Sat.Sep 16, 2023 - Fri.Sep 22, 2023

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Emptiness and Innovation

IdeaScale

Introduction The ancient Buddhist philosophical concept of “emptiness”, going back nearly two millennia, has some interesting present-day implications for the process of idea creation and development in innovation. These implications relate to the desirability of high levels of technical diversity, in-person interaction and temporal intensity within innovation team processes.

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What Makes A Strategy “Good?”

Digital Tonto

One of the most frustrating statements I come across is that “we had a good strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” That’s nonsense. Obviously, if you couldn’t execute, there were some important factors that you didn’t take into account. You miscalculated in some significant way. So how was that a good strategy? This raises an important question: What makes a strategy good?

Strategy 160
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3 Ways to View Your Innovation Basket

Innovation Excellence

(including one that makes Radical Innovation easy) GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton You are a rolling stone, and that means you gather no moss!

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The Covert Cost of Poor Communication: A Business Wake-Up Call

Daniel Burrus

We have all heard that the key to becoming a successful business is effective communication and collaboration, but do we really know what that means? Unfortunately for many business leaders, they believe they do. But the reality is they actually struggle with the concept. Back in 2013, the CEO of Yahoo! announced via memo that employees would no longer be able to work remotely and must come back into the office from Monday through Friday.

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Turn Payments Into Personalization: Unlock the Value of Transaction Data

Speaker: Loreal Lynch, Everett Zufelt, and Michaela Weber

Once upon a time, in the vast realm of online commerce, there lived a humble checkout button overlooked by many. Yet, within its humble click lay the power to transform a mere visitor into a loyal customer. 🧐 💡 Getting checkout right can mark the difference between a successful sale and an abandoned cart, yet many businesses fail to make payments a part of their commerce strategy even when it has a direct impact on revenue.

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Leading Change May Need to Begin with Changing Yourself

Harvard Business Review

Behavior change is hard, but it’s a skill leaders who want to succeed amid near-constant organizational change need to develop. By increasing their self-awareness, committing to change, overcoming limiting thoughts, and deliberately practicing new behaviors, leaders raise the likelihood that the change initiatives they’re tasked to lead will be successful.

Change 145
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Why Infrastructure Projects Require High-Quality Management

Business and Tech

We spoke with Andrea S. Rutledge, CAE, president and CEO of the Construction Management Association of America, about the value trained and educated program and construction managers bring to projects, and how hiring the right pros can help improve U.S. infrastructure. Andrea S. Rutledge, CAE President and CEO, Construction Management Association of America “A PM/CM professional’s mandate is to work with all parties to deliver the project or program within the owner’s schedule, budget, qua

Project 130

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Beyond the Daily Grind: How Design Thinking Can Illuminate Your Life’s Purpose

Tullio Siragusa

Beyond the Daily Grind: How Design Thinking Can Illuminate Your Life’s Purpose In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, it’s easy to get caught up in the routine, to lose sight of what truly matters to us, and to wonder if there’s more to life than the daily grind. This is where the concept of “purpose” comes into play. Purpose is not just a lofty idea; it’s a guiding force that can transform your life, and Design Thinking can be the compass that helps you navigate the path to discover

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5 Types of Stories Leaders Need to Tell

Harvard Business Review

Storytelling is an important leadership skill, and executives who want to succeed should master five types of narrative: Vision stories, which inspire a shared one; values stories that model the way; action stories that spark progress and change; teaching stories that transmit knowledge and skills to others; and trust stories that help people understand, connect with, and believe in you.

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Aaron Witt Shares What’s New in the World of Dirt

Business and Tech

Self-dubbed the Chief Dirt Nerd, Aaron Witt is the CEO of BuildWitt , a services, media, and software company focused on infrastructure and mining. He shared what’s new in the World of Dirt and how stakeholders can meet today’s infrastructure demands by embracing the modern workforce. Aaron Witt CEO, BuildWitt “Who doesn’t want to help in literally shaping the world around them?

Industry 130
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Measuring Employee Engagement Accurately

Innovation Excellence

GUEST POST from David Burkus Employee engagement has been a hot topic for several decades. And for good reason. Business teams with highly engaged employees have a 59 percent lower turnover rate than those with less engaged staff. Highly engaged teams are 17 percent more productive. Engaged teams receive 10 percent higher customer reviews.

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Manufacturing Sustainability Surge: Your Guide to Data-Driven Energy Optimization & Decarbonization

Speaker: Kevin Kai Wong, President of Emergent Energy Solutions

In today's industrial landscape, the pursuit of sustainable energy optimization and decarbonization has become paramount. Manufacturing corporations across the U.S. are facing the urgent need to align with decarbonization goals while enhancing efficiency and productivity. Unfortunately, the lack of comprehensive energy data poses a significant challenge for manufacturing managers striving to meet their targets.

