I was wrapping up a recent talk on doing growth programs in larger firms, when during the Q&A session, one of the up-and-coming innovation leaders expressed a common concern: “We sometimes build some interesting things in our product team, but we can never get our sales team even remotely interested in sharing them with a […]
It’s a common conversation, yet it continues to surprise me. I was talking with a P&L owner of a smaller, publicly-traded firm, when they raised the issue of how they put themselves in a bind: “I’m not sure what else we could have done. We hit the customer need dead on, yet when we went […]
It’s very common in mid-sized firms and larger: when a big review is coming up, particularly with the analyst community or a larger customer, there is a need to have a few slides that position the firm as a leader. The R&D team is tapped for “some content” and many times a project is dusted […]
Which is more challenging: the internal organizational resistance or market resistance? A portion of my work is spent with cohorts of upwardly mobile, mid-senior leaders who are developing their growth programs as part of their commitment to professional development. One of them asked me this question during a recent coaching session, and as usual, it […]
I received some interesting notes back regarding the post (here) from SCPD, particularly on the 60 percent of IOT programs that don’t make it past proof of concept. For those of you coming from outside the tech world, IOT refers to the “Internet of Things.” I wasn’t surprised, as the Gartner Hype Cycle for IOT […]
Picture a group assembled under one mantra: accelerating innovation. It would be an eclectic group of industry leaders, thought leaders and others who make their living building value. Mix in equal parts of dialogue, interaction and new experiences. That’s what the SCPD (Society for Concurrent Product Development) conference is all about. Set each year at […]
It was a quest of nearly mythic proportions, and I had a front-row seat to the action: allow anyone – anywhere – to make a satellite-based phone call. The program was dubbed Iridium (named for the 77th element when initial calculations showed the need for 77 satellites). It was conceived of in the 1990’s and […]
If you are on the board, a member of the C-Suite or a P&L accountable leader in a larger firm, there is a common blind spot when launching innovation initiatives. I was reminded of this during a phone call with a colleague whom I did several large-scale breakout programs with while in an op’s role […]
True story from my ops background: When I was running through emails one morning, I found one that stopped me in my tracks. The VP of a recently acquired product line had sent an incendiary note to the CFO and copied dozens of people internally, using coarse language to declare the integration systems team completely […]
Have you ever fallen victim to the MBA Kool Aid? As a young strategist, it led me to believe that with the right preparation, a great pre-read and a superb facilitation job, I could lay the foundation for a solid innovation strategy with one good offsite session. After the session was complete, we’d then spend […]
