Innovation: An Erring Gospel? and “Do as We Say; Not as We Did”….Which Bull are You ….A Guide to Players or Pretenders….Econ Recon: This Side of the Recession

“Innovation is hard because ‘solving a problem people didn’t know they had’ and ‘building something no one needs’ look identical at first.”

 Aaron Levine

CEO of Box, Inc.

 Innovation: A False Gospel?….. and “Do as We Say, Not as We Did”

Two compelling articles on innovation: the first long, the second short, both from the New Yorker.

A False Gospel?: For those of you who are disciples of Clayton Christensen, the famous innovation guru from Harvard and author of “The Innovators Dilemma”, check out a very different take on Dr. Christensen’s work in Jill Lepore’s article:  “The Disruption Machine:  What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.”    (Warning: a long article, but a must read for Clayton Christensen fans and those charged with creating a culture of innovation in their enterprises.”)

 “Do as We Say, Not as We Did”: We rightly celebrate the American centuries of creativity and “Yankee “Ingenuity” that have made the country great.Our reaction when China and other countries are accused of economic espionage is therefore understandable but, as it turns out, our national indignation may not stand close examination. Columnist James Surowiecki reviews America’s own early entrepreneurial story in an interesting and brief article  “Spy versus Spy”  He reports that the early American entrepreneurs who laid the foundations of our own innovative culture did more than a little “borrowing”  of intellectual capital from other countries!

Which Bull are You?

Former CEO, Naval Officer and Indianapolis Vistage Chair David Quick shares his story as a recovering “bull in a China Shop” and suggests that we are all “bulls”” and as such, we have three choices as to the kind of bull we become: we are either “In the Ring, Led by the Ring or Ringing the Bell.”  Which Bull are You? And which of these Bulls do you have on your team?

A Guide to Players or Pretenders

We hire people who interview well only to find out that their persona and performance is nothing but pretense. We invite people to be our friends only to find out they are all about themselves. How do we tell the Players from the Pretenders? Leadership scholar and author John Maxwell has studied leadership for decades and offers a guide to  “Knowing the difference between players and pretenders.” Run Maxwell’s list against your team and find out who’s a player and who’s a pretender.

Econ Recon:  This Side of the Recession

 The recovery from the recession of 2008 is now five years old. While the business cycle has not been outlawed, the recovery has not returned us to an economy that is  the same as it was at the 2007 peak. For an executive summary of where we are and how we’ve changed, check out this panel of graphs with brief commentary from the New York Times on The Nation’s Economy, This Side of the Recession.