I was the Chairman at an Operational Excellence and Business Transformation conference in Amsterdam this past March (2023) which was produced by CParity.  The lead-off workshop was on Design Thinking. I must admit; my first impression of the workshop was mixed.  I thought the concepts of Design Thinking and its approaches were novel.  But it...

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Most of us read about the recent leadership changes at Toyota. Many industry experts criticized Toyota’s lack of innovation and the gap with Tesla as the main reason for the succession. Despite Toyota’s status as an industry benchmark, we have to ask: Did “lean” impede innovation? My answer is “NO”. I had the opportunity to...

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What’s on Elon Musk’s mind? In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Musk details how the radical new innovations he’s working on — Tesla’s intelligent humanoid robot Optimus, SpaceX’s otherworldly Starship and Neuralink’s brain-machine interfaces, among others — could help maximize the lifespan of humanity and create a world where goods and services are...

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It’s another “Open Mic Night” at The Outliers Inn and JP and Mule are happy to welcome our guest and have a casual chat with whatever might be on their minds (and ours). JP starts off with sharing a return trip from Newark back to Frankfurt which was quite like the movie “planes, trains, and...

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Profit, money, shareholders: these are the priorities of most companies today. But at what cost? In an appeal to corporate leaders worldwide, Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya calls for an end to the business playbook of the past — and shares his vision for a new, “anti-CEO playbook” that prioritizes people over profits. “This is the...

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Summary.   For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which industry entrants will succeed. Unfortunately, the theory has also been widely misunderstood, and the “disruptive” label has been applied too carelessly anytime a market newcomer shakes up well-established incumbents. In this...

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The revolutionary theory of the nature of light which won Albert Einstein the 1921 Nobel prize for physics went on to remake the world. Oliver Morton surveys a century of innovation. Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel prize for physics in 1922. The temporal anomaly embodied in that sentence was not, alas, one of the...

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Emerging from the pandemic, tomorrow’s successful businesses will make themselves more resilient to unexpected crises. They will intensify the use of digital technologies in cloud computing, cyber security, cognitive and artificial intelligence tools and the Internet of Things. Empowered with these tools, they will also have greater flexibility in managing costs and the agility to...

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Several months into a global pandemic, leading organizations are redefining expectations of what is possible. Consider how offices around the world shifted virtually overnight to digitally enabled remote work. Grocery retailers and restaurants rolled out new pickup and delivery services. Hospitals rapidly expanded telehealth options. Automakers, apparel makers, and mobile phone assemblers retooled on the...

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For decades, researchers have published findings in MIT Sloan Management Review about developing and executing strategy. This collection offers a dozen of our most popular strategy articles of all time. “Strategy, at its heart, is about choice,” write the authors of “Turning Strategy Into Results,” an article featured below, which takes a keen look at how leaders...

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Ecosystems create powerful forces that can reshape and disrupt industries.  In healthcare, they have the potential to deliver a personalized and integrated experience to consumers, enhance provider productivity, engage formal and informal caregivers, and improve outcomes and affordability. We define an ecosystem as a set of capabilities and services that integrate value chain participants (customers,...

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Have you ever wondered how they design those tiny microrobots, no bigger than the size of a single cell? Paul McEuen and Marc Miskin explain how this is done and reveal some of the many fascinating uses for these remarkable creations from crop disease control to understanding the human brain. Read more… 

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As the Coronavirus pandemic spreads the United States and many other countries around the world are asking employees to work from home. This may sound fantastic, akin to a vacation in many ways, but productivity needs to remain and things need to operate as normal is what will be a new normal until the pandemic...

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Topic:  We do another theme-based episode, this time on “New Year’s Resolutions”.  It doesn’t matter whether they are funny or serious ones, but it does matter that your word and resolve is so useless that you can’t keep a promise to yourself.  In that case, you might not even have any resolutions.  But if you do,...

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Description: “It was a dark and stormy night”. No, actually, it’s just the gloom and cold of February. So what better way to spend your time than to stop by The Outliers Inn for some hot toddies and warm conversation – or is it warm toddies and hot conversation. In any case, with Spring just around the...

