When doing new things there is no predictability. There’s speculation, extrapolation and frustration, but no prediction. And the labels don’t matter. Whether it’s called creativity, innovation, discontinuous improvement or disruption there’s no prediction. The trick in the domain complexity is to make progress without prediction. The first step is to......
It doesn’t matter where the journey ends, as long as it starts. After starting, don’t fixate on the destination, focus on how you get there. A long project doesn’t get shorter until you start. Neither does a short one. Start under the radar. When a project is too big to......
All the scary words are grounded in change. Innovation, by definition, is about change. When something is innovative it’s novel, useful and successful. Novel is another word for different and different means change. That’s why innovation is scary. And that’s why radical innovation is scarier. Continuous improvement, where everything old......
Compound annual growth, profit margin, Key Business Indicators, capability indices, defects per million opportunity, confidence intervals, statistical significance, regression coefficients, temperature, pressure, force, stress, velocity, volume, inches, meters, decibels. The numbers are supposed to tell the story. But they don’t. There’s never enough data to see the whole picture. But,......
For those who lead projects and people, failure is always lurking in the background. And gone unchecked, it can hobble. Despite best efforts to put a shine on it, there’s still a strong negative element to failure. No two ways about it, failure is mapped with inadequacy and error. Failure......
When you’re laying in your camping tent dead tired and wanting for sleep the last thing you want is a rouge mosquito that dive-bombs you continuously throughout the night. With each sortie, it pushes on your expectations of how things should be. This little creature, so small and so powerless,......
Like it or not, everything changes. The rock solid brand will erode and the venerable business model will wither and die. Though you will add immense energy to hold on to what you built, natural forces of competitive evolution will come up with something makes your best work extinct. We......
Expectations result from mental models and wants. When you have a mental model of a system and you want the system to behave in a way that fits your mental model, that’s an expectation. And when you want the system to behave differently than your mental model, that’s also an......
Today marks seven years of weekly blog posts. Here’s what I’ve learned so far: When you can write about anything, what you choose tells everyone what you’re about. Sometimes you’ve got to start writing to figure out what you have to say. Some people think semicolons are okay; others don’t......
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