25 Tuesday Feb 2014
Posted in complexity, consulting, design thinking, innovation, knowledge, management, problem solving, strategy
Tags
Alignment, complexity, Criteria, Innovation, Performance, Peter Drucker, phase transitions, Portfolio, Qualitative Leaps, Quantitative, strategy
When people ask me what it is that I do, they often act surprised and sometimes suspicious upon hearing my answer: “I solve wicked problems with undefined parameters”; yes, really.
20 Thursday Feb 2014
Tags
Boss, Business Talent Group, Charles Handy, Economy, Elephants, Fleas, Freelance, hierarchy, management, Middlemen, Roger Martin, Talent
I ended my initial post on this topic with a pointer to the so-called “freelance economy”. In this post I want to take this thread further, as I think it can shed light into the future of employment.
What I was implying at the end of my initial post is that reducing or even doing away with “middleman” corporate hierarchies in a post-materialistic, fluid economy of ideas doesn’t lead to anarchy. Rather it logically leads to a “freelance economy”, a world where, in British management philosopher Charles Handy’s words, free-floating freelancer “fleas” service multiple corporate “elephants” following the need for their specific talents.
19 Wednesday Feb 2014
Posted in business, human capital, management, Organizational Development
Tags
Boss, Career, Corporations, Customer, Executives, Manager, Market, Middlemen, Performance Appraisals, Professional Growth
For all you hard-working, well behaved corporate folk out there I suggest you wake up from the illusion of getting ahead by meeting or even exceeding your performance objectives. You will get that occasional 7.5% annual raise and you may even get a bonus once in a while, but it’s all part of a linear revenue ascendance mostly eroded by inflation or even wiped out by the occasional Wall Street black swan that dissolves your wealth.
18 Tuesday Feb 2014
Posted in Crisis, future, human capital, learning, society, technology
Tags
Answers, Conspiracy Theory, effectiveness, Efficiency, Idiosyncrasies, Machine, Questions, Recruitment, Skills, Society, Talent, Technology
Conspiracy theories vs. idiosyncrasies
I for one am no big fan of conspiracy theories. I see them as the construct of minds unable to grasp modern life’s intricacies. The fact that few of us manage to agree within the same family leaves me suspicious as to the proliferation of occult groups with the coherence to pull the world’s strings – that is assuming they would possess the means. I have however become convinced that society doesn’t need conspiracies to create its own self-imposed idiosyncrasies which in turn come with a hefty price.
17 Monday Feb 2014
Posted in capitalism, human capital, problem solving, society, taxonomy
Tags
creativity, Currency, Economy, George Gilder, Harvard Business Review, Knowledge, Liquidity, Money, Peter Drucker, Roger Martin
The road from the Renaissance to the iPhone might have taken much longer had the world not invented modern banking and finance. Money, an abstraction of value, is indeed a necessary precursor to globalization. It is also the source of systemic crises when the abstraction loses touch with the underlying value as when sophisticated financial instruments become self-referential.
13 Monday Jan 2014
Posted in complexity, design thinking, Organizational Development, technology
Tags
CES 2014, Common Sense, complexity, Design Thinking, Karl Popper, Network Theory, Organizational Development, Roger Martin, Technologization, Tools
With the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attracting worldwide media coverage last week, let me be the one to posit that technological innovation is only as effective as our mental models are able to keep up.
05 Sunday Jan 2014
Posted in democracy, future, human capital, society
Tags
2014, causality, creativity, Credo, democracy, Frank Lloyd Wright, If-then, Mediocrity, Progress, Society, Steve Jobs
From Ivy League scholars to country presidents, mediocrity permeates society’s highest echelons. Indeed, we remain defenseless against it in the 21st century. We are hard at work battling world financial crises, poverty and social inequality even as we produce mediocre leaders who proliferate populist, symptomatic, efficient but not effective “solutions” to these and other pressing issues. Democracy itself, the most advanced social construct to date, is no match for mediocrity. I propose keeping mediocrity in check is a much more effective way to go about our world’s progress. We would first need to understand how it evades society’s filters.
21 Thursday Nov 2013
Posted in complexity, knowledge, learning, paradox, philosophy, society
Tags
Absolute, Cosmology, divinity, George Box, Knowledge Funnel, Leonardo Da Vinci, models, Murray Gell-mann, Progress, Reality, Roger Martin, Singularity, Sistine Chapel, Truth, Universe
Roger Martin’s “knowledge funnel” is a very useful model for understanding the human pursuit of knowledge. Man contemplates a new mystery using intuition to infer causality, by trial and error arrives at an inexact approach that somehow seems to tame the new mystery before finally framing the new phenomenon with the objective precision of a rigorous formula. This is the process by which the vast unknown is distilled into bits of knowledge that our puny minds can manipulate.
13 Wednesday Nov 2013
Posted in society
Tags
Here are a few opinion-free, “pulp” observations of Vienna:
– people take the time to hang their coats on coat hangers and put their umbrellas in umbrella bins;
– it appears safe for small children to walk by themselves on the street;
– you have to pay attention to the writing on restaurant windows: “cafe-restaurant” is very different than “cafe-bar” or “cafe-lounge”;
– you as the paying customer of course have rights, but don’t assume you are the center of the universe;
– there are very few balconies;
– there is still a fascination with American gospel music;
– general dress code leans towards the practical;
– there are many boutique stores with various paraphernalia that seem to get foot traffic.
29 Tuesday Oct 2013
Posted in capitalism, future, human capital, philosophy, society
Tags
Capitalism, Communism, Harvard Business Review, Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx, Knowledge Economy, Manifesto, Umair Hague
Picture the time in which Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto emerged. The Industrial Revolution, unraveling in full force, was very much based on a materialist world view. Since physical resources are limited it’s only normal that someone, Marx or otherwise, would have signaled that a zero sum race for wealth will make some extremely rich only at the expense of others. And indeed there was some truth to that, as exceedingly ambitious industrialists seemed to have no limit to their greed. There’s no leap of logic required to arrive at the “class warfare” idea aimed to right the inequities generated by a zero sum game world. Accumulation of things, cordially known as consumerism in our time, was also decried by communists as a sickness of the soul.
The art and science of the possible 