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Topic:  In this episode of The Outliers Inn, we try something new – having a “theme” for the show.  As we approach the end of another year in time and space, we (ought to) become reflective of things said and done, failures and successes, fulfillments and hopes yet to fulfill themselves.  Like the Irish man who...

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McKinsey puts it simple in this article, by stating that the ability to develop, deliver, and scale new products, services, processes, and business models rapidly is a muscle that virtually every organization needs to strengthen. Their latest research highlights a growing performance gap separating innovation “winners” from companies that merely muddle along, with the intent...

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Craig Costello uses mathematics to secure the digital world, both against the threats that exist today and those that may exist in the future. In this glimpse into our technological future, this cryptographer discusses the world-altering potential of quantum computers, which could shatter the limits set by today’s machines – and give code breakers a...

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Topic: Antlerboy (aka Benjamin Taylor) continues to be plagued by substandard internet, although right in the middle of London and across the street to MI-6, yet can only get ADSL service to his office.  How can that be in 2019?  Broadcasting from home is not possible because Antlerboy is too “afraid” to tell his wife to...

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In today’s age, the question comes to fore: Do hiring algorithms prevent bias, or amplify it? This fundamental question has emerged as a point of tension between the technology’s proponents and its skeptics, but arriving at the answer is more complicated than it appears. HBR means that hiring is rarely a single decision, but rather...

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Algorithms have taken a lot of heat recently for producing biased decisions. People are outraged over a recruiting algorithm Amazon developed that overlooked female job applicants. Likewise, they are outraged over predictive policing and predictive sentencing that disproportionately penalize people of color. Importantly, race and gender were not included as inputs into any of these algorithms. Should we be outraged...

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McKinsey & Co means that embracing AI promises considerable benefits for businesses and economies through its contributions to productivity growth and innovation. At the same time, AI’s impact on work is likely to be profound. Some occupations as well as demand for some skills will decline, while others grow and many change as people work...

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In William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” (usually referred to simply as “Hamlet”), the main character, Hamlet, uses the phrase “undiscovered country” to refer to what lies beyond the grave – the afterlife – and our lack of knowledge of it, and our fear of it.  As it is with death, so...

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Topic: An eclectic bunch of visitors visited The Outliers Inn sharing a myriad of challenges. It was another successful Open Mic Night at The Outliers Inn.  Word is spreading of the new format of having random call-in guests is taking hold with the guests being greater in number and in energy. We start with Antlerboy and...

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Welcome to this episode of the State of Readiness podcast – with Stephane Jeanmart from Syngenta I welcome Stephane Jeanmart, Chemistry Operational Excellence Lead at Syngenta, a global agrochemical business headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.  In this episode, Stephane shares his journey from being formally trained in Chemistry, a discipline of predictable outcomes governed by formulas...

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McKinsey & Co means that most executives we know have a powerful, intuitive feel for the rhythm of their businesses. They know how hard and fast to pull strategic levers, move their organization, and drive execution to achieve their objectives. Or at least they did. But in the light digitization that has intensified the rhythm...

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Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence…. Good fences make good neighbors — Robert Frost, 1914 In this article, I explore possible uses of blockchain technology in non-financial businesses. Possible uses because the technology and supporting...

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The Economist writes that back in 1900, only one in three cars on American roads ran on volts. Then oil began gushing out of Texas. Cheaper than batteries, and easier to top up, petrol fuelled the rise of mass-produced automobiles. Cost and worries about limited range have kept electric vehicles (evs) in a niche ever...

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Fortune poses the question: So, who’s winning? The disruptors or the incumbents? This article means that while incumbents often get a bad rap, the truth is that for every sector where technological change has enabled fleet-footed digital disruptors to innovate business models, there are even more where established players still prevail. Furthermore the reader is...

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According to McKinsey & Co, we certainly all know examples of bad product and service design. The USB plug (always lucky on the third try). The experience of rushing to make your connecting flight at many airports. The exhaust port on the Death Star in Star Wars. The question comes to the fore: How do the best...

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