Organizations are like icebergs.  The formal aspects of organization, roles, hierarchy, signing authority, rules, etc., are the 2/5 above the water line.  The 3/5 below the waterline is where the real work gets done through informal relationships supported by implicit norms and culture. Just as drunks are prone to look for their lost keys under [...]

Apple’s new iPad is testimony to the leverage companies’ can harvest from product platforms. The iPad literally widens the iPhone which enlarged the iPod.  The iTunes store made it easy to download music.  Now iBooks will bring books and periodicals to the iPad.  Each product leverages a focused set of technologies and business processes from [...]

Stress accentuates our most basic fears and predispositions.  When Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked what he’s learned about leadership during the recent financial crisis, he said, “I learned about the importance of making sure that everyone in the organization interprets his job or her job expansively…People can get trapped by their context.” When [...]

James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist, recently presented his research on Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship at Stanford.  The gist of his findings is that in developed countries, the availability of research in the sciences, social sciences and humanities has narrowed rather than expanded scholarship.  Research that is popular and [...]

A core premise of Working Wider is that the external environment moves and morphs faster than strategy and internal work practices.  In coping, leaders call for consecutive, rapid changes that seek to be responsive but are perceived as hyper-reactive and inefficient as the TSA’s recent response to the so-called “underwear bomber”.  The challenge is to [...]

For a child, diving into a swimming pool is a scary proposition.  Most parents position themselves 5 feet inside the pool and coax the child to dive to them.  Rarely will you see a parent come up behind a nervous child and just shove them in.  Pulling evokes sustainable change better than pushing. Companies can [...]

In a well-written article in this month’s Wired, Jonah Lehrer describes how important thinking wider is for innovation.  More importantly, he underscores how inherently difficult it is even for the best scientists in the world. Lehrer points out that science is a deeply frustrating pursuit.  Over 50% of the time, experiments fail.  Scientists define failure [...]

If necessity is the Mother of Inventions, who do you think is going to work just a little bit harder and imagine just a little bit more expansively – a young company on the cusp of transformation or a Fortune 500 behemoth?  Developing nations and young companies are more likely to stretch their energies and [...]