Rocking Your Next Brainstorming Session!

I am sure that at some point in your career, you have been either invited to or hosted a brainstorming session to come up ideas. Ideas to either solve a specific problem or to create a new product or service or for something else altogether.  Most brainstorming sessions don’t work. They either don’t get the creative ideas that you expect to come up with or nothing happens after the brainstorming, which leads to a feeling of fun but wasted time. But it need not be like that. I’ve hosted more than 200 brainstorming sessions and what I have learnt is that these […]

4 Pathways to Innovation

I was facilitating a group of senior leaders who were tasked with leading the innovation effort in their respective organization and started the facilitation with the simple yet profound question – “How do you define innovation?”. The best answer I’ve so far received to this question is the following: “Innovation is applied problem solving leading to generation of value.” The next question to ask then is the following: “Which problems are worth solving and where do we find them?” This is the first step in the innovation process. If we don’t pick the right problems, no matter how interesting our […]

Big Data, Automation and Cows Who Decide When they want to be Milked

I came across this interesting read on Quartz.com. The post is about a farm in Iceland where the entire barn is automated. Here are some quotes from the article. When one of their cows wants to be milked, she walks to the center of the barn to one of the three self-milking Lely machines. She enters the machine—a gated, cow-size booth—and first has her teats inspected and cleaned. Next, the robot attaches its equipment to extract her milk while the cow chows down on some cow candy: tasty corn pellets supplemented with various vitamins and minerals. The whole process takes […]

ABCDEFG of Successful Digital Transformation

I came across this very interesting post by John Hagel, where he brings up a very interesting topic, one that I feel strongly about – Digital Transformation. It appears that you can not go through a corporate presentation or a CxO presentation without hearing the word “Digital Transformation”. Not a day goes by when I don’t read about some initiative run by a business under the banner of “Digital Transformation”. As with any other loosely thrown around words, this term has also lost a lot of meaning and significance. As John clearly points out in his post, doing the same […]