Cisco’s Virtual Management Lab - Inder Sidhu, VP Strategy and Planning Cisco WorldWide

How one of the world’s most innovative companies discovered the value of focusing its R&D attention on its own business practices.
Making Innovation Happen
How one of the world’s most innovative companies discovered the value of focusing its R&D attention on its own business practices.
Analytics: The New Path to Value: How the Smartest Organizations Are Embedding Analytics to Transform Insights Into Action is an excellent research report from the 2010 New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive Study and Research Project conducted by MIT in association with the IBM Institute for Business Value. Here is part 6 of the Report chosen because it deals with insights, modelling and visualisations - the basis of the Creative Leadership Forum's Management Innovation Index
Business is, above all, busy. And maybe it's too busy. Let's face it. Most of us spend most of our time chasing the immediate reward, the short-run "objective," the near-term "goal — in short, the expedient and the convenient. But maybe business's obsessive focus on doing hasn't defused any of the following conflagrations, and is, instead, dumping Molotov cocktails on each: customers as detached, distrusting, and "disloyal," investors firing back at boardrooms, regulators with bloodlust a-burning in their eyes, and about a trillion low-cost factories who can do it all faster, quicker, and cheaper anyway.
President Obama's mission to Asia earlier this month was touted by US media primarily to highlight the 50,000 jobs created by deals signed in India during his visit. It's a shame Obama — and the Western press — didn't pay attention to the far bigger story happening in many of the countries on his visit: real, game-changing innovations from emerging markets that could point the way for currently stagnant Western firms. The good news for the world economy is that, with economic development occurring in a more dispersed fashion, experiments are underway in more diverse institutional settings than ever before. So, with the right attitude and mindset Western economies should expect to see the emergence of viable models from all over the world, not just their backyards.
The massive disclosure of classified US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks is an event of historic, if not seismic, significance. So great is the number of cables, and so sensitive is much of the information they divulge, that the consequences will be profound, long-lasting, and manifold. No one — neither Wikileaks nor the U.S. government — can know whether the effects will be good or bad. They will undoubtedly be both. We can be sure only that they will be many and unpredictable. Governments are no doubt rushing to secure their data and hold it more tightly than ever, but the horse has bolted. If a government as professional, technically sophisticated, and well-protected as the U.S. can suffer a breach of this magnitude, no government is safe. Politicians can roar their demands for the prosecution of Julian Assange or — absurdly — that Wikileaks be designated as a terrorist organization, but the rage is in truth a tacit admission that government's monopoly on its own information is now a thing of the past.