Reverse Mentoring – The Summer Intern Experiment
Well, the summer is over and school has restarted for my summer interns. If you are a regular reader of the blog, you read about my summer intern experiment where I hosted my summer interns at my California house. It’s what I called “reverse mentoring”. My selfish objective was to immerse myself
The emerging creative economy …
I’m a big believer that we are on cusp of a change from the information economy to the creative economy. We’ve been through these kinds of changes before with the shift from agriculture to industrial to information and now to the emerging creative economy. Why do I believe that this change is coming
The launch of an innovation …
Many of you have probably noticed that I’ve been inconsistent on postings to the blog and the release of podcasts. There has been a good reason …. On 5 September, we released an innovation that we’ve been working on for 18 months .. 18 all consuming months since I was also doing my normal “day […]
The Stress Of Innovation
As an innovation program gets ready to launch an idea into the market, the stress level within the team rises. Stress is normal. We start questioning the execution, the love of the idea … Is still the best idea we could have executed? Will the market respond to our idea? Have we done our […]
Over dressed for the AlwaysOn event ……
I apeared on a panel during the AlwaysOn event last week in Stanford. For those who know me, I’m usually the one who is more “casually” dressed compared to my other panelists. In this case, I was clearly over dressed …. Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founder of Sun) came in his usual jeans and shirt … Nick
Reverse Mentoring
Hanging out with staff and interns that are younger than your own children is a real eye-opener. You quickly realize that you are so far out of the loop – you can’t even see the loop. The challenge is how to you get yourself back into the loop without looking like a creepy old guy […]
20 Years In To The Future
During my recent trip to Shanghai, I gave a press conference where I presented a vision and timeline of major shifts occurring over the next 20 years. For those of you who are podcast listeners, you know that I’m not a big believer of random long range forcasting. In this case, we’ve been careful
Profile In The San Jose Mercury News
As I mentioned in last weeks podcast, I was recently interviewed for a profile that was to appear in a local paper. Well — it was released today. For those of you interested, you can click on the link below to read the article. For some reason, the Q&A section that appeard in the […]
What’s wrong with “old think” innovation approaches?
So, what is wrong with the traditional approaches that most companies use to generate ideas/innovations? Plenty!! I’ve seen it, experienced it and in my past, I probably inflicted it on others. There are the four (4) tell-tale symptoms that the approach being used is “old think”. How many of the
The Right To Argue With Your Boss
Do you have the right to question or even argue with your boss? In most cases, people would say ‘are you kidding!!’. Without the right to argue, how can management even hope to avoid the potholes and cliffs that we all face. In the case of innovation, the right to argue is paramount to creating [
