04 Wednesday Sep 2013
Posted in business, capitalism, complexity, consulting, future, innovation, society, technology
Resilience will receive a lot of attention as the complexity of our world increases. Below is a brief description of the logical correspondence between complexity and resilience, followed by a succinct primer on mechanisms of resilience. But first, a bit of history is in order.
23 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in business, knowledge, Organizational Development, philosophy, society
Tags
aspirations, Crowd Sourcing, Friedman, heightened awareness, hierarchy, higher purpose, horizontality, Leadership, the world is flat, Thomas, wisdom
It’s uncertain to me whether our recent obsession with horizontality started with Thomas Friedman’s flat world. What is certain is that it is picking up steam. The theme of the Internet and mobile technology facilitating asymmetric competition, empowering the little guy, and dissolving traditional barriers is pervasive in business literature – see for example Nicco Mele’s “The End of Big” and Michael Saylor’s “The Mobile Wave”. New business models such as crowd-sourcing and complexity science inspired ant colony organizational models combine with the literature to reinforce the horizontality orthodoxy.
Yet even as technology is dissolving the barriers that had prevented a “flat world”, the invisible hierarchy of human purpose and meaning remains as if not more valid than ever before.
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Tags
Decision Making, Heuristics, Human Systems, Humans, Implicit Knowledge, Life, problem solving, Science vs Art, Social Context, strategy
Life is not a sanitized laboratory experiment. It’s rather a messy ebb and flow that makes scientific precision a futile pursuit. The scientific method has its rightful place in the universe, but human affairs are more artful than scientific.
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in business, management, Organizational Development
Tags
Alignment, Consensus, convergence, democracy, Diversity, Experience, Leadership, mental models, Organizations, Thatcher, Totalitarian Regimes, Trust
I don’t believe in descriptive instantiations of leadership – and even less so in prescriptive recipes. Paraphrasing Thatcher’s “being a leader is like being a lady”, describing what leadership is or how it can be enacted defeats the very purpose.
11 Thursday Jul 2013
Posted in business, Emerging Markets, innovation, problem solving, society
I’ve written before about the huge pool of abductive reasoning in emerging economies and the opportunity it represents for western multinationals. This piece will explore the negative implications of that same mental resource for emerging economies themselves.
10 Wednesday Jul 2013
Posted in business, human capital, innovation
Tags
HR, human capital, Innovation, Mavericks, Reliability bias, Risk
About a month ago I argued in one of my blog entries that current HR practices’ bias towards reliability is killing innovation. This is a short update to provide further supporting evidence.
03 Wednesday Jul 2013
Tags
business, Empower, Hints, human capital, management, Organizational Development, Talent, value, wisdom
“Managing” true talent is a misnomer. Subjecting the truly inspired to rules is akin to plowing fields with Ferraries – yes it might just work, but it sure is stupid. Use the talented rather for creating the recipes around which the hoards of less inspired can be assembled and scaled. In the same vein, don’t compensate the truly talented by the hour or with a fixed income: you would in effect incentivize them to limit their imagination. Strategy and vision are holistic products, they cannot be bought or measured by the hour, and don’t bow to quantitative rewards.
So then how can you empower the talented? Here’s a few hints.
03 Wednesday Jul 2013
Tags
21st century, complexity, cost-reduction, DARPA, development cycles, Government, Lean, Resilience
I see two key challenges for 21st century governments: lean operations and resilient design. While based on fundamentally distinct mindsets, mastering the two practices would drive similar benefits, primarily cost-reduction.
26 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted in business
Tags
business, Communication, Decision Making, dos and don'ts, Entrepreneurship, lessons learnt, wisdom, work delegation
So you’re a new entrepreneur. Here’s some snippets of wisdom from my entrepreneurial experience in the form of DOs and DON’Ts that might help:
21 Friday Jun 2013
Posted in business, capitalism, complexity, design thinking, future, human capital, society
Tags
architecture, Buckmister Fuller, complexity, Design, Foundational Thinkers, specialization of labor vs. holism, Systems
:
I have just come across the incarnation into words of a beautiful positivist and humanist mind of the highest caliber: F Buckminster Fuller. Apparently he is 50 years ahead of my timid attempts at using the converged wisdom of complexity, design and systems to contemplate our society’s potential pitfalls and ways to overcome them. And so, my initial list of foundational thinkers (Ackoff, Jaques, Prigogine and Vester) has just been expanded. I will be studying the implications of Fuller’s profound insights in the near future, but, for now, here is a quotation that takes the duality of my caution-opportunity message in the discontinuity disorder and post-causality pieces even further:
“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. . . . In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war“. – F. Buckminster Fuller
The art and science of the possible 