TL;DR: The traits that make founders and leaders dangerous (conviction, taste, doing things properly) can later make them brittle. When you start protecting your creation instead of the problem it once solved, your vision becomes a blind spot. The antidote is learning to critique your own masterpiece (and allow others to do the same) before […]

“A peak always conceals a treacherous valley.” — Shigetaka Komori, former CEO of Fujifilm Financial markets, like organisations, follow rhythms. History rarely repeats itself cleanly, but it often rhymes. One of those quieter rhymes appears every December and is known as the Santa Claus Rally. First described by Yale Hirsch in The Stock Trader’s Almanac in 1972, it refers

“To know and not to do is not yet to know.” — Xunzi “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” — C.S. Lewis TL;DR We wait to believe until we see, but by the time we see, it’s often too late. From Boston’s burst pipe to São

“More effective communication occurs when two or more individuals are homophilous. When they share common meanings and a mutual subcultural language, and are alike in personal and social characteristics, the communication of new ideas is likely to have greater effects in terms of knowledge gain, attitude formation and change, and overt behavior change.” — Everett Rogers, The

“Death is nature’s way of making things continually interesting. Death is the possibility of change. Every individual gets its allotted lifespan, its chance to try something new on the world. But time is called and the molecules which make up leaf and limb, heart and eye are disassembled and redistributed to other tenants.” — Peter Steinhart, The

A company proudly appoints its first Head of Innovation. Armed with a mandate to shake things up, this inaugural innovation chief launches several initiatives and talks up transformative change. But what happens if those early projects fizzle or a foundational assumption proves wrong? In many organisations, early missteps by the first innovation leader can embed

“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” Marshall McLuhan Mark Twain is often credited with saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The rhyme is persistent across time. Faces change, leaders wax and wane, technologies evolve, yet the dilemmas leaders confront are strangely familiar. The

“Knowledge can be a double-edged sword when it comes to creativity. While knowledge in a domain facilitates action and work in the domain, it can also constrain from thinking outside the domain.” — Manu Kapur I’ve just returned from speaking for Mastercard, who kindly invited me to join them for VIP access at Monza to celebrate their sponsorship