Story of the Creation of the Humble Mouse as Narrated by Steve Jobs and Its Lesson in Leading Innovation

Earlier today, I stumbled upon a video of Steve Jobs talking about the creation of the humble mouse and why he had to go to David Kelly Designs (which later on became IDEO) to get it done. You can watch the video here. In the video, he shares that content is more important than process, when it comes to innovation and creativity. The question is what does he mean by content? He is not talking about the content that we refer to. He is talking about the sum of character, knowledge and the curiosity of the people as their content. […]

Two ways to Drive Performance Improvements

A recent post on GapingVoid talks about another performance equation (I shared one yesterday on my blog here): Performance improvements = Reducing Errors + Increasing Insights – Gary Klein The author of the post argues that while there is a lot of focus on reducing errors in organisations, there is not enough focus or energy spent on increasing the number of insights that people could share and use to drive productivity improvements. I think there are many reasons for this behaviour. Firstly, we are biologically attuned to negative information more than anything else. So, it is obvious that we are […]

How could SouthWest Airlines spend A Billion Dollars for IT Modernisation

One of the biggest news story this last Christmas season was the cascading effect of flights being cancelled by Southwest Airlines. According to their SEC filing, they had to cancel more than 16700 flights over the holiday period in December, costing them an estimated $725million-$825 million. The reason for this cascading effect was a perfect storm of outdated technology, a natural storm and their very own business model (point to point service instead of the hub and spoke model that almost all the other airlines follow). In a recent press release, their CEO Bob Jordan shared the following: We are currently […]

Learnings from Participating in an Intrapreneurship Program

This blog is co-authored by Makesh Gupta and Rena Yu Ning Wang, and it is about our journey participating in the SAP.iO journey, with the idea of building a SAP Live Shopping Platform. This was originally posted on the SAP Community blog and has been republished here with permission. Context: It was a late Friday evening and I was bored and so I did what I always do when most of us feel bored – pick up the phone and started scrolling through my social media feed – Facebook, instagram and then my latest favorite – TikTok. And something there on […]

Wishing you a very happy “World Creativity and Innovation Day” #WCID

Today, April 21st is celebrated as the “World Creativity and Innovation Day“. Do we really need a creativity and innovation day? Shouldn’t every day be about creativity and innovation? I think this is a discussion for another day. For now, lets stick with celebrating the day (recently, any excuse to celebrate is a good excuse, if we need one at all). Here is a short video of how and why the UN announced April 21 as the World Creativity and Innovation Day. Over the past decade, I have written many blog posts that talk about different perspectives on creativity, creative […]