Eleven Tips for Boosting Your Sense of Quiet Focus | Psychology Today

We all know the feeling of being overwhelmed, of being beset by distractions. The problem is – too many things are clamoring for your attention. People are trying to reach you, by phone, email, text, Twitter, IM, or old-fashioned yelling up the stairs. There are the interesting subjects you want to learn more about, on the TV or the internet or the newspaper. Noises in the background occasionally catch your ear, from the TV or radio. Your kids all talk at the same time. Colleagues interrupt. You need to update, check in, post, or ping. Ads jump at you from the most unlikely places. Devices buzz, ring, chirp, and vibrate. It’s enough to drive you crazy. You lose your train of thought, you forget what you’re doing, you have trouble re-engaging in a task, you feel besieged.

Click to read more ...

Groupthink, Self Serving Subordinates and Uncertainty - Can They Be Overcome

In this article, Martin Evans considers the barriers to accurate information gathering in large organizations. “I expect to get valid information … I can’t make good decisions unless I get valid information” George W. Bush, April 13th 2004. George Bush’s cry is echoed by every organizational manager in the world. Looking back on the Presidency of George W. Bush we can see many information failures. Every manager would like to be sure that the information received was both timely and accurate. Every good manager knows it’s their responsibility to make sure that information received is timely and accurate. Despite his Yale education, George W. Bush did not learn this. Every good manager knows about the three major barriers to the realization of good information: group think, self-serving subordinates, and uncertainty absorption. Despite his Harvard Business School Education, George W. Bush failed to grasp this. Good managers are proactive to ensure that these barriers are overcome. Despite his years of management experience, George W. Bush did not learn this. In this article I will deal with the three barriers:

Click to read more ...

Getting Down to the Business of Creativity

Business leaders must manage and support creativity just as they would any other asset. Harvard Business School professors Teresa Amabile, Mary Tripsas, and Mukti Khaire discuss where creativity comes from, how entrepreneurs use it, and why innovation is often a team sport. 

Key concepts include:

• People have their best days and do their best work when they are allowed to make progress.
• Whenever a firm introduces a truly novel product, suppliers, complementary producers, distribution channels, and consumers must often develop new capabilities, beliefs, and behaviors for the product to succeed, creating a challenge for the innovator.
• The perception exists that creative businesses can just start up, when in fact it takes a while for an entire ecosystem to actually generate an industry.

Click here to download the full article

Why CEOs Don't Get Innovation - A Nonsense Article from Stefan Lindegaard and BusinessWeek

I read with interest Business Week entitled why CEO's don't get innovation by Stefan Lindegaard another innovation speaker, network facilitator, and adviser on open innovation and intrapreneurship. He runs all the usual arguments about the inability of organisations to innovate, the spurious argument that leaders now emerging with MBAs are the first with innovation subjects in their degrees (that stat certainly doesn't stack up with our research which is telling us globally universities are failing badly with MBAs, most of whom don't have innovation in their programmes anyway) and summarises with this meaningless statement

Click to read more ...

Why Crowd-wisdom fails businesses

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki popularized the notion that, under the right conditions, canvassing the aggregate opinions of many people could be more efficient than relying on the expertise of a few. Jeff Howe applied this approach to decision-making using the buzzword ‘crowdsourcing’ in a Wired article in October 2006. Crowdsourcing assumes that customers know best what they want and need. Hence, more heads are better than one. We discuss why crowdsourcing may fail in a few important situations that concern social media.

Click to read more ...