Illustration credit Christian Laborin
Slaying giants is fun, almost every new disruptive company slays a giant or two. Last week I had a chat with a team based in Puebla Mexico working on a cool augmented reality application for museums. They asked for my thoughts on their app and business model, I happily answered their questions. One of those questions comes up every time I talk with startups: How do you protect yourself from giants who might copy your idea?
…
The President and CEO for Ford Motor Company, Mark Fields, had a conference where he spoke about Ford entering the self-driving car race in 2021 hoping to establish Ford as a leader in this field.
Of course, self-driving is the next car revolution so it’s not surprising to hear Ford is entering the space.
What’s interesting is how he explained Ford’s decision making process and the way they operate. In order to make any investment they go through 3 simple questions:…
Empathy, collaboration, creativity, leadership are future-proof skills everyone needs to have; which are in short supply. So, how do we embrace, develop and put these skills to work in a world where collaboration is an imperative?
We can begin by setting expectations about ourselves, clarifying our intentions and being accountable. How?…
No standard behavior change, no innovation. It’s that simple. True Innovation results in a step-change where we can’t imagine going back to the old way, but the road to that outcome is full of rejection. It’s hard to overstate how important this is: if you’re not getting rejected you’re going the wrong way.…
English: A collage of an image modified with 16 different Instagram filters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I started 2017 will a couple of posts about reinvention (here and here). Fittingly, Recode published a look into Instagram’s reinvention. The story goes that a few years ago, Instagram was seeing a dip in sharing and engagement on their platform. Driving this change was the mass of brands and celebrities sharing and promoting as much as they can, lowering the quality of friend and family interaction Instagram became known for; the user experience they set out to create with Instagram.…
My last post on the challenges Generalists face in a society that rewards specialists got a lot of attention from people who are Generalists themselves (from healthcare); not from Specialists.
One of them is Dr. Jonathan Griffiths who spoke at a TEDx about how healthcare needs to embrace Generalists:…
New challenges require new approaches. All organizations have new challenges on the table all the time, but most are not equipped to come up with new approaches to conquer them because they can’t think and act differently.
This is a specialization challenge.
As a rule of thumb, your business needs more generalists than specialists if it wants to innovate. Don’t get me wrong, specialists are valuable. But Generalists are the innovators, the ones who are most capable of dealing with complexity; the ones that connect that dots.
Yesterday I joined Innochat to chat about T-Shaped people and culture for collaborative innovation (see transcript). I’ve written quite a lot about Generalists (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), so I won’t touch on here the well known factors about being a Generalist, hiring and managing.
Instead, I’ll touch on the challenges……
