What’s the most critical challenge facing CEO’s in 2010?  According to 1,500 CEO’s interviewed for IBM’s 2010 Global CEO study, the answer is instilling creativity into their organizations. I’d suggest they consider creating an attractive platform that potentially accesses  thousands of creative people from outside their organization. By shaping their businesses around an attractive platform, [...]

Apple and Google stand out as two highly successful Silicon Valley gorillas at the top of their game. In the past, their products were complementary but they’re now doing battle in mobile phones, mobile search, digital books and the new tablet market.  Both companies target individuals over corporations yet how they grow and reach wider [...]

Coming out of the Great Recession we’ve entered a period of deleveraging and belt-tightening that some call the “New Normal”.  Clearly there have been fundamental changes in the global economy but changing economic conditions alone understates what constitutes the New Normal.  There’s a wider New Normal to consider. First, the projected GNP growth for developing [...]

I get nervous when companies get excited about benchmarking.  I understand why they do it.  If you’re lagging, benchmarking defines a target and improvement path to catch up.  But that’s exactly why I get nervous.  At best, benchmarking helps you get to where others already are, and more often, where they’ve been.  It paints the [...]

I look forward to receiving The Economist every Friday.  By far, it is the best written and most informative magazine per page of any business periodical.  In the spirit of Working Wider, here are six bits from this week’s issue that illustrate why dreaming, thinking and working wider is important. Harnessing the U.S. Immigration Network [...]

Technology influences economies at the same time economies point to the next technology that can be monetized.  In The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Free Press, 2009), Brian Arthur goes a step further suggesting that economies are defined by and structured around technologies. He argues that the daily encounters between [...]

Rising from the ashes of communism has emerged a new form of competition that is as fast as it is formidable.  I’m speaking of the “autocratic economies,” the most important being China with Viet Nam, South Korea, and Singapore as other examples.  To a large degree, these countries embrace economic democracy while keeping significant political [...]

Today, Washington D.C. stands as the antithesis of working wider.  Critical issues including the financial crisis, global warming and health care are batted back and forth like a baseline rally on the championship court at Wimbledon.  After being elected on a platform aspiring to rise above partisanship, President Obama has had little success bridging boundaries [...]

If our corporate control structures were uncooked spaghetti, dropping them into the wider environment softens them like boiling water.  Working wider, requires us to challenge the central premise of corporate hierarchy: control. Our mental reflexes are so tuned to hierarchical control that imagining a world without it is difficult.  Corporations and Congress are quick to [...]

Wider Major Studies are Making More Movies for Non-U.S. Audiences Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is doing production deals abroad to boost revenues. One of Jeffrey Bewkes’ favorite movies these days is Two Ear Chicken, a low-budget German tale about a philandering tabloid journalist. No, the Time Warner (TWX) CEO hasn’t become a connoisseur of obscure [...]