This article from McKinsey (http://bit.ly/2qWLuvk) gets one of it's early assertions wrong: "Products, services, and environments—both physical and online—are converging to anticipate and meet rising customer expectations." Why is that wrong? Because products, services, and environments have ALWAYS converged into the singularity of customer experience. What is happening now is that people are starting to realize that, and think about things differently. I don't mean to berate

Innovation is like a street fight. Or at least that’s the thought that popped into my head at one point during a recent self-defense seminar. I had to leave the training mats to jot down this message from the instructor: “A technique does one thing; a principle does many.” That eloquently captures my philosophy of bringing simplicity to strategic innovation. I wish I had said it first. Techniques are great, and they go a long way when you know clearly the situation in which t

The problem of managing innovation (and innovators) is one of the most challenging aspects of running an organization well. Organizational leadership has been well-trained in maximizing efficiency, eliminating waste, cutting costs, streamlining, etc., but innovation does not work like that. Innovation requires a different kind of management for the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world in which it resides. An excellent Harvard Business Review article, "Your