When you teach someone how to throw a baseball, you tell them to look where they want the ball to go, step toward where they want the ball to go, and then throw the ball where they want it to go. To the novice thrower, this can sound frustratingly uninstructive. So, too, is the simple complexity that is viewing your business in a way that narrows your perspective to one that can provide an experience...
Claudia Kotchka played a key role in figuring out what parents (mostly mothers) want from their children’s diapers. She was in charge of P&G’s design, tasked with bringing new innovation tools and techniques into the company. But it was incredibly difficult to get marketing on board because the experiences reported by her consumers didn’t match up with what marketing thought were the important parts of selling diapers. It was only when IDEO came on and...
Let’s address the elephant in the room that appears when we talk about the global energy company BP: the tragic Deepwater Horizon incident and the 2016 Hollywood movie of the same name that describes itself as “based on true events.” The movie generally sticks to what actually happened on April 20, 2010, when an oil rig owned by BP exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven people, injuring many more, and creating an environmental...
There are five key dimensions against which an organization must exhibit strength. We interviewed people representing over ninety organizations, from a wide array of categories, for our book Shift Ahead. Some of them were successful in shifting; others were less so. Nevertheless, all could attest to the fact that these five dimensions were essential elements in being able to shift at critical moments of change.
GE has been injecting urgency into conversations—and actions— for over 130 years. In our conversation with GE’s chief marketing officer, Linda Boff about the company’s ability to continuously shift gears to stay relevant, she said, “Progress is part of our constant.
