Steve Blank
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Avoiding Innovation Pantomime: Capability vs. Capacity
We all like a bit of theatre, but unless you focus on your strategy, and turn those ideas into actions that change colleagues and customers lives, you risk something worse. The endless idea challenges that go nowhere, the hackathons, the… Continue reading
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How To Behave In A Legacy Organisation
“I was a Legacy manager in a Legacy organisation. We were mainly caretaking a broken model, trying to make it function better.” Kate Davies It’s always refreshing to hear a CEO, or ex-CEO, offer a pragmatic take on their career… Continue reading
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Innovation Doesn’t Happen By Accident
Trickle down innovation, just like trickle down economics, doesn’t trickle down very far at all. When leaders are implored to innovate they often go for the easiest and most attractive option, innovation theatre: You bring someone in to give an… Continue reading
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The Anatomy of a Great Idea
Ideas are not invented equally. I’d suggest that anyone who repeats the adage that ‘no idea is a bad idea’ has never attended a management away day. So what makes a great idea? Continue reading
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The People Vs The System – and Why The People Rarely Win
What if we overstate the effect of the people in our organisations, and we spend too much time addressing what they feel and think without addressing the more complex, systemic problems that influence how they perform or behave? Continue reading
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What Effect Does Environment Have On Our Ability To Think Creatively?
When you think of the “space to innovate” what immediately springs to mind? Is it the physical space , the mental space, the calendar space? All three? I’ve been thinking a lot about spaces and environments this week: specifically what… Continue reading
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Death By Zoom: Have We Failed The Mass Home Working Experiment?
One of the few positives of the pandemic lockdown was the opportunity to reset the way in which we spend our working day. This was the chance to prove that remote work actually works. As someone whose job it is… Continue reading
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How To Avoid Innovation Theatre
Consistent investment, dedicated teams, proper evidencing of decisions, alignment with strategy. A simple but critical recipe for innovation in future-ready organisations – Tom Cheesewright One of the questions I get asked most frequently is“How do you define innovation?” This week… Continue reading
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We Need To Be Boringly Reliable and Radically Disruptive – At The Same Time
Our organisations are generally bad at innovation. That’s because they are designed that way. Just as your body is designed to fight a common cold, most of our cultures protect the organisational DNA from any foreign antibodies. Add something new and it… Continue reading








