Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in A Start-Up World - TechCrunch - Vivek Wadhwa

A long time ago, I had to make a really tough choice: invest in an MBA from New York University, or make do with my bachelors. I was newly married, had a child on the way, and didn’t have much in savings. The degree would set me back tens of thousands of dollars and take years to complete—especially if I did it part time. And I couldn’t imagine doing anything but programming computers for a living. So why learn finance, marketing, and operations management, I wondered? Well, I decided to enroll because my understanding of the business world lacked depth, and I harbored a deep-rooted desire to get the best education possible. My wife and I moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in North Bergen, NJ, and we made do with what we had. For a couple of years after getting my degree, I wondered whether I had made the right choice. Even though I scored a great job at CS First Boston in its IT department, I was just writing code and designing systems. Yes, I started to enjoy reading BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal; but had the financial sacrifice and time away from my family been worth it? It didn’t seem to have been.

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Collaboration: Building and Managing Trust - Allcollaboration.com

The issue of trust is at the core of effective collaboration. The most basic definition of collaboration (co-labor) is working jointly with others for shared goals and outcomes. The need for trust thus arises due to the interdependence between parties. A trust relationship inherently has risk for the parties involved. Individual personal behaviors are different that manage this trust and associated risk. Since trust it at the core of collaboration, how does one build trust? What is trust anyway? What are individual behaviors and expectations in a trust relationship? What can be done to rebuild trust when trust is violated? These are some of the question we address in this post. We can recall what President Reagan often said: Trust but verify. That is, I am willing to trust you only to the extent I can verify what you say. Trust is based on evidence, not words. Evidence is the key to minimizing risk in this instance. This is not a trust relationship in fact; it is a relationship of distrust. But, the circumstances of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) created the interdependence for shared goals and outcomes.

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Need Speed? Slow Down - Harvard Business Review - Jocelyn R. Davis and Tom Atkinson

In business, there’s a speed gap: It’s the difference between how important a firm’s leaders say speed is to their competitive strategy and how fast the company actually moves. That gap is significant regardless of region, industry, company size, or strategic emphasis. Organizations fearful of losing their competitive advantage spend much time and many resources looking for ways to pick up the pace. Paradoxically, they should try slowing down instead. In our study of 343 businesses (conducted with the Economist Intelligence Unit), the companies that embraced initiatives and chose to go, go, go to try to gain an edge ended up with lower sales and operating profits than those that paused at key moments to make sure they were on the right track. What’s more, the firms that “slowed down to speed up” improved their top and bottom lines, averaging 40% higher sales and 52% higher operating profits over a three-year period. How did they defy the laws of business physics, taking more time than competitors yet performing better?

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What is Design Thinking Anyway? : Roger Martin - Design Observer

Design thinking, as a concept, has been slowly evolving and coalescing over the past decade. One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be. More concretely, Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” [1] A person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation. The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning. Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with the term.

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24 Characteristics of Creative Organizations - Michelle James

1.  balance planning with improvising
2.  use the unknown as a resource (do not avoid it)
3.  creativity is a core value
4.  creativity is a organizational discipline; an ongoing process; a mindset
5.  time and attention are dedicated to “practicing” creative process until it 
     becomes embedded in the system
6.  flexible, limited organizational structures
     combined with intensive interaction
7.  room for exploration and discovery without judgment
8.  act upon intuition and “resonance” as well as logic
9.  employ real-time feedback loops and adapt accordingly
10.  mistakes and failures are seen as invitations to improve, grow or create
11.  hold organizational tension, cognitive dissonance and natural resistance
12.  engage paradox – engages opposing or differing “truths” and view points to without
       needing to boil them down to the lowest common denominator
13.  use diversity productively – uses differences to contribute to the creation of something new
14.  creativity can come from anywhere in the system in any direction
15.  use both linear and non-linear ways of thinking
16.  believe in their people; draws forth what is positive
17.  encourage the questioning of all assumptions
18.  informed by, but not limited to, what worked in the past
19.  not reliant on business buzz words; uses more authentic language
20.  excitement is not squelched – it is used to fuel creativity
21.  tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty
22.  use both divergent and convergent thinking; whole-brain approaches
23.  balance structure and “being organized” with flow and emergence
24.  value fun as part of the creative process

By Michelle James, CEO of The Center for Creative Emergence