Monthly Archives: June 2007

Brainstorming Poster

Angela Hayden has made an interesting brainstorming poster available as a pdf file (free download). The intention is that the poster can be used for triggering or stimulating thoughts and ideas when thinking about future directions.

Book Review: John Kotter on Change Management

John P. Kotter is a leading author and authority in Change Management. This article is a review of Kotter’s excellent work on the management of change outlined in his books Leading Change and The Heart of Change (with Dan Cohen). I will first summarise Kotter’s model of change in these books, and then assess Kotter’s…

Atlassian on Bootstrapping

I always love listening to stories of successful companies that started up without a business plan. Maybe it’s because the mantra for the last 10 or 15 years has been you have to have a business plan. So people grind away and produces massive tomes that are pretty much out of date by the time…

The Four Phases of Intuition

During my Ph.D research, I examined the psychology of creativity in relation to the creative work processes of economists. In a separate paper, I examined economists’ use of highly mathematical models as a kind of ‘metaphor’ or intellectual playground in which to explore the dynamics of system behaviours to motivate intuitions about real world economic…

Thinking Differently at Work – Poetry and Leading Business Conversations

I’m starting a series of posts on “thinking differently at work.” A great place to start is with poet David Whyte, featured in the May 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review. Whyte uses poetry as a medium for leading and enriching business conversations – to create conversations that “no matter how slowly, help you…

Quotation – Morris on Innovation as Our Last Competitive Advantage

“Given the march of the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut, innovation is just about the only remaining competitive advantage that rich nations have.” – Peter Morris, BRW magazine, June 7-13, p. 65

Dealing with Difficult People using Porcupine Theory

Brad Cork of Improving People has a nice piece of advice for dealing with difficult people that he calls Porcupine Theory. Brad writes: Every person has gold in there, it is just that for some of them it is buried deeper than others. I have a management theory that I call “Porcupine Theory”. It says…

GROWTH as a Framework to Develop an Innovation Culture

Brad Cork of Improving People has developed an acronym called GROWTH to help people understand some of the elements of a culture that fosters innovation. It stands for: Great Ideas are encouraged Reward and recognition (Great ideas are rewarded appropriately) Onwards & Upwards (Creating a positive change culture) Work with change (The skill to manage…

The Oslo Manual and Is Innovation our Last Competitive Advantage?

A recent article in BRW discusses the evolution of the OECD Oslo Manual over its three editions, providing a lens through which to view how thinking on innovation has evolved over the last 15 years. In the first (1992) edition of the OSLO manual, the emphasis was on technological product and process innovation with a…

The Madness of Meetings

This months BRW magazine has a nice little article on “the madness of meetings.” The article offers 3 interesting tips for getting more value out of meetings. In addition to the usual advice (such as set an agenda, record actions and assign responsibilities and distribute minutes documenting the decisions reached and the timelines for actioning…