Making Innovation Happen
Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 11:04AM The corporation isn't a sturdy species. In fact, only a tiny fraction reach the age of 40, according to a study of more than six million firms by management professors Charles I. Stubbart and Michael B. Knight. "Despite their size, their vast financial and human resources, average large firms do not 'live' as long as ordinary Americans," the authors concluded.
Friday, March 18, 2011 at 01:10PM There are three variables in the innovation equation: Innovation = ƒ(Strategy + Creativity + Execution) The need to experiment and fail inexpensively in Execution is where most of the focus is these days. Ironically, the relatively low risk and low cost of experimenting with seemingly dead ideas during Creativity is still one of the keys to lowering the high risk, high cost and high rate of failure in Execution. How many times does someone in your organization say, when a competitor launches a big success, "We thought of that but it died!" There are also three variables when i
Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 09:14PM Ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine published To Err is Human [PDF], a groundbreaking report that pushed the issue of medical errors into the public spotlight. That we all make mistakes was certainly nothing new: Operational failures occur across all industries. But the impact of errors in the context of the health-care industry drew instant attention. Preventable medical errors resulting in injury cost the industry somewhere between $9 billion and $15 billion a year, the report stated. Even more shockingly, by some measures the number of patient deaths attributed to operational failures annually in the United States equaled the crash of one fully loaded 747 airplane every one-and-a-half days.
Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 10:34PM How to create a culture that combines healthy risk taking with effective risk management. Want to buy a pile of second mortgages with a loan-to-equity value of 99 to 1, and scant documentation on borrower qualifications? (By the way, those borrowers might not live in the homes they’re mortgaging.) And, sure, it’s possible the borrowers are lying about their income and job status. (But who cares?) Today, even considering such a package seems ridiculous. Yet most of these loans, part of
