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Experiment more often and more cheaply

“The next big opportunity never looks that way at the outset. Big opportunities grow out of successive rounds of experimentation.”

To evolve more rapidly, organizations must experiment more frequently. Management processes that seek to arrive at the “one best strategy” through top-down, analytical methods must give way to models based on the biological principles of variety (generate lots of options), selection (find low-cost ways to test critical assumptions), and retention (ramp up spending once a strategy has started to gain traction). In the future, top management won’t “make” strategy but will create an environment in which there is lots of fast-paced, strategic experimentation.

42 Stories
62 Hacks
5 Barriers

Experiment more often and more cheaply

“The next big opportunity never looks that way at the outset. Big opportunities grow out of successive rounds of experimentation.”

To evolve more rapidly, organizations must experiment more frequently. Management processes that seek to arrive at the “one best strategy” through top-down, analytical methods must give way to models based on the biological principles of variety (generate lots of options), selection (find low-cost ways to test critical assumptions), and retention (ramp up spending once a strategy has started to gain traction). In the future, top management won’t “make” strategy but will create an environment in which there is lots of fast-paced, strategic experimentation.

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From time to time, let everyone in a team  exercise leadership by setting up a system that picks a new leader randomly.The main focus of that randomly selected leader will be to serve their team,
Hack by Alberto Blanco on July 29, 2014
Dell's marketing and communications organizations rely more and more on social media and community (SMaC), with some people blogging on internal or external sites, others developing community-focused
Hack by Bill Johnston on October 22, 2010
This article has been written as one of the requirements to obtain the Innovation Mentor Certification credential at iVia: a program founded by Notre Dame University, Whirlpool Corporation and Bea
Story by Raymond Tilkens on October 30, 2014
"Lock in" of talent may squelch passion, demoralize employees and of course lead to worse fit of talent to problems.  Top down delegation of tasks utilizes fewer minds thinking about what pr
Hack by Gisela Jönsson on July 5, 2011
If you want to promote the behaviours of your best leaders, give them a larger span of control and ability to influence.
Hack by Sean Schofield on November 21, 2013
A collaborative business planning and execution approach holds the promise of increasing the success rates for achieving corporate goals.
Hack by Matt Johnson on April 29, 2012
We know the lessons of Edison's light bulb.  He had to fail so many times to get to what would work.  We tell our kids to "fail and try again".  But in our organizations, we hate failur
Barrier by Howard C. Park on May 20, 2010
Traditional Models of entrepreneurship are sequential and focus on steps and deliverables centered on the  business plan.
Hack by Declan Kavanagh on July 12, 2013
We’ve waged a personal vendetta against ‘the business meeting’ for the past year or so and have successfully come out on top.
Story by Jeremy Green on April 30, 2012
Project Monitoring 2.0 is a collaborative systemic monitoring approach for project management to bring the “people” part of project activity into focus to get earlier insight into problems.
Hack by Vlatka Hlupic on April 26, 2012

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