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You're doing ten things at once. Or twenty. You've got a roadmap that looks more like a buffet line than a strategy. You're hiring smart people and somehow still feeling like you're slower than the scrappy startup trying to eat your lunch. And you've convinced yourself the problem is process, or tools, or team size. The real problem is much simpler. You're trying to be good at everything. And that means you're actually good at nothing. I recently talked with John Carter , who

Picture this: Your corporation just opened an innovation hub in Silicon Valley. You got the coffee machines right, hung some string lights, hired someone with a hoodie to run it. Now you're going to capture the magic of startup culture and bring it back to your organization. Except here's what actually happens: The hub becomes a small island disconnected from where actual business gets done. It generates reports that nobody reads. It networks with startups that nobody at head

Your best idea is dying right now. Not because it's bad. Not because the market doesn't want it. It's dying because your organization has no idea how to move it from "Hey, I had a thought" to "We're actually doing this." I recently talked with Jesse Nieminen , founder of Viima , who's spent years watching this exact phenomenon play out in thousands of companies. And here's what he found: Organizations are drowning in ideas. Their problem isn't a creative crisis. It's a plumbi

Yi Hoo Ong starts with a simple observation: "Corporates and startups are playing different games." And then he makes it specific: "Corporates are playing chess. Startups are playing Fortnite." Chess has rules. Every piece moves in a defined way. There are structures. It's a turn-based game where you can think three moves ahead. Whoever is more strategic and patient usually wins. Fortnite has a dynamic map. The constraints are constantly closing in. You have to be ready to go

Picture this: You're a retailer. Somewhere between mid-sized and massive. The tech is moving faster than you can keep up with. Amazon exists. Your stores are closing. Your margins are getting crushed. So you build an innovation lab. You get some venture capitalists. You bring in a technology partner. You design a space that looks like the future—all glass walls and standing desks and people with MacBook Pros looking thoughtful. And then nothing fucking happens. The lab become

Picture this: You've assembled a consortium. Eight organizations. Different countries. Different business models. Different legal frameworks. One of them is Google. One of them is IBM. And you're the coordinator. Your job is to keep this ship from sinking. This is the position Kostas Tserpes found himself in back in 2010 when the European Commission funded the Socios project—a multi-million euro research initiative designed to leverage social media analytics to build busines

There's this scene that plays out constantly in corporate offices across the world: A group of smart people in expensive chairs agrees that "community" is important for innovation. They nod seriously. They schedule working groups. Someone mentions engagement metrics. Everyone leaves feeling like they've accomplished something. Then nothing happens. The problem isn't that they don't understand community. It's that they think community is something you can design from above, a

Here's the thing nobody tells you about enterprise transformation: It's boring. It's slow. It requires politics. It requires patience. And it requires you to give a shit about something that won't show up on your performance review for three years. That's not the story you hear. The story you hear is some CEO standing on stage talking about "digital transformation" or "agile transformation" like it's something you can download, install, and roll out across 50,000 employees in

Here's the problem with how we teach: We treat learning like it's a thing that happens in a classroom. You show up. You listen. You take notes. You take a test. You prove you were technically present. And then you leave and immediately forget most of what you heard. This is particularly absurd when you're talking about things kids actually need to learn. Not facts to memorize. Not something they can Google in five seconds. But actual skills. Actual understanding. Actual abili

Picture this: You're running a 115-year-old property company. You have a strong culture. You have traditions. You have ways of doing things that have worked for more than a century. And now your leadership is saying: "We need to innovate. We need to move faster. We need to become more entrepreneurial." So you create a new team. You give them a mandate. You tell them to "make innovation easier for everybody." And then you wonder why it's like pushing a boulder uphill. The prob

You ever watch a relay race where the runner drops the baton? It's brutal. The whole thing falls apart. Not because the runners weren't fast. Not because the technique was wrong. But because the moment where one person was supposed to hand something to another—that moment failed. I recently talked to Bud Caddell , who founded a company called Nobl after spending years as an innovation consultant doing the exact thing that most companies do wrong. He'd create the innovation l

You know that moment when someone says, "Innovation is this fluffy thing with post-its on the wall" and you just... internally die? Because they're right, but also they're completely missing the point. I recently talked to Suzanne Vos , an innovation coach at ING Labs in Singapore who spent years inside innovation teams wondering why so many initiatives that looked promising on paper just... disappeared. Quietly. Without explanation. Like they never happened. And she realized

You're home. Your kids are home. The news is terrifying. You're on a Zoom call trying to focus while simultaneously managing a crisis and a crisis of confidence. And someone wants to tell you that this is what remote work is really like. No. This is not what remote work is really like. I recently talked to Laïla von Alvensleben , who's been working and building distributed teams since 2014—long before it was fashionable or forced. She helped pioneer the remote work movement a

You know that moment when you're in a meeting and someone throws around the phrase "eat, sleep, innovate" like it's motivational advice? Like it's some kind of aspirational mantra that's going to magically make your product better and your company more competitive. I recently talked to Scott Anthony, who's spent decades as a senior partner at Innosight, helping companies figure out what innovation actually is versus what people *think* it is. And here's what stuck with me: In

Picture this: You're sitting in a conference room. The whiteboard says "DREAM BIG" in enthusiastic marker. Your boss just said the words every innovation team dreads: "There are no bad ideas here." Except there are. And everyone knows it. You have an idea—a genuinely bold one that could change everything. But you're not sharing it. Why? Because you've done the math. If you propose this idea and it actually gets approved, congratulations: you just gave yourself a second job wi

Let's start with what most people got wrong about the last few years. Everyone called it "the remote work experiment." As if we were all trying something out temporarily. As if at some point—when the crisis passed—we'd flip a switch and go back to the before times. That's not what happened. What happened is we accidentally discovered something about how work actually works, and we can't unsee it now. We can't un-experience having control over our environments. We can't un-lea

Picture this: You're a brilliant engineering student with an idea that could change how we solve a real problem. You have the technical knowledge. You have access to the best minds in your field. You have labs, equipment, funding opportunities. And yet, when you pitch your idea to someone in administration, what you get back is ten very rational reasons why it won't work. The building blocks are all there. The ingredients are sitting right in front of you. But they're in sepa

Here's something nobody tells you when you step into a role where you're supposed to make innovation happen inside a big corporation: You're about to spend most of your time talking people out of the very thing that's keeping them safe. Because safety—the comfortable routine of doing what you've always done—is seductive. It's predictable. Nobody gets fired for maintaining the status quo. And when some well-meaning innovation manager shows up with an idea that requires people

Let's be honest: Corporate training is where good intentions go to die. You know the drill. You get pulled into a conference room (or now, a Zoom call) for some mandatory training on "leadership excellence" or "synergistic innovation" or whatever buzzword the HR department found on LinkedIn that week. You spend two hours half-listening while scrolling through your phone, take a quiz at the end to prove you were technically present, and then immediately forget everything becau