Who is more American? Is it the Kenyan or the Mormon? Who created or destroyed more jobs? Is it the community organizer or the private equity economizer? The candidates are focused on attacking personalities and circumstances rather than reality.
But, what really happened to blue collar jobs? This answer is straightforward. Our blue-collar laborers became too [...]
You are leading a very successful enterprise in airplanes, automobiles, mobile devices, healthcare — or perhaps higher education. The business model that got you to where you are — successful, profitable — seems to be faltering. The growth of revenue is diminishing while costs are escalating. The costs of infrastructure — physical, financial and human [...]
Change tends to be very difficult, but it does happen. Technology is one of the key drivers of change. Technologies enable new possibilities, such as typing this post on my iPad early Sunday morning, sipping coffee and listening to the rain. The iPad means that I can be productive any time, any place. This capability [...]
Over the past two semesters, I have been helping Georgia Tech undergraduate teams to contribute to transforming healthcare delivery. Their senior “capstone” projects have focused on patient in-flow (Emergency Department), in-patient operations (Operating Rooms) and patient out-flow (Discharge and Bed Turnover). Three eight-person teams addressed each of these areas of hospital operations.
The problems these students [...]
It is fairly common for the perceived benefits of current market offerings to fade and new value propositions to displace older offerings. As noted in earlier posts, Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction.” Steel ships replaced iron ships, which replaced wooden ships. Microprocessors subsumed transistors, which replaced vacuum tubes. Change happens and creative destruction causes [...]
I am a student of history, particularly economic history. Lately, I have been immersed in reading about technological innovation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Transportation was transformed from stagecoaches and steamboats to railroads, automobiles and airplanes. Electricity transformed communications from mail, telegraph and telephone to radio, television and now Internet.
In the process, [...]
Change happens when it is forced. The force can be an opportunity or a threat, perhaps embodied in a crisis. In many domains, the forces for change are manifested as market forces. Competitors, large or small, recognized or unrecognized, are the sources of market forces. Thus, change happens when there is competition to meet market [...]
A few months ago, a colleague asked me, “What if our big idea does not get approved by the powers at be?” I said, “We will start an insurgency and just do it anyway.” We are still waiting for approval, and may get it, but we are quickly progressing despite the lack of formal blessing. [...]
There are many impediments to addressing and solving executives’ toughest problem – see my last post. Resource limitations – time, money, and people – can obviously be impediments. Less obvious, and often much more troublesome, are the stewards of the status quo. These stewards include people and organizations who are determined to keep everything as [...]
I recently visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. One can question the whole “City on the Hill” imagery, but the Great Communicator was undoubtedly able to evoke a positive emotional response from me three decades after the original narrative. How does this compare to the Current Communicator?
Both Presidents inherited troubled economies– one could easily argue [...]
