The Idea That Led to 10 Years of Double-Digit Growth – HBR

This is an important read for all in leadership and governance who are responsible to make those difficult decisions.  It addresses decisions that all companies face …..  there is a caution against the same innovation that succeeded may not be the best today or even tomorrow.

Excerpt:  In the mid-90s as CEO of Medtronic, I was concerned about whether we could sustain the remarkable success in innovation that we had enjoyed during the previous 10 years. As we grew, I knew it would be very difficult to continue to create the breakthrough innovations that had led to Medtronic’s high growth rate, which had exceeded 18% per annum for a decade. Then I read Clay Christensen and Joe Bower’s 1995 article “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave” in HBR.

Read full article via The Idea That Led to 10 Years of Double-Digit Growth – Bill George – HBS Faculty – Harvard Business Review.

Structure Your Presentation Like a Story – HBR

Recommended if you are in a leadership and management role.  Communications how-to.

Excerpt: After studying hundreds of speeches, I’ve found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved.

That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be. And by following Aristotle’s three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that’s easy to digest, remember, and retell.

Here’s how it looks when you chart it out:

Read full article via Structure Your Presentation Like a Story – Nancy Duarte – Harvard Business Review.

5 Ways Competitive Intelligence Teams Can Prove Their Worth

There is definitely value to be gained by competitive intelligence teams, but the understanding and how-to are, in my opinion, yet to be mastered.  Good read for all leadership and management

Excerpt:  For CI efforts to shine bright from the top of the food chain, CI teams must prove their efforts positively impact the quality of decision-making among executives and departments leaders. It’s actually not about quantifying tactics or measuring ROI like other service functions may do, CI functions must prove their value is supportive, much like accounting or project management. So instead of waiting for management to ask about analysis and results, CI functions must be proactive and transparent about showing it.

Here are five ways CI teams can show their value day-to-day and in the long term:

Read full article 5 Ways Competitive Intelligence Teams Can Prove Their Worth. From Clear Technology to Compete

Develop Perfect Memory With The Memory Palace Technique

Here is a tool to improve your memory for all leadership and management.   I have been fortunate in this department.  Although sometimes I say my memory is both a gift and a curse …. but mostly positive.  I credit my many years of constantly strengthening my memory in my work with many clients and ALL their numbers.  I am frequently called upon to help with an issue that  starts with “do you remember”  ….  I am happy that most of the time, my memory (even for many clients) can exceed the individual client’s memory of THEIR issue.

Excerpt:  The Memory Palace technique is based on the fact that we’re extremely good at remembering places we know. A ‘Memory Palace’ is a metaphor for any well-known place that you’re able to easily visualize. It can be the inside of your home, or maybe the route you take every day to work. That familiar place will be your guide to store and recall any kind of information. Let’s see how it works.

Read full article via Develop Perfect Memory With The Memory Palace Technique.  From Intelligence Daily

The Brain Performance Test

For all leadership and management.   The heavy weight partners on this test based on neuroscience is impressive.  Short test (and fun) with specialized report to let you know your training areas.

Excerpt:  The Brain Performance Test is a battery of assessments designed to measure your performance in five core cognitive areas. Developed by Lumosity’s neuroscientists, the test is based on the same assessments that doctors and researchers use to measure brain function.

via The Brain Performance Test.  From Lumosity’s

Learning Styles – Learning Skills

Another tool for leadership and management.  Hone your learning skills to effectively handle the information challenges presented daily.

Excerpt:  Once you know where your preferences lie on each of these dimensions, you can begin to stretch beyond those preferences and develop a more balanced approach to learning. Not only will you improve your learning effectiveness, you will open yourself up to many different ways of perceiving the world. Balance is key. You don’t want to get too far on any one side of the learning dimensions. When you do that you limit your ability to take in new information and make sense of it quickly, accurately, and effectively.

Read full article via Learning Styles – Learning skills from MindTools.com#np.

The Next Wave of Process Strategy – HBR

Leadership and management considerations in today’s and tomorrow’s environments requires constant attention.

Excerpt:  When it comes to operational improvement, organizations today are light years ahead of where they were two decades ago, but there’s no time to celebrate yesterday’s wins. They won’t immunize your organization against this decade’s march of ongoing progress. That’s because information technology — not just the Internet, but also mobile devices, “big data” for intensive data-crunching, and other computer hardware and software — will render even some of today’s most proficient business processes obsolete by the end of the decade.

The question for top management is no longer whether your organization’s processes need to be improved, but rather which ones, how much, and when.

I see three big opportunities:

Read full article via The Next Wave of Process Strategy – Brad Power – Harvard Business Review.

The Radical Beauty of Three Simple Management Practices – HBR

I think everyone in leadership and management should read this.  Do you believe your management is in the top tier — think again.

Excerpt:   The vast majority of organizations, it turns out, have a highly inflated view of their management practices. The reality is that many of them are unable to take such basic steps as setting achievable benchmarks, removing underperformers, collecting useful data, or offering coherent bonus schemes to motivate employees. These deficiencies are as common in health care and education as they are in manufacturing and retail.

The good news is that much of the opportunity for improvement lies in the hands of people exactly like you — managers of teams, departments, units, and divisions. And even small improvements in practices can have a huge impact:

Read full article via The Radical Beauty of Three Simple Management Practices – Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen – HBS Faculty – Harvard Business Review.

