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Have you ever wondered whether your work efforts were really creating value? From what I've seen in organizations, a lot of people have that experience. The problem is that many times they don't do anything about it. Not long ago I spoke at a company meeting about the challenges of complexity in organizations . At one point, I asked the audience members to identify and discuss simplification opportunities in their areas. During the report-outs, one woman described how she and her co-workers spent hours each week on the cosmetics of a particular report to make sure that it looked good when it went to senior management. She went on to say that this focus on style rather than substance was a waste of time. When I asked why she continued to do this, she quickly said that her boss expected it. Her boss was also in the room, and when asked about the report said, "I don't care what it looks like, as long as it has the right information." This kind of disconnect is n...

  And so it begins: the life of Apple, post Steve Jobs. Jobs announced that he would step down as CEO, effecting a smooth transition to known successor Tim Cook. Jobs is surely not just any retiring CEO. As an entrepreneur, he built a company that changed history . Like many entrepreneurial founders, he did it by force of personality and personal vision, without much concern for consensus or committees. And like many, he paid the price when the narrative took hold that he'd lost his touch, and his board lost faith. But very unlike that typical experience, he found his way back to the CEO job and put the company back in the game. It was quite a feat, and speaks to the specialness of this particular man. But now it's time for Apple as an organization to pull off a feat of its own: it needs to continue on its trajectory without a visionary founder to rally behind. It has had the luxury of having a personification of its ethos, and now it must either allow someone else to be tha...

If you're not familiar with the law of diminishing returns , it states that at a certain point adding more effort will not produce significantly more gains. The challenge is knowing when you've reached that point. For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it's "good enough" — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome? Several years ago I worked with a project team charged with increasing sales to its large corporate customers. At the first meeting the team brainstormed ways to drive up sales, but before moving ahead decided to collect data about current sales and survey sales managers and customers. Since it wasn't clear which ideas might work, this seemed like a logical next step — until the data analysis work dragged on for months as the team tried to reach the perfect answer. I've seen this pattern in many organizations where, instead of moving into action, m...

It's unusual that an analyst will ask you to stop thinking about the far future, but I need you to back away from the Corning A Day Made of Glass video on YouTube. All that clear glass is clouding your vision. More and more, as I talk with companies about their next big product innovation, they can't get far-flung ideas out of their mind. They can't wait to get there, but they can't justify making the investments needed to get there. They prevaricate while smaller, more proximal innovations, more likely to succeed rapidly, languish unattended. The ideas won't pine forever; if you don't act on them soon, someone else will. We call these innovation opportunities adjacent possibilities and we have just written a new report about them called We've blogged elsewhere on the topic ; let me share some more details with those who aren't reading Forrester's research. To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started wi...

Next time you come across a wishing well or fountain, don’t fall for it. You can still pitch in a coin or two if it’s for a good cause but just don’t make a wish like you are suppose to. In fact, you should NEVER make wishes if you want to be successful at anything. Too often we end up wishing for things. We wish we could have more money. We wish we could be better looking. We wish we could be in better shape. What I would like to do is propose that you wipe out the word ‘wish’ from your vocabulary. Instead, replace it with the word ‘commitment’ . So instead of making wishes for the things you want in life, make commitments instead. Make Fully Committed Decisions When I do my motivational keynotes, I tell my audiences to make ‘fully committed decisions’ . That is, they should make strong decisions to pursue their goals with total commitment instead of just wishing to become successful. This may seem like a simple play on words to some people but there is indeed a significant diff...

Life is full of twists and turns and it is sometimes easy to get sick of the many gyrations that are needed to make a business thrive, a project launch, or even to get internal signoff in some bureaucratic version of the Hokey Pokey. It would be so easy to quit. But a part of you knows that many a failure turns into the big success story. In start-up land, Air B&B notably went for 4 years with scraping the barrel kind of funding and just recently received $112 million . Most people don't remember how dire the Apple situation was in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned. A share of Apple back then would buy you a cup of coffee; now it'll get you a nice bottle of Opus One from, say, 1987 . Business is full of stories of perseverance and pursuit — of the almost-failed hero who didn't quit when times were dark. Those stories admonish quitters, and honor the survivors. I should know. I am both. My dark night literally came in a late evening 1987, when I was attacked by a serial...