Critical to the success of every organization, strategy is not a long planning exercise or document. Strategy can be simple, fun and effective and is founded on a set of five interrelated and powerful choices that positions an organization to win.

ON Strategy

Playing To win
At best, Management Models help managers make better choices faster, without having to go back to first principles to build their decisions from the ground up. However, at their worst, they perpetuate the making of bad decisions. That is why when it comes to Management Models, quality is key.

ON Management Models

A New Way to Think

Integrative thinking is a form of reasoning which allows you to constructively face the tensions of opposing models. Instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, you generate a creative solution. Your solution contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.

ON Integrative Thinking

Creating Great Choices

Organizations need to incorporate the best of design thinking into their ways of working to unleash innovation and creativity. An organization will be able to counter-balance analytical thinking with intuitive thinking – to enable it to both exploit existing knowledge and create new knowledge. 

ON Design of Business

The Design Of Business

While prevailing theory holds that stock-based compensation perfectly aligns corporate executives’ incentives with those of shareholders, it does the opposite. As a consequence, executives have done brilliantly while shareholders have become increasingly frustrated. Incentives and governance practice needs to be transformed to enable corporations to prosper in a way that better serves society.

ON Incentives & Governance

Fixing the Game

The combination of the stagnation of medium incomes and the rapid rise of high incomes is threatening the future of democratic capitalism. Its predictive future requires building a more robust knowledge, transactional and physical infrastructure for broadly shared prosperity.

ON Democratic Capitalism

When More is Not Better

For both social entrepreneurs and corporations, the key tenet of social innovation is finding ways to make the world a better place. My work focuses on building tools for social entrepreneurs to create more powerful models for creating value for society and developing models to guide corporations on a path of productive corporate citizenship.

ON Social Innovation

Getting Beyond Better

DESIGN OF BUSINESS

Innovation has become the holy grail of modern organizational life.  The vast majority of organizations, whether for-profit or not, big or small, are frustrated by the slow pace and low level of innovation to which they find themselves limited. Unbeknownst to them, analytical thinking, which is the predominant thinking pattern in their organizations, inadvertently suppresses innovation and creativity. 

I have found that in order to overcome this limitation, organizations need to incorporate the best of design thinking into their ways of working. I explored this theme in my 2009 book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. I show how an organization can counter-balance analytical thinking with intuitive thinking to enable it to both exploit existing knowledge and explore to create new knowledge.  The former enables it to prosper today while the latter ensures that will be able to build advantage for the future.

My work on the Design of Business covers a wide array of themes:

  • Why business people and designers have such a challenge working productively with each other – and what they can do about it;
  • Why there is a battle in most organizations between the desire for reliability – the production of a consistent replicable outcome – and for validity – the production of an outcome that is highly desired;
  • Why reliability tends to dominate and how organizations can achieve a more productive balance;
  • How organizations can link design principles to business strategies to produce systematic and consistent innovation.
My overall goal is to help organizations design their business to achieve a consistently higher level of innovation and creativity.

on design of business

Articles

Harvard Business Review
Design for Action 
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Interviews

Steelcase Threesixty Magazine
On Innovation and Why Companies Struggle with It  
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Watch "A Plan is Not a Strategy" from Harvard Business Review