Sharing what I have learned from what I have read: A blog by Joe Abittan
In the book Risk Savvy Gerd Gigerenzer describes the work of top executives within companies as being inherently intuitive. Executives and managers within high performing companies are constantly pressed for time. There are more decisions, more incoming items that need attention, and more things to work on than any executive or manager can adequately handle … Continue reading A Leader’s Toolbox
My last post was about negative error cultures and the harm they can create. Today is about the flip side, positive error cultures and how they can help encourage innovation, channel creativity, and help people learn to improve their decision-making. "On the other end of the spectrum," writes Gerd Gigerenzer in Risk Savvy, "are positive … Continue reading Positive Error Cultures
To be innovative is to make decisions, develop processes, and create things in new ways that improve over the status quo. Being innovative is necessarily different, and requires stepping away from the proven path to do something new or unusual. Risk and innovation are tied together because you cannot venture into something new or stray … Continue reading Risk and Innovation
When you learn something new, when you have a new insight into the world, when you figure out how to do something that you couldn't do before, do you share that insight or do you try to keep it to yourself? If you are a big business, you probably try to keep that to yourself. … Continue reading Innovation Openness
In his book Deep Work Cal Newport shares a story about Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the term disruptive innovation. Its an idea I like quite a bit, especially since it is a big concept in healthcare right now, and I focused quite a bit on health policy and dabbled slightly … Continue reading The Basics of Disruptive Innovation
One of the things I am secretly fascinated by is workplace design in our modern knowledge work economy. I'm not so interested in where the copy room is located, how the office kitchen is built out, or what furniture/decorations are around, but the big high level design question: where will our employees sit to do … Continue reading Workplace Design
The last few weeks I have been thinking quite a bit about chain restaurants. At some point in the recent past, I started to really dislike your typical chain restaurant. Perhaps my wife and I were gifted too many gift cards to Darden Restaurants, but I find myself feeling slightly disdainful toward chains and longing … Continue reading Chaos and Innovation
There is a story that I hear from time to time in different contexts. Depending on the context, it is framed as either positive or negative, with different ideas about what our future holds and how we should behave. The story manages to hit political and social identities, aspirations and fears for the future, and … Continue reading To Wear a Sweater or Not?
In The New Localism, Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak discuss the elements needed for cities to continue to grow as economic engines of modern economies. The United States currently has a handful of dynamic cities across the country which are powering the national economy. San Francisco (really the Bay Area as a whole and Silicon … Continue reading Collaborative Governance
One of the case studies presented by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak in their book The New Localism is Pittsburgh, PA, which has merged academic research institutions with business industry and supportive public policy. Pittsburgh has two major research universities within a block of each other, The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Experiences … Continue reading When Disciplines Collide