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The Energy Transition is a crazy pitching evolving business need.

Innovating4Energy

The Energy Transition is probably the most challenging undertaking we need to take in a short time frame of thirty years. to give our planet the chance to regain balance for us to live in and protect what we have To get there, we will need to chase a crazy business of existing, competing businesses, all vested in how we do things, to gain their attention and convince them of a sense of urgency and need for a rapid change from the existing to a preferred.

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How to Have a Successful Meeting with Your Boss’s Boss

Harvard Business Review

Taking the time and effort to invest in upward relationships, such as those with skip-level managers, requires strategy, humility, and diligence. After all, leadership is not only about managing those below you, but also navigating the complexities above. In this article, the author offers practical tips for holding a successful skip-level meeting.

Meeting 133
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Building a Secure Future for America’s Water Resources

Business and Tech

How often do you turn on your faucet or shower and think about where your water comes from? The luxury of having a consistent supply of clean water masks a harsh reality: the gradual depletion of this invaluable resource. Deron Brown Deron Brown, President and Chief Operating Officer, U.S. Operations, PCL Construction “To secure a strategic future, it is imperative to reshore critical manufacturing processes related to water infrastructure components.” Take the Colorado River Basin f

Resources 130
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AI Actually Leads to Increased Customer Experience Employment

Innovation Excellence

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken That title is a bold statement in a world where AI, ChatGPT and other technologies are doing many tasks that employees have typically performed. Sometimes, the technologies perform even better.

ChatGPT 105
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Peak Performance: Continuous Testing & Evaluation of LLM-Based Applications

Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

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Implementing Open Innovation: Insights from Ariana Smetana of AccelIQ Digital

Qmarkets

Open innovation is a core strategy for transformative growth amongst a growing number of enterprise companies around the world. The days of boardrooms and R&D departments keeping innovation under lock and key are waning, as companies are increasingly preferring a more collaborative approach with startups and other external parties. AccelIQ Digital is a global consultancy based in Houston, Texas, with a mission to help enterprise businesses unlock the benefits of this outward-looking, collabo

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Why Is It So Hard to Leave a Bad Job?

Harvard Business Review

If you’ve ever been in an unhealthy work situation, you probably know how hard it can be to leave. Leaving a bad job is never easy, and each person’s breaking point is different, so beating yourself up over why you stayed so long in a traumatic situation won’t help. But learning from each experience will empower you to own your career choices and leave earlier if you find yourself in a comparable situation again.

Strategy 133
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Different ways we use Category Expertise to deliver better results

Flying Fish Lab

As we’ve mentioned, Category Expertise is what enables you to make things happen. It’s the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, which enables teams to focus on driving viable solutions. At FFL we leverage our clients’ category expertise in a few ways, and we often have a particularly strong focus on it at the start and the end of a project. At the start of every project, while we try not to “drink too much from the same fountain” as the client, there’s fundamental knowledge that is required

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Avoid These Four Myths While Networking Your Organization

Innovation Excellence

GUEST POST from Greg Satell In an age of disruption, everyone has to adapt eventually. However, the typical organization is ill-suited to change direction. Managers spend years—and sometimes decades—working to optimize their operations to deliver specific outcomes and that can make an organization rigid if the face of a change in the basis of competition.

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How Mature Companies Are Scaling Transformational New Businesses

Scaling transformational innovations in large companies is challenging due to ‘Company Fit’ issues, which arise when the resources, processes, and priorities (RPPs) of the core business are not aligned with the needs of the new business. Many companies have learned how ambidexterity—the ability to both ‘exploit the present and explore the future,’ can help them address these issues for ideation and incubation of new innovations, but scaling transformative business innovations remains a challenge

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What Every Leader Should Know About AI Transformation

Faisal Hoque

All its potential aside, there are legitimate dangers to AI. At the heart of the matter is the essential value of a balanced perspective.

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It’s Time for a New Model for Operations Management

Harvard Business Review

Covid-19 was the death knell for traditional hierarchical command-and-control operations management. In its place a new model has emerged that’s far better equipped to deal with today’s disruptive, volatile, and unpredictable environment. In this model, decision-making responsibility is broadly dispersed to where it makes the most sense, resulting in faster, more accurate decisions in response to changing conditions.

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Remembering Chris Burnham, Answering Questions From His Lean Leadership Podcast

Kainexus

The lean community recently lost a brilliant mind and a warm heart, Chris Burnham. His sudden passing left a significant void that is still hard to come to terms with. Today, we want to pay tribute to Chris and celebrate his life and the profound impact he had on our company and our community. Chris was a kind and insightful lean thinker and a *Lean Leadership Podcast* host, where he shared his passion for lean principles with a broader audience.

