Best Practices are Stupid. Data, Info, Insight, & Wisdom. Last Updated Jul 6, 2011 1:42 PM EDT While I was looking over my notes of my conversation with Ryan Kubacki, president of the sales consulting firm Holden International, I ran across this neat little definition of the "knowledge continuum. " According to Ryan, there are four levels of business knowledge:Level 1: Data. This consists of points in a domain, the sort of material that's typically provided as the result of searching the Internet or various data bases. Level 2: Information. But seriously, I think this is a clever model that maps out to how to think about all the data sources in your life. . © 2011 CBS Interactive Inc..
How to Spot Trends Before Everyone Else. Last Updated Sep 20, 2011 12:59 PM EDT My career has been winding and unexpected, but one thing is true: Each turn my career has taken happened because I spotted a trend. When you think about startups, and subsequent rounds of funding, each pivotal moment of the company usually hinges on an identified trend. So you need to get good at spotting trends. Here are three ways to do it: 1. Beach volleyball was essentially my first startup. 2. 3. Once I saw this, I realized that homeschooling is going to be huge. The first thing I did when I realized this trend was launch a blog about homeschooling, because I understand things by writing about them. I realized that public school is the best babysitting system in the world, but as an educational system, it's only effective for educating kids to work in factories.
Try to understand new, unpopular ideas instead of arguing against them. . © 2011 CBS Interactive Inc.. Why Innovation Is Really a Four Letter Word | BNET. Last Updated Aug 10, 2011 2:04 PM EDT "Innovation" is a scary word when it's aimed in your direction. Say you're looking for ways to improve your business; you know you need to be innovative, but then you immediately flash on an image of Steve Jobs and freeze. The word innovation tends to set a really high mental bar. But the bar isn't really that high. Finding new ways to improve your business is relatively easy. Don't think about being innovative. Pain. Here's the process. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Now think about something you would like to change: A constraint, a cost, some kind of pain point.
Find a pain and eliminate it -- that's all innovation really is. Related: Photo courtesy flickr user dno1967b; thumbnail courtesy flickr user US Army Africa © 2011 CBS Interactive Inc.. Don't Think Different, Think About Different Things - Art Markman. By Art Markman | 11:56 AM January 11, 2012 This post is about innovation. But before we get started, imagine the produce area in your local supermarket. Were you able to do it? That seems like a strange question to ask. Of course you could. Now back to innovation. When you need to solve a problem in a new way, you have two options. As I just showed you, pulling information from memory happens effortlessly. To get a sense of what I mean, consider James Dyson.
Instead, Dyson realized a vacuum takes in a combination of dust and air and needs to separate the dust from the air. To solve the problem, Dyson focused on its essence. You might immediately think, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Now, think about the core meaning of the first proverb. It turns out that if you practice finding the meanings of proverbs, you can get better at finding the same kind of essential definitions of problems you are trying to solve. Average Is Over. What's Your Extra? - Bill Taylor. By Bill Taylor | 9:05 AM December 19, 2011 I approach a book by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman with a mixture of wariness and anticipation. Wariness because Friedman’s books tend to go on for many pages longer than they need to, and many of those pages contain his trademark blend of Davos Man self-congratulation and cheesy metaphors. Yet I still have a sense of anticipation because in every one of Friedman’s books there are a handful of insights that are so clear, so sharp, so flat-out right that they frame how you look at the world going forward.
That Used to Be Us, Friedman’s newest book (written with Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum) has at least one such observation — a principle so clearly true, and so crisply expressed, that it should become a mantra of sorts for leaders everywhere who want to build something great and do something important. Most organizations don’t stand for anything special, of course. Talk about positive word of mouth. How to Come Up With a Brilliant Idea | BNET. Last Updated Jul 25, 2011 6:32 PM EDT By Caitlin Elsaesser In competitive environments, businesses need fresh, creative ideas to stay on top. Unfortunately, it can seem like coming up with a brilliant new idea is a matter of luck or talent -- neither or which you have, especially when you need it most. Brothers Kevin and Shawn Coyne think otherwise. In their new book, "Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas," the authors lay out a method for generating new ideas that anyone can learn.
Business owners often fail to come up with great ideas because they are using the wrong approach -- too broad and unfocused -- say the authors. While at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, Kevin worked on a project to improve the firm's own ability to generate ideas. In 42 of the 43 businesses, says Shawn Coyne, "the founder had asked a single question at outset -- or could have asked a certain question -- that would have led you to same idea. " Acknowledge your constraints upfront. Where do big ideas come from? COMMENTARY I don't know about you, but when I'm watching a football game where the kicker is about to attempt a field goal to win the game, my hands grip the chair, I hold my breath, and I wonder what's going through the guy's mind. When Michigan's Brendan Gibbons nailed a 37-yard field goal to win theSugar Bowl in overtime, guess what was going through his mind?
Brunette girls. No kidding, that's what inspires the guy. And it works. We can't all be great athletes, so some of us have to "win the big game," so to speak, with our intuition, our ideas. Which brings us to a subject of much confusion and debate in the business world. Actually, many so-called "left brain" or analytical people I've known over the years, including an awful lot of managers and executives, think the whole concept of some people being more intuitive or inspirational than others is pure mythology.
Where does it come from? For example, against all logic, Albert Einstein was obsessed with light. The team. Success. Use Jugaad to Innovate Faster, Cheaper, Better - Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, and Simone Ahuja. Don't Let What You Know Limit What You Imagine - Bill Taylor. One of the most perplexing features of these troubled times is that so many capable people in so many fields look so lost and ineffective. Whether it’s the stubborn inefficiencies of the health-care system, the ever-rising costs of the higher-education system, even the slow-motion collapse of the US postal system, leaders with unrivaled expertise and decades of experience can’t seem to develop creative solutions to dire problems. Why are so many smart executives so ineffective? One answer may be that all this experience is itself a problem.
In her underappreciated book, The Innovation Killer, Cynthia Barton Rabe, a former innovation strategist at Intel, explains how “what we know limits what we can imagine.” Many organizations, she argues, struggle with a “paradox of expertise” in which deep knowledge of what exists in a marketplace or a product category makes it harder to consider what-if strategies that challenge long-held assumptions.
Italy's 40K Books: No Paper, No Attention Span, No Problem. What Africa's Entrepreneurs Can Teach the World - Bright B. Simons. By Bright B. Simons | 1:03 PM March 5, 2012 It’s becoming ever clearer that entrepreneurship is the answer to the vexing economic questions facing Africa today: job creation, capital formation, skills acquisition, taxation-based self-sufficiency, quality of governance-demand, and of course social inclusion.
But how has it actually evolved in Africa? Are there peculiar features of African entrepreneurship we may consider relevant to big global debates on development and sustainability? I spend a significant amount of my time associating with a pro-business think tank that has been building an impressive database of entrepreneurs, small businesses, start-ups, and innovation-driven enterprises in Africa. Until recently, my attitude had been quite negative about both of these. I am now convinced, though, that the entrepreneurial driver behind talent churn in African labor markets actually yields significant net benefits for African economies. This was crazy, we initially thought.