A Talk On Fast Innovation, All In One Great Picture A couple weeks ago, I did a talk on "fast innovation" at IDEO. I gave the talk from a powerpoint deck, but at the same time, while the audience and I discussed the the talk, there was a guy named Kevin Bain who does this thing called "graphics scribing."
Updated Tue Jul 26, 2011
New York City Halts Teacher Bonus Program: Another Blow To Evidence-Resistant Ideology The New York Times reports that the school system has abandoned their teacher bonus system because it is ineffective.
Updated Tue Jul 19, 2011
Is Your Future Boss Horrible? A 10 Point Reference Check Discovering the answers to these questions before you take a job can save you a lot of heartache.
Updated Fri Jul 8, 2011
How Many Pilots Does A 737 Need? Evidence-Based Management In Action I have been reading a lot about group and organizational size lately because it is a key issue for understanding the "scaling problem" that Huggy Rao and I are currently tackling.
Updated Wed Jun 29, 2011
Taking The Path Of Most Resistance Taking the easy way out--expecting instant results; not taking the time to engage with others; doing it on the cheap; expecting everything to go smoothly--simply weren't realistic or wise for would-be change agents. Examples of successful large scale change take pretty much the opposite approach.
Updated Thu Jun 2, 2011
Caffeine: It Undermines Performance On Collaborative Tasks For Men, Enhances It For Women I can't believe that I missed this study reported by BPS research last January. Way cool. It compared the performance of men working in pairs to women working pairs.
Updated Wed May 25, 2011
A Cool Neurological Explanation For The Power Of Small Wins Regular readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of the power of small wins, and following Karl Weick's classic article, have argued in Good Boss, Bad Boss and here at HBR that big hairy goals cause people to freak-out and freeze-up if they aren't broken down into smaller stepping stones.
Updated Mon Apr 25, 2011
Stanford Magazine Story on the d.School: David Kelley as Founder, Jedi Master, and Cover Boy The new Stanford Magazine just arrived and it has a fantastic story about the d.school called "Sparks Fly" and a nice sidebar on the efforts by Rich Crandall and others to teach design thinking in schools via their K-12 initiative.
Updated Mon Mar 21, 2011
Hope for HP's Culture The histories of the Stanford School of Engineering (where I work) and HP are closely intertwined. Most famously, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard were young guys, they borrowed $500 from Fred Terman, then Dean of the school, to start the company.
Updated Fri Mar 11, 2011
Kurt Vonnnegut on "Having Enough": A Reminder From the No Asshole Rule Yesterday, I was talking to a pair of very smart and very ambitious friends. As I told them, I am all for high performing teams, excellence in performance, and I love the restlessness that drives creative people at places like Apple, Pixar, and Facebook.
Updated Thu Mar 10, 2011
More Reasons Creativity Sucks: Creative People Seen as Having Less Leadership Potential Ever since the days when I was writing Weird Ideas That Work, I have been careful to point out various ways that creative people suffer in comparison to their less imaginative counterparts. My focus has been largely on the differences between doing creative and routine work (see this post on why creativity and innovation suck). Much theory and research suggests a long list, including:
Updated Tue Mar 8, 2011
Report: We Are More Creative When We Help Others, Not Ourselves There is an interesting set of findings from psychological experiments that suggest we see others' flaws and strengths more clearly than our own.
Posted Thu Mar 3, 2011
On the Temptation to Declare "Email Bankruptcy" The concept of email bankruptcy really hit home to me because my situation is similar to what Sherry Turkle describes. And it is no joke to me.
Updated Mon Feb 28, 2011
Ideo's David Kelley on Love and Money One key to David's success is that, before he starts talking to the person in front of him, he actually listens carefully and takes in their body language before offering a comment or opinion -- it is a rare talent, and one of many signs of his magnificent empathy.
Updated Mon Feb 14, 2011
New Study: When NBA Players Touch Teammates More, They and Their Teams Play Better There is a new study that shows the power of nonsexual touch among male professional basketball players.
Updated Mon Dec 20, 2010
Harnessing Ignorance to Spark Creativity There are many virtues of ignorance and naivete in the innovation process. Indeed, radical innovations do often come from people who don't know what has been or can't be done.
Updated Mon Dec 6, 2010
"Lend Me Your Wallets:" Research on the Link Between Charismatic CEOs and Stock Price, Featuring Steve Jobs I was exchanging emails the other day with Dave Ulrich, my co-author on Asian Leadership, and asked him what he was working on. He answered that he was pretty interested in the link between CEO actions and stock price.
Posted Fri Nov 19, 2010
Asian Leadership: A New Book With Dave Ulrich March, I joined Dave Ulrich in Singapore to lead an "executive roundtable" with the CEOs and heads of human resources from seven companies, which was convened by Singapore's Ministry of Manpower.
Posted Tue Nov 16, 2010
Narcissism and Creativity: Intriguing and Troubling Findings Two studies suggest that creative people that can't pitch need a narcissist on their team to sell their ideas.
Posted Wed Nov 10, 2010
More on Hard Times and Friendly Bosses I wrote a post a couple weeks back about some intriguing surveys that suggest the downturn may have resulted in better relationships between employees and their bosses. An article just came out at Human Resource Executive that digs further into these rather surprising findings.
Posted Tue Nov 9, 2010
