Group items tagged

"Established companies are "held captive by their customers," in Christensen's phrase, and so routinely ignore emerging markets of buyers who are not their customers. Dominant companies prosper by making a good product and keeping their customer base by using sustaining technologies to continue improving it. The products get ever better-but at some point their quality overshoots the level of performance that even the high end of the market needs. Typically, this is when a disruptive innovation lands in the marketplace at a lower price and relatively poor level of performance-but it's a level adequate for what the lower end of the market seeks. The disruptive technology starts to attract customers, and is on its way to staggering the industry's giants. "Sustaining innovation makes good products better-but then you don't buy the old product. They're replacements. They do not create growth." To bring these powerful ideas into the real world, Christensen in 2001 founded the consulting firm Innosight (www.innosight.com) with Mark Johnson, M.B.A. '96. Now employing about 100, the company works mostly with Fortune 100 companies that are seeking to defend their core businesses and adapt to disruptive environments. It also coaches them on how to disrupt markets proactively, harnessing disruption's engine of growth for themselves. "It's hard to do both," says David Duncan, a senior partner at Innosight who earned a Harvard Ph.D. in physics in 2000. "As successful companies get bigger, their growth trajectories flatten out, and they need to find new ways to expand. But that will look different from what they did in the past. Most are so focused on maintaining their core business that when push comes to shove, the core will almost always kill off the disruptive innovation-the new thing. "The two goals conflict for resources," he continues. "CEOs are accountable to shareholders and feel Wall Street pressure to meet earnings targe

"A Passion for Creative Transformation The Transformative Leadership MA is a uniquely innovative distance-learning program that integrates extensive practical skills with deep self-reflection and an emphasis on creative action in the world. The program prepares students to embody leadership and mobilize their creativity in many different ways, whether in organizations, social movements, or a range of activities requiring personal initiative and dedication to making a difference. Transformative Leadership offers a creative incubator for new forms of leadership in a rapidly changing world. New forms of leadership are needed in all dimensions of life, not just in boardrooms and governments. Transformative Leadership explores leadership along four dimensions: new ways of being, relating, knowing, and doing, all requiring new perspectives, skills, and personal practices. Transformative leadership holds that as we change the world we also change ourselves, and as we change ourselves we also change the world. The transdisciplinary curriculum develops students' abilities to reflect on their mission in life, apply leading edge research, develop new sets of skills, and creatively act in the world. Faculty and students create a rich and supportive online learning community that provides a context where students can create their own approach to leadership, based on their personal values, capacities, and mission in life. This innovative program culminates in a Capstone Action Project that demonstrates leadership in the world and allows students to apply their learning and test their theories and assumptions about leadership in real time. The lessons learned from this project are often stepping stones for new initiatives and life paths for our graduates. The program also offers a unique set of electives, including a set of courses specifically designed to address issues related to LGBTQ leadership and policy."

"a guide for selecting and assembling a technological platform to support communities of practice across a large organization. To this end, the report addresses four questions: What makes communities of practice different from garden-variety online communities? Every group that shares interest on a website is called a community today, but communities of practice are a specific kind of community. They are focused on a domain of knowledge and over time accumulate expertise in this domain. They develop their shared practice by interacting around problems, solutions, and insights, and building a common store of knowledge. What categories of community-oriented products exist and what are they trying to accomplish? The ideal system at the right price does not exist yet, though a few come really close. But there are eight neighboring categories of products that have something to contribute and include good candidates to start with. Analyzing these categories of products yields not only a scan of products, but also a way of understanding the various aspects of a knowledge strategy based on communities of practice. What are the characteristics of communities of practice that lend themselves to support by technology? Technology platform are often described in terms of features, but in order to really evaluate candidates for a technology platform, it is useful to start with the success factors of communities of practice that can be affected by technology. The third section of this report provides a table of thirteen such factors with examples of how a technology platform can affect the success of a community in each area. How to use the answer to these questions to develop a strategy for building a platform for communities of practice? Most of the product categories can be a starting point for building a general platform. In fact, this analysis of the field suggests a strategy for approach the task. Decide what kinds of activities are most

""The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problem.""

The Linda test has another explanation. The choices are read in context, so "Bank teller" is read as "Bank teller and not feminist." The fact that Kahneman and followers do not check out this alternative might show their confirmation bias!

one crucial difference between IQ and CQ [creativity quotient] scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect-each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Caveat: written by Jonah Lehrer, whose star has fallen since it was shown that he recycled his own previous writing without noting it and he quoted people who other people, not him, had interviewed. Messages: K. Sawyer -- "Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups [who were told not to criticize anything proposed] think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas." Research by Nemeth -- Groups told that "most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticize each other's ideas" produced more ideas together and then subsequently on their own. Research by Uzzi -- (Lehrer's words) "The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy." Lehrer's take-home message -- "The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right-enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways-the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up."

"We still need more tool-building but there is much benefit in putting the remarkable tools we now have to work. So we will have a better understanding of both animal model brains, but to me very importantly, the human brain that makes discoveries relevant to disease actionable. And also advances basic neuroscience. We've been focusing on brain disease but in the end basic science is the well from which everything comes, and we should not forget it. But that said, understanding all the different cells, understanding how they're wired together, understanding the language of neurons - that is, when they fire, what are they saying to each other? Understanding how this information integrates. Understanding how activity spreads in the brain and how it's decoded is much more than a 10-year project. But I think a focused push like this could lead to a platform of ideas, of tools, of testable hypotheses, of new observations, that could power both basic neuroscience and translational neuroscience interested in disease and therapeutics."

Gardner holds that MI is completely different from learning styles, but many people don't distinguish them.

"Nobody said it better than Francis Bacon, back in 1605: For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture."