A recent article in Forbes asked if innovation was purely the domain of the young, saying
“youth seems to have advantages in innovation: everything is possible, knowledge is fresh, obligations are few and reputation is not at risk.”
Innovation can occur in products – we see this clearly in the field of mobile technology, for example – as well as in processes and services. Depending on the impact of innovation on environmental conditions, it can be classified as breakthrough innovation or  incremental innovation .
Any environment, business, culture or otherwise will be shaped by innovation that evolves through periods of incremental change, and will be punctuated by innovative breakthroughs that either enhance or destroy the existing competence of firms and the individuals that make them up.
Incremental innovation creates changes through cumulative processes until a major advance that creates discontinuity ruptures the beginning point altogether.
Through incremental [...]

Stakeholders (e.g. activist groups, unions, competitors, corporations, environment groups, political lobbies) are increasingly creating a “stakeholder media”, where content is created for the purpose of influencing public opinion and/or the opinions of particular actors in favour of pre-determined issues. Social media is a tool that stakeholders are able to use to set out their agenda, often in competition with dominant media corporations, and as such have the potential to provide a powerful alternative to the dominant and current public agendas as well as to promote the interests of powerful stakeholders. Stakeholders with expert power and substantial means can be very influential through the use of social media channels (i.e. through user-created content).
Whilst the mainstream media is focussed on current issues of interest to the general public, presented with (supposed) neutrality, stakeholder run social media tends to focus on solutions to problems which are of interest to target communities, and even though subjective, [...]

I’ve been thinking about hiring recently, prompted by this article, The Strategic Imperative Not to Hire , by Walter Kiechel III. The main idea is probably a reality: companies have reduced overhead as a result of the global financial recession. One thing that they have tried to do is maintain capability as costs are cut. There has been a focus on talent leadership, prompting many companies to ask: What talent do I want? How do I develop it? Do I hire it in? Once I have that talent, what do I do with it to keep it? [...]

Prompted by several articles on the topic , I discuss executive remuneration in this podcast, particularly with regard to the fact that the shareholder value world is only concerned with financial capital and not productive capital, and the fact that no corporation on its own will be concerned with social issues.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Wired’s Gadget Lab blog recently ran a piece about how Steve Jobs has been emailing customers to answer their questions directly . An interesting question stemming from the article is how Steve Jobs interprets his role as the CEO. What is the role of the CEO?
From all research Nada and I have undertaken, what the role and spread of the responsibilities of the CEO and chairman is is one of the two most difficult questions we’ve had to answer. [...]

Earlier this week I was quoted in an article in the FT on global cultural differences. The gist of the piece is that many companies are paying attention to and celebrating countries’ differences, which runs counter to the idea that the world is becoming culturally homogenized through the internet. Two of my comments made it into the article: [...]

Will these ongoing British Airways strikes give British Airways the chance to restructure? Robert Peston thinks so, and I agree. I was recently at a global conference in Australia on how supply chain thinking can better penetrate the boardroom, and one of the case examples was British Airways. I remember a very senior director remarking about BA as ‘yesterday’s legacy’ business — not just a legacy business, but yesterday’s legacy business that nobody had done anything about it when they should have. In effect he was saying that BA was going to go bankrupt, because they have problems that they should have sorted out yesterday, and these problems are getting worse. [...]

Prompted by this story on executive payouts at Sun, in this podcast I discuss talent and how bonuses and golden parachutes reflect the end of the shareholder value world in mature markets. [...]

Recently the Mail Online broke a story about how the BBC technology chief spent £639 on taxi ride . These sorts of expenses are nothing new. The BBC, as well as the and House of Commons and House of Lords, are legacy institutions. Introducing change in legacy institutions is very difficult. The critical issue is how do you manage to adapt an old culture that is used to doing things in own way when that culture is also financially supported and so has no reason to change. [...]

Prompted by this blog post by Dan Pallotta on Harvard Business Blogs, in this podcast I discuss how organisations outside the private sector should evaluate compensation. Charitable work is becoming more professional, and as it does so, it is becoming increasingly necessary to pay the market value for executives.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]