some of the frightening highlights:... 3. Collaboration tends to foists work from the incomp…

EUrope’s success in eliminating mobile roaming charges may be the first “data4policy” case study where the data was website traffic, and illustrates the rewards of allowing innovation to flourish at the edges of large organisations.

Venting my spleen a little over on Medium.

becoming a learning organization was nothing like winning a marathon ...cultivating an award-winning orchard... nurturing systems and culture to produce meaningful results... We embarked on a systematic and phased approach to cultivating the organization we all wanted.

not necessarily easy to get buy-in from the organization... different parts of the organization are responsible for their own little bits so you can’t always do it within your own team.

as CEO... your power and privilege leave you insulated... from information that might challenge your assumptions and allow you to perceive a looming threat or opportunity. Ironically, to do what your exalted position demands, you must in some way escape your exalted position... at firms that are highly successful innovators, leaders are especiall…

“We want to believe that we are thinking, rational people and on occasion tangle with emotion... The truth is we are emotional beings who on occasion think.”... Holacracy has been criticized for putting a disproportionate focus on process... pushing Zappos employees to operate in a way that goes against their very human nature... The overwhelming …

the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science. Perhaps nothing captures this dichotomy better than the story of the Higgs discovery... Almost 3,000 people qualify as authors on the key physics papers ATLAS produces... easier to guard against bias in interpreting the data The depth and breadth of this effort transform the act of discov…

TL;DR: because you think it’s a solution in itself, while it’s merely a framework for organizations to create them in an efficient and controlled manner.

an edge is not just a term for advantage itself; it can also be the place where you can find that advantage... the outer rim that frames what you do and separates it, quite conveniently, from what you don’t... When you proceed beyond this border in business, the main thing that changes is risk. they are the places where the inside and the outside…

a new role that I believe will become more and more important: the Minister of Culture.WARNING: REAL CONTENT AHEAD! This essay links to most of the best research on culture. ... I’ll also show how to generate a culture score for your company and improve it. ... a full 3-6 month course on culture ... Don’t think of this as a long post — think of it…

In this week’s edition, two new social media products in one week; a few good longreads for the weekend; and more stuff for your online toolbox.

Huge longform exposé - don't know whether to be impressed, amused or horrified: "... what did it mean for an online retailer with annual sales of more than $1 billion, that fills 280,000 orders per week, to be “self-organized”?... Holacracy is ... just one example of a growing movement... that seeks to apply insights derived from evolutionar…

A great manager is someone that pushes you to fulfill your own potential. What you if you could do that for yourself? ... ... develop a strong understanding of your areas for growth and regularly invite ... feedback on your work? Would your team mates be willing to hold you accountable ... What if you invited coworkers to surface tensions direc…

The absence of hierarchy does not necessarily mean no structure. - Holacracy vs. Hierarchy vs. Flat Orgs — Holacracy — Medium

"A large part of corporate economic activity today is still designed to accomplish what high market transaction costs prevented earlier. But the world has changed... coordination can be performed without intermediaries with the help of new technologies. Digital transparency makes responsive coordination possible... Apps can now do what manag…

Another advocacy piece on holacracy, because "Getting rid of hierarchies might just save the human race" - You Don’t Need a Manager — Work: Reimagined — Medium

If you ever wondered why meetings so often lead to the wrong decision ... "... we are wired in certain ways ... that can block groups from processing information effectively, which leads to bad decisions... Gilbert explains how to use diversity and inclusion to get better results from product ideation efforts... One of the most fundamental …