Four New Tools for Brain Workouts – HBR

I loved this article.  For all leadership and management.  Have you accepted the false premise “you are as you are now and that is the end of it?”  Read this article!

Excerpt:  How do you sharpen your thinking?

We’ve written already about how you can use auto-analytics to measure and improve the tasks you take on every day at work, but there’s another class of auto-analytics that help you improve at a more fundamental level. These tools strengthen the underlying brain and behavioral structures that support smarter thinking, decisions, and routines in any professional field.

Here are four new tools that I’ve spotted in my research. I use the term “DIY” because each option can be tested, and learning outcomes quantified, without the need for an outside instructor or expert.

Quantified Mind is a personal online cognitive testing platform based on psychometrics, the measurement of cognitive performance in areas like reaction time, executive function, and verbal learning.

Read full article via Four New Tools for Brain Workouts – H. James Wilson – Harvard Business Review.

Positive Thinking, Rational Thinking, Thought Awareness – Stress Management Training

It is not the situation that creates stress but it is how one handles that situation that creates stress.  For all leadership and management

Excerpt:  This set of tools helps you to manage and counter the stress of negative thinking.

Thought Awareness helps you identify the negative thinking, unpleasant memories, and misinterpretation of situations that may interfere with your performance and damage your self-confidence. This allows you to deal with them.

Rational Thinking helps you to challenge these negative thoughts and either learn from them, or refute them as incorrect.

You can then use Positive Thinking to create positive affirmations that you can use to counter negative thoughts. These affirmations neutralize negative thoughts and build your self-confidence. You can also use Positive Thinking to find the opportunities that are almost always present, to some degree, in a difficult situation.

Read full article via Positive Thinking, Rational Thinking, Thought Awareness – Stress Management Training from MindTools.com#np.

An Adaptive Approach to Managing Innovation

Recommended read leadership and management.   Ideas of Axelrod and Cohen as basis of tools.

Excerpt:  It is this author’s view that the gap in management practice, where it exists, results from a mismatch between traditional management methods (command and control) and the unique nature of innovation as a system having non-linear behavior.

This approach makes it possible to build on the ideas of Axelrod and Cohen (2000) regarding complex adaptive systems in general, applying their framework specifically to managing innovation. This permits us to describe the role of managers and specify actions they can take to advance the process. The Axelrod/Cohen framework is evolutionary and has been developed so that improvements can be generated even though every element of a system may not be fully understood and the outcome may not be predictable (a good fit with innovation).

Read introduction and download pdf here via Enterprise innovation articles.  Innovation Tools

How to Outsmart the Competition Through Superior Knowledge Management

Good read — the perspective is a little different but the proof is there.  For all leadership and management

Excerpt:  Superior knowledge management (KM) is often credited with boosting shareholder value, jumpstarting innovation and improving customer service, but with little evidence to support vendors’ heady claims, executives have to rely on faith instead of facts when approving costly initiatives.

Finally, research confirms that acquiring, sharing and using knowledge in meaningful ways definitively improves a company’s return on assets, sales and operating income.

“We only had soft evidence to support the link between superior KM and the bottom line,” says Jiming Wu, Ph.D., assistant professor of management for the College of Business and Economics at California State University, East Bay. “Now after studying the results of 62 companies, we’ve confirmed the link between superior financial performance and superior knowledge management.”

Smart Business spoke with Wu about the tangible and intangible benefits of superior KM.

Read full article via How to outsmart the competition through superior knowledge management | Smart Business.

What I Learned from My TED Talk – HBR

This is a good read — primarily because it explores underlying reasoning  —  not just bad marks on a something.  Learning should not be something ‘you have done’, it is something ‘you need to do and keep on doing’.  Leadership and management.  Communications

Excerpt:  Which is why one “rule” of my recent book on the Social Era is: “Learn. Unlearn. (Repeat.)” Rather than viewing change as an aberration, we need to understand it as a natural part of life and work.

Read full article via What I Learned from My TED Talk – Nilofer Merchant – Harvard Business Review.

Hijack! How Your Brain Blocks Performance

This is the first article in what author describes as an upcoming series of article posts on the subject.   Good read —  “why we are who we are” and “why we do what we do”    🙂     as you know one of my favorite topics for leadership and management.

Excerpt:  Now most of these internal programs—the neural connections and associations we make that give experience meaning—are programs we “wrote” between the ages of zero and six years old. Many of our programs were either provided for us by our parents, or were coded by our very young and inexperienced reaction to what we perceived as threatening people or situations. Even the most wonderful, well-intentioned parents are going to make a few coding errors. I know I have.

Now that we are adults, the question becomes, how can we rewrite our own programs to set the meaning and get the results we want?

Read full article via Hijack! How Your Brain Blocks Performance – Forbes.

Presentation Zen: Tips On How to Be More Creative by John Cleese

Note this is a reprint —  still relevant and good tips to use today for all leadership and management.

Excerpt:  Creativity is in all of us—in fact it’s who we are. And yet, regardless of our professions, we can benefit greatly from being even more creative. So how to do that? One way to start is to listen to the legendary John Cleese below and incorporate his tips into your daily work and life where possible. This speech is from 1991 and is as relevant as ever.

Read full article with video via Presentation Zen: Tips on how to be more creative by John Cleese.