LEAN 94
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How to Defeat Corporate Antibodies

Innovation Excellence

A Guide to Beating Resistance GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard Imagine yourself as the CEO of a mid-sized organization that’s struggling to grow and adapt to the ever-changing business landscape. You decide that it’s time for a significant transformation, which will involve new partnerships, revamped processes, and a shift in the company’s culture.

How To 99
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How Retailers Are Transforming Customer Experiences with Data & AI

Speaker: David Azoulay, Marc Stracuzza, Román Tejada, and Guest Speaker Sucharita Kodali

Imagine a retail landscape where every interaction is personalized, every decision informed, and every opportunity maximized 🤔✨ Join us for an exploratory journey into the heart of AI-driven retail innovation. We’ll unveil the transformative potential of AI and data analytics in shaping the future of omnichannel personalization and e-commerce.

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The Creative Challenge of Changing Culture at IBM

InnovationManagement

Key Strategy: Facilitating Genuine Employee InvolvementExcerpted from the book: Idea Stormers, How to Lead and Inspire Creative Breakthroughs (Wiley Jossey-Bass) by Bryan Mattimore There is no tougher organizational challenge than changing a culture. Just ask any CEO or company president. Even the most powerful executive can feel surprisingly powerless when it comes to changing [.

Culture 81
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Research: Consumers Choose Shared Experiences Over Quality Ones

Harvard Business Review

Some consumer experiences are best when they’re solo — but new research shows that people will forgo a high-quality experience in order to share it with a partner or loved one. As a result, they may have a worse time, which can lead to unsatisfied consumers, lower sales, and neglected business opportunities. This article explains why people tend to stick together, even when it isn’t necessarily beneficial, and outlines several ways marketers can encourage people to break apart (even briefly) in

Marketing 125
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Shifting from Compliance to Commitment: Leadership Excellence with CEO Mark Parrish

Kainexus

Here is a summary of the webinar presentation by Mark Parrish titled " Building Cultures of Commitment. " In the webinar, Mark gave a 20-minute presentation that was followed by a robust Q&A period for the rest of the hour. View the entire webinar here.

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The Secrets of Seeing What’s Missing

Innovation Excellence

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski With one eye open and the other closed, you have no depth perception. With two eyes open, you see in three dimensions. This ability to see in three dimensions is possible because each eye sees from a unique perspective.

Design 85
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How Automation is Driving Efficiency Through the Last Mile of Reporting

Speaker: Jamie Eagan

As organizations strive for agility and efficiency, it's imperative for finance leaders to embrace innovative technologies and redefine traditional processes. Join us as we explore the pivotal role of digitalization and automation in reshaping what is commonly referred to as the “last mile of reporting”. We’ll deep-dive into why digitalization is no longer a choice, but a necessity for finance departments to stay competitive in a fast-paced environment touching on: 2024 trends for the Office of

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If You Want to Be an Industry Leader, Be an Industry Innovator. Here's How to Inspire Innovation in Your Business.

Entrepreneur - Innovation

Innovation isn't just about making something new; it's about improving something.

Industry 112
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6 Actions CEOs Must Take During a Cyberattack

Harvard Business Review

Many have warned over the years of the growing cyber threats and some have offered thoughtful advice for how to strengthen an organization’s protection and resilience. Three questions can help determine whether enough has been done: First, have you participated in a cyber tabletop exercise recently? Second, do you have the contact information of your chief information security officer saved somewhere other than your work phone or computer?

Exercises 125
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Insanely Interesting People who Influenced Me #17 Joseph Campbell

Rmukesh Gupta

For the rest of the year, I would like to take a moment and thank the people who have had a significant impact on me as an individual. The way they have lived their lives and their body of work has had an outsized impact on how I think about life in general and and work, in particular. Some of these are contemporary thinkers and some of them are just a memory.

Culture 59
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Thursday Theory Tips- Disruption, a theory of competition

Christensen Institute

Disruptive innovation is commonly misunderstood. Just watch “ Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery ” to hear one of the main characters, Miles Bron, get the definition of “true disruption” really, really wrong. Thankfully (spoiler alert), he was the villain, so we’ll move past it and be the heroes of the story, by doing a mini dive into what true disruption really is.

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Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI

“Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI” is an extensive guide for integrating generative AI into product strategy and careers featuring over 150 real-world examples, 30 case studies, and 20+ frameworks, and endorsed by over 20 leading AI and product executives, inventors, entrepreneurs, and researchers.