Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

False flat is a term used in cycling and it refers to a situation that occurs when one is pedaling in what one believes to be a flat road. The mind is a funny organ an tricks us all the time. Faced with a perceived flat portion of a road, ideally in a sunny day in a California road with low humidity and no cars, the mind relaxes and perceives the challenge of pedaling the next few miles to be easy and consistent. We are basically seduced by our visual perception of the terrain. Said perception starts to change as the pedaling becomes arduous for no apparent reason and we start to feel differently. All the while the brain is still persisting in that this should be easy; it is a flat road after all. Is is amazing how a 1% to 3% incline, not readily evident to our visual sense, can affect physical effort and of course results over a long period. The longer the miles pedaled in such a section, the longer the struggle and the longer the dissonance. In my experience a very similar thing h

Recently my wife and I had occasion to reflect on the different levels of maturity that our children have to deal with as they go about their growing up. The discussion evolved, unexpectedly, to organizational maturity. Don't ask me how the leap happened, but it did. What makes the human drama so perplexing and interesting is that we are all very different. We learn differently, our brains are wired differently, we are different. Why should maturity be an exception with our institutions? At the end of the day our institutions (and dare we say "governments") are managed by us. In my eternal quest to try to understand how best to manage companies via an innovation imperative, I find that this maturity coefficient must be relevant and it will influence an organization's innovation DNA. A lack of maturity severely retards development and the generation of new ideas. Enhanced maturity allows for more openness, exploration and the generation of ideas (quantity and quali

The question of Face Book's new "frictionless sharing" was asked in a recent Trends forum in LinkedIN. My contribution to it is written below.  Yes, I consider myself a techno-utopian and believe that technology can help us immensely. Witness the emerging field of neuro-science and how it may be able to help us understand ourselves better and aid our poor decision making skills.  On the other side of the coin, I have witnessed how technology has atrophied our social abilities: call it our "social curation" abilities. Regrettably, I think Facebook frictionless sharing will exacerbate this trend. Like the author says: there is value on what our friends write or say and we base a lot of our decision on this curation from our circles of influence. Overall, I have mixed emotions about Facebook. It can be a great tool for communication but it can also blunt our humanness in ways we are only now experiencing. How many of us just "park" our friends in Face

I came across Nova Now on PBS yesterday and the episode had to do with the growing field of Neuro-Science and the different fields of research. An absolutely fascinating piece of content that everyone should watch and that profiles various scientist and their areas of focus. You have always wondered how magic happens? Well, now you will know: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/change-blindness.html My particular interest is in merging this field with business management and thus explore better ways to run ourselves and our institutions and also to pursue innovative ways of being. Who would not want more Steve Jobs, right?  There is so much to delve into, but one area that is interesting and applicable to my World has to with the perception of change.  There is a phenomenon called: Change  blindness  and it occurs in situations where we are so focused on one thing that we miss a larger event happening right in front us.  For more intriguing demonstrations, see   this website   main

Two separate and distinct events occurred to my wife and I as we were trying to help people with their specific causes. Please remember that I wrote help - as in going out of our daily routines and struggles to assist another human being with their specific idea and cause. In both instances the people that we were aiming to help (after getting their approval for us to do so) reacted in ways that were anathema to the situation. Both felt challenged and the basis for these feelings appeared to be caused by a sense of loss of control. In addition, both seemed to have reacted impulsively without giving the circumstances its due deliberation and thought. This got me thinking, and while I am not a psychologist, it occurred to me that as we live on the edge driven by economic  and social insecurities, we are reacting instinctively and protecting our "space" even when people are trying to help us. Or, is it a more profound issue, where people have lost their ability to distinguish

In keeping with the new digitally enhanced human behaviors, we must pay attention to how these behaviors are carried over to the rest of people's lives. This means that we must be aware of the "impatience" factor that has been accelerated by our digital expectations. I feel that as we adopt communication technologies with increased speeds - such as mobile broadband on our smart handsets- these accelerated expectations are being carried over to the rest of our lives. I can't prove this is happening, of course, but I can feel it and based on my past reads of emerging trends, I am probably right on this one. This is reflected in our increasing intolerance for "too much"; too much text on web sites for example, too much going on in car dashboards, too many TV channels, too much avertising. We are now processing more information faster than ever and - well - there is only so much we can retain. Recently, I experienced a more poignant example of this impatience

When understanding complexity gets too hard for our feeble minds, go back to basics; as in biology and other sciences. Here is an interesting deep thinking resource for all of us in the business of business. The Sant Fe Institute: http://santafe.edu/research/topic/robustness-innovation/

So, interesting report on how magazine reading on the Ipad is not holding people's attention. Not surprised. What is the first thing you do when you buy a magazine? As for me, the first thing is I do is bend it and flip through it back to front. I know, weird , right...The thing is a lot of people do this. Buying an "analog" magazine is akin to buying a toy (I feel) with all of the allure of the feel and physicality of if. In the digital world, consuming the magazine is more about consuming " content ", which in my opinion is a totally different experience and one that competes with all the rest of the screen consumption that we do. Not sure how to bridge the gap. Perhaps Apple in all its magic will be creating flexible digital magazines? Doubt it. Technology is a wonderful thing but is not all and it can't make up for the real world feel of...well, the real world.

I think the author of this piece and book is on to something powerful. Brain research is already showing that digital natives are using their brains in different ways. I won't go into how they are different, but if awareness is in fact our own individual cerebral projections (as some brain scientists attest) well then, maybe digital natives do in fact see and "use" reality in a different way. Case in point: research shows that digital natives are not so prone to own autos. Why? Simple, they are comfortable with having relationships on-line and thus are not compelled to buy cars so they can drive to see their friends. From our digital immigrant perspectives this is crazy of course, but herein is the challenge of innovators: we must have open minds and accept new realities however different they may be to ours. Back to gaming and in its defense; it is changing everything. Even the way we learn when you bundle it with story telling. The retention rates learning via these mea

Here is the genesis of this insight. I was sitting in a bar with a good friend of mine last week sharing some deep and non- chronic conversation about...you know, life stuff. That day I was particularly down due to a sequence of news events from friends and their latest struggles . So, my friend - who basically plays the role of life coach for beer and food - was asking me why was it that all these latest news were getting me so down. He challenged me to find the common theme from these different bits. After thinking about it for a nano -second, the insight came as it it had been waiting there for years. All the bits of information had to do with good, talented and really intelligent people having difficulties with bad management or - if independent like some of them - with getting themselves or their businesses going. So here it is: our social systems do not do a good job of "processing" talent. The system - whatever that is - lets us down all the time: We have the wrong p

It has been awhile since my last post. This is because that balance thing erred on the side of a lot of work for the last couple of months. Perhaps I need a ghost writer: Nah, I like the excruciating pain of putting thoughts into paper in a way that has some impact. It is tough to compete with the constant media stream hitting our brains now days, you know. In any case, here is the latest insight coming from a call I received from a friend of mine last night that was hired by a very large bank to create and run an innovation practice. She basically called to tell me that the bank was shutting the practice after about one year. I can conjecture a lot of reasons why this may have happened, starting with the "real" reasons the sponsor of the practice decided to start it in the first place. Was it a play thing for the CEO? Did he want to use it to drive others out? Did he genuinely want to create new products? Did he want to just capture new knowledge? etc... The first mistake