Tag Archive: spread and impact of ideas

Is Gladwell’s "Tipping Point" Toast?

In March 2007, I posted a three part critical review here here and here of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Recently, the February 2008 issue of Fast Company Magazine recently published a great article by Clive Thompson entitled “Is the Tipping Point Toast?“. The article is a fascinating and accessible adjunct to the social…

The Art of Persuasion: Getting Buy-In For Your Ideas

A recent post Selling Your Ideas to the Entire Organization, One Person at a Time by Mahesh M Piddshetti on the Hyper Passionate Entrepreneurs blog, contained an extremely stimulating review of the book The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas. The book is about the art of persuasion: how to get…

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…

Which Ideas Become Influential? Stickiness vs. Forcefulness

In response to a post by Larry Prusak on the Harvard Business Online Discussion Board reviewing Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, James McKeen recounts an interesting experiment he ran with one of his Ph.D students at Queen’s Business School: “We randomly formed a number of 6-person groups of undergraduate business…

Building an Internal Marketplace for Ideas

An article from the New York Times reported that Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds advanced command-and-control systems for the US Navy, developed an interesting approach to Idea Management Systems by creating: . . . an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or…

Book Review: "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Recently I posted a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference , where Gladwell argued that ‘stickiness’ is a vitally important aspect of ideas becoming ‘contagious’ and spreading like viruses. I’ve recently been reading with interest Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s recently published book Made to…

5 Types of Ideas

Over again at Strategic Development consultant Helene Finidori’s blog, Helene argued this month that new, creative ideas emerge out of the context of previous thought and activity, and that rather than there being radically new ideas departing from the old there tends to be instead essentially three kinds of ideas: (i) The logical consequence of…

Self-Fulfilling Business Theories

Helene Finidori posted an article in her blog a year ago (which I just saw today), entitled The Art of Management. Helene cited a paper from Sumantra Ghoshal in The Academy of Management: Learning and Education entitled Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices . Helene summarised the paper as arguing that . ….

What’s New Under The Sun?

Harvard Business Review recently published its list of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 (see the February edition for a full list). Coming in at number 9 out of 20 was the notion that subconscious processing of content in relation to decision making and problem solving could lead to greater creativity and greater levels of intuition. The…

Book Review: The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell (Part III)

See Review Part I – Introduction, central ideas of the Tipping Point See Review Part II – were Gladwell’s Tipping Point ideas original? Exactly what kind of argument was Gladwell putting forward in his Tipping Point? In the introduction to The Tipping Point , Gladwell asserts that: The Tipping Point is the biography of an…