As a reverse fairy tale for the CEO set, the reality television program Undercover Boss is fascinating, not so much in the witness-to-a-train- wreck mode of the rest of the genre, but because it is so revealing of our conflicted relationship with "the boss." The premise of the show—that the only way to get a clue about what's really going on in his (or her) organization, is for the boss to go undercover on the front lines—is all too often the actual reality in organizations of any size. Yet, at the same time, the view of the boss as the ultimate authority with the heroic power to swoop in and save the day—whether that means paying down a mortgage, granting an instant promotion, or banishing a reviled policy—holds sway in real life as well as on "reality" TV.
My conversation with our newest MIX Maverick Andrew McAfee yielded all kinds of bracing insight when it comes to how we set strategy, structure work, unleash talent, and measure success. But I haven’t been able to shake one idea in particular he threw out at the end of our conversation as a...
Tech companies have unleashed the creativity latent within their organizations through “hackathons” - intense ideation events where teams of professionals move quickly from idea to prototype.
An Anglican parish launches a bold experiment with a radical model of how to “do church,” by replacing hierarchy with communities of passion, and unleashing the capabilities of its c
Whirlpool Corporation recently added the “bow” to the rock-solid and deeply embedded Double Diamond process which focuses on discovery and development of new opportunities in the front end.
One enduring change in the management lexicon brought about by the dotcom revolution was the term business model —how a firm makes money. The concept had been in existence for decades, but the competition between "old" and "new" economy firms, with very different business models, helped to...
In Parts 1-3, I recounted the Pull Replenishment saga of how a small team started a bottom-up movement that generated millions of dollars in profit, improved shipping performance to the customer, and
What would it look like if the rapidly-evolving social world of Web 2.0 collided with the sterile and static corporate Intranet? What would happen if information flowed from the outside in, instead of inside out? Those are the questions at the heart of an interesting experiment unfolding at global...
Imagine a room filled with 100 people like you. Everyone knows a little something about a little something. Now let’s say 25 of those people are given a question to answer.
