How can you advise others on things you haven’t done in years?

They don’t treat all remote work the same.

We are preoccupied by the size of things: big cars, big sandwiches, and big salaries. At leadership retreats, and in the bestselling books we buy, we seek grand thoughts. The basic logic we use is the bigger the idea, the bigger the value, but often that’s not true. There’s a myth at work here: the […]

Last month celebrated the 40th anniversary of the greatest product and technology innovation demo of all time. In a single day Douglas Engelbart showed the world new hi-tech ideas that dominate our world today: The mouse, the hyperlink, hierarchical lists, user testing, and on it goes. What people often forget is that despite the importance […]

Over at change.org, there’s a popular proposal for the U.S. government to create a Department of Innovation. Many companies have created innovation groups, and even VP of innovation positions, in an effort to spur and support innovation. This move is often a mistake (see my analysis of VPs of innovation here), but do the dynamics […]

Industry legend John Seely Brown was the director of the famed Xerox PARC lab for nearly two decades. I first came across his work in the popular book the Social Life of Information that he coauthored with Paul Duguid in 2000. He’s currently the Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, and he […]

Most people who went to college remember struggling to find advice on where to go. When I recently heard about Unigo.com, a start-up that takes the best of the web approach to information and applies it to helping high school students pick a college, I thought it was a great idea. I asked Unigo’s CEO, […]

There is never a shortage of new ideas being thrown around. As long as people are considering change, there is the possibility for innovation to happen. With all the talk of recessions, cutbacks and layoffs, everyone assumes creative thinking will suffer. Not entirely true. What it means is the kind of change that’s possible is […]

The banking crisis story is an example of the downside of innovation. As many have reported, one major factor in the crisis was the use of new financial products, like CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). While the concept had been in use since the 1980s, it’s only been the last decade that CDOs have been used […]

While playing the new Sims game Spore, a game where you get to make your own species to compete against others, my evolving species of Bloopies encountered a much tougher group of Stingfangs (lions to my puppies). But when I commanded my lead Bloopie to roar, guess what happened? The Stingfangs, as a pack, turned […]