Henry Ford said that failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently. But many of us begin again with no increase in intelligence. Or, we don’t get smarter because we won’t risk failure in the first place. We covered how organizations fail at failure in our last post. Here, we will look at how [...]

Successful innovation requires successful experimentation, and successful experimentation requires eagerness to learn from failure. This has become a cliché because it holds true, time and time again. The great experimenter Thomas Edison is famous for comments such as, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” The design firm IDEO keeps [...]

  Deep wisdom directed at today’s leaders isn’t what you’d expect from a guy who’s been dead since 1792. But Captain John Paul Jones, having been successfully channeled by Rear Admiral Rob Wray, has stern advice for today’s officers of the American Navy. Do you agree with him? And, does his advice apply to other [...]

“It’s an accountability problem.” This is one of those diagnoses that sound definitive and inspire lots of nods around the conference table – right up there with “it’s a leadership issue,” and “it’s a communication problem.” But a diagnosis is no cure. We believe that if we ask what “accountability” really means, when it’s present, [...]

Any serious strategist must ask, “How will we know when we’ve succeeded?” Strategies have intended outcomes – goals – and it’s terribly helpful if those outcomes are clear enough that success or failure will be indisputable. So, we’re offering an alternative to the usual questions such as: “Do we have metrics?” (Or worse, “Do we [...]