09 Sunday Mar 2014
Posted in business, design thinking, management, strategy
Tags
Analytics, Big Data, business, Clay Christensen, Design Thinking, disruptive innovation, Generative Management, George Gilder, integrative thinking, Kevin Kelly, Nassim Taleb, operations, Peter Drucker, Roger Martin, Russell Ackoff, strategy, thought leaders
Like yin and yang, human enterprise has two facets: closed-loop activities and open-ended endeavors. In management we call these two operations and strategy.
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.
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.
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.
24 Thursday Oct 2013
Posted in business, consulting, management
Tags
Amit Goswami, Best Practices, business, Clay Christensen, complexity, Consultants, Cybernetics, Dave Snowden, Distinctions, Educators, Gurus, management, management consulting, Management Thinkers, Methods, models, Peter Checkland, Peter Drucker, Recipes, Roger Martin, Russell Ackoff, Systems
I have heard my share of reservations about management consultants. Many see business consulting as a shallow field devoid of real substance. As the old saying about no smoke without fire goes, there is likely good reason for the distrust of this modern profession. The great Russell Ackoff himself distinguished between two types of consultants: self-promoting gurus and educators.
17 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in business, Crisis, design thinking
Tags
Creative Tension, Crisis, integrative thinking, problem solving, Roger Martin, Short Term vs. Long term
They say mistakes are key to learning. Having had my share, I couldn’t agree more. But I would say while mistakes are great learning experiences, crises exercise a unique mental capacity for (wicked) problem solving: integrative thinking.
Roger Martin defines integrative thinking as the “ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superiors to each”.
09 Sunday Jun 2013
Tags
Ackoff, Clay Christensen, Education, Free Education, future, Harvard, Knowledge, Life long learning, Michael Saylor, Multidisciplinary, Online Education, Roger Martin
Late last year, I was in a small conference room listening to Michael Saylor, the billionaire that is as close as it gets to a Steve Jobs figure, and, luckily for me, happens to reside in the Washington D.C. area. Saylor was discussing his latest book. Besides his compelling case for an American 21st century (when most Americans are predicting the opposite) I remember a point which can be paraphrased as if a 15 year old from India scores better than a Harvard graduate on an online certification test for a particular job, why would one hire the Harvard graduate? In one sentence Saylor exposed preconceptions behind not just national and educational barriers, but also age and experience level. Which naturally leads to the question of Harvard’s relevance, and in general to that of the educational establishment in the 21st century. To drive the point, Michael Saylor has recently started a free online university. Saylor’s university is not yet accredited, but what if entrepreneurs like Saylor start hiring these kinds of “graduates” over those from traditional universities? Clayton Christensen reinforces many of Saylor’s perspectives for how online education will disrupt the educational establishment.
Many of the current arguments made for the future of education involve technology. But what if we take technology out of the picture, is there still something to be said about the future of education? I propose there is.
06 Thursday Jun 2013
Posted in complexity, consulting, human capital, management, strategy, taxonomy
Tags
Abductive Reasoning, abstract thinking, antifragility, Art, business schools, Categorization, complexity, Daniel Pink, Dave Snowden, hierarchy, integrative thinking, management consulting, Management Theory, mental models, Nassim Taleb, right brain thinking, Roger Martin, Sense Making, statistical analysis, strategy, weak-signals
As I have recently argued, the world’s top strategists agree that strategy in complex, cause-and-effect blurred environments requires a unique mindset.
According to Snowden and others, in complex environments cause and effect relationships do not repeat and a categorization mindset where data is fit to preconceived notions about reality (i.e. models, frameworks, etc.) is ineffective. This by the way rules out most of the consultants who provide precisely this: prescription style, a-la-carte frameworks and models. What works are sense-making models (to understand the distinction between categorization and sense-making in the words of the world’s top strategists, see my related blog). Categorization models are fast and efficient, but may miss so called “weak signals”, comparatively insignificant data points that are simply part of the average in normal situations, but which can be the source of new emergent patterns in complex circumstances – fat tails and Black Swans respectively in Nassim Taleb parlance.
05 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted in business, capitalism, complexity, consulting, democracy, future, human capital, innovation, knowledge, management, philosophy, problem solving, society, taxonomy, technology
Tags
Big Data, business, Categorization, causality, Cause and Effect, complexity, creativity, Cynefin, Daniel Pink, Dave Snowden, Drucker, Drucker Forum, Emergence, future, Imagination, Innovation, Knowledge, management, Methods, models, Motivation, Peter Checkland, Resilience, Revolution, Roger Martin, Russell Ackoff, Safety, Sense Making, Social Systems, Society
If one were to cut a global cross-section through social classes, nationalities, ethnicities, ages, professions, genders, and so forth, very few commonalities would emerge. And yet, there is I propose just such a common thread: a shared causality mindset, a globally predominant belief in the supremacy of cause and effect.
Since it is people who run our institutions, this belief continues to shape our modern society and even influence to a large extent the technological outcrops of our knowledge economy. From business strategy to macroeconomic models, and from political debates to Big Data, causality is pervasive and its implications profound.
The art and science of the possible 