leadership
leadership in a broad sense, including also management, entrepreneurship, innovation, business strategy Mar 3
Steve Jobs’s pursuit of perfection—and the consequences.
Evgeny Morozov: The IGod: Steve Jobs’s Pursuit Of Perfection—and The Consequences.
Brain scan: Taking the long view
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This is the second in a series excerpted from a new chapter in the paperback version of Good Boss, Bad Boss , a New York Times bestseller by Robert Sutton .
What Good Bosses Do With Bad Apples
Dodgy Coder: Every software project I’ve worked on has used the "Spanish Theory" of project management, and its likely yours have too
The "Spanish Theory" says that management's job is to extract the maximum resources (= developer effort) from the smallest amount of money (= developer salary). In practice what this often means for the developer is unpaid overtime (also known as "crunch time"), something very familiar to game developers, and also common in traditional software development, as the project nears its deadline. But those unpaid hours are actually costing you, the developer, because you can't get them back.Posted on | February 9, 2012 | 5 Comments Over the last year or so I’ve worked with a few large organizations to solve product strategy issues. Typically, the organization is working to introduce a new product line or concept to the market, and sometimes they have already entered the market but don’t have a clear understanding of what stands between the product and financial success.
Lean Startup, Big Company: Challenges and Recommendations | You Can Change It Later
Going to Harvard means I have the amazing opportunity to be around a lot of smart people. Now, when I say “smart people,” I don’t mean that guy who always wins trivia night.
tommy's tenacious tumblr | What I've Learned About Smart People.
What will the digital world look like in ten years? The trends are already clear. Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path. The explosion in the volume of information and number of devices will persist. Our data will be linked and most likely be processed in qubits rather than bits.
Our Emergent Digital Future
I am not intentionally a business person. Over the course of my career to date I’ve worked at companies of various sizes, and have been situated at commensurately varying distances from the concerns of running a business: funding, sales, forecasting and planning, marketing, payroll, legal matters, and so forth. In that time, I’ve developed an interest in the mechanics of business. It seemed prudent to know where my paycheck was coming from. Still, I got to keep my distance from the “business stuff”. Being now a co-founder of a startup has made it difficult to stay impartial when considering how businesses work, how they succeed, and how they fail.
On Business Madness
Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs'
Tuesday, 14 February 2012 What is Apple at heart: a software company, or a hardware company? This is a perennial question. The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither.
10 February 2012 Last updated at 00:04 GMT By Tom Austin Vice president, Gartner Hive mind: Working around the clock in hyper-connected 'swarms' - is this the future of work? As part of our Future of Work series running throughout February, we asked some experts to give us their take on how the way we work is going to change. Tom Austin, vice president at Gartner, has been a Gartner Fellow for a decade.
Viewpoint: Gartner on the changing nature of work
Two years ago this month, Apple Computer released a small, sleek-looking device it called the iPod. A digital music player, it weighed just 6.5 ounces and held about 1,000 songs. There were small MP3 players around at the time, and there were players that could hold a lot of music.
The Guts of a New Machine - NYTimes.com
The Science of Serendipity
As disruptive technologies and business models challenge established companies and even jeopardise industries, innovation has shifted from a competitive advantage to a competitive imperative. The good news is that innovation is a business discipline; it can be broken down into its component parts, analysed and taught. While every innovation strategy is unique to the company it serves, there are some key leadership behaviours every senior executive can use. Create an honest innovation agenda – and don’t do it alone Companies that want to innovate successfully first have to define why they want to innovate. This requires taking a very hard look in the mirror and opening the organisation to some honest forensic work.The Eight Pillars of Innovation
The greatest innovations are the ones we take for granted, like light bulbs, refrigeration and penicillin. But in a world where the miraculous very quickly becomes common-place, how can a company, especially one as big as Google, maintain a spirit of innovation year after year? Nurturing a culture that allows for innovation is the key. As we’ve grown to over 26,000 employees in more than 60 offices, we’ve worked hard to maintain the unique spirit that characterized Google way back when I joined as employee #16. At that time I was Head of Marketing (a group of one), and over the past decade I’ve been lucky enough to work on a wide range of products. Some were big wins, others weren’t.by Chris Zook | 12:00 PM February 2, 2012 The softly drifting snowflakes that greeted me every morning at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year were an inadequate warm-up for the cold blast of reality I felt in session after session during this five day Congress on the "state of the world." As I participated, one theme seemed omnipresent — that while events are unfolding in the world at an accelerating pace, increasingly complex institutions are less and less able to deal with them . I heard it in the opening remarks of WEF founder Klaus Schwab who talked about a growing phenomenon of "burn-out" among world leaders with finite energy and time to put against seemingly bottomless complexity.
Desperately Seeking Simplicity - Chris Zook
Is there any psychological truth to such metaphors for better thinking? Our research suggests that the answer is yes. When people literally — that is, physically — embody these metaphors, they generate more creative ideas for solving problems.