The Anti-Creativity Checklist

Michael Ianni-Palarchio has a nice blog where he shares his thoughts on technology. I watched in his blog, an interesting video called The Anti-Creativity Checklist, originally published by Youngme Moon, in the section blogs of the Harvard Business Review site. She is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where she focuses on marketing and strategy innovation.

Youngme wrote: If you had to come up with a checklist for your organization that was guaranteed to stifle imagination, innovation, and out-of-box thinking...a checklist designed specifically for people who want nothing to do with disruptive change...what would it look like?

Michael commented: Of course, this is really telling you what NOT TO DO if you want to have innovation become a part of your organization.

In my opinion, this thought-provoking checklist has almost everything what you need if you don't want creativity, innovation and disruptive change in your organization. It is worth to watch.

My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

Leading by Omission

Ricardo Semler is a Brazilian businessman, CEO of Semco, well known for his innovative business management policies. He implemented at Semco a radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. I am fan of Ricardo Semler's work since 1988, in the beginning of my career, when I read his first book Virando a Própria Mesa (Turning Your Own Table, published in Portuguese), one of the first business book I read, and after attended his lecture on business management using innovative approaches. In 1995, he published an English version of his book, entitled Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, and in 2003 published The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works.


In 2005, Ricardo Semler gave a good lecture at MIT Sloan School of Management, where he told about the Semco's history.

Watch and Enjoy!



MIT World is a free and open site that provides on demand video of significant public events at MIT. MIT World's video index contains more than 700 videos.

10 Ways to Achieve Growth Through Innovation

I read in CIO.com a nice post on innovation based in an Accenture's research with more than 900 companies in eleven different industries, written by Adi Alon, North American managing director-Accenture’s Innovation Performance Group. Based on this research and analysis, he proposed 10 actions companies in the business technology and other industries examined should consider taking to improve their innovation performance. Below is a summary of his proposed actions:

1 - Conceive of innovation as a business discipline, and then manage and execute it systematically. That means as an end to end, uniform process from insight development to idea generation to development to marketplace launch.

2 - Craft a precise definition of innovation’s role in the overall corporate strategy based on the company’s industry, market, and competitive environment. And specify the types of innovation being sought to build a sustainable competitive position, and the specific value the innovations are expected to generate.

3 - Focus much more time and resources on breakthrough, long-term, game-changing innovation. Spend less time on incremental innovation that yield only short term benefits. Several of the world’s greatest companies have performed exceptionally well by delivering breakthrough innovations based on “big bet” initiatives.

4 - Take more risks, reward failure, and encourage continuous improvement. The fastest and most effective path to breakthrough innovations is to think big and act big. Be bold in your actions and decisions. Create a corporate culture that not only tolerates risks but rewards it. And when employees fail while taking big risks, reward them.

5 - Measure innovation performance and results as you do other business functions such as marketing, strategy and operations. There’s a tendency to keep inconsistent and unusable records about corporate innovation.

6 - Focus on the customer experience and less on technology.

7 - Embrace open innovation and open innovation tools. This means tapping external sources such as universities and corporate start-ups.

8 - Encourage idea generation from everywhere both inside and outside your company. That means from the highest levels of the company to the lowest. Often the most innovative ideas are submitted by junior employees.

9 - Consider appointing a chief innovation officer and setting up a uniformity of command for corporate innovation accountability. Accenture’s research found a direct correlation between the level of successful innovation within companies and the presence of a chief innovation officer (or an executive who has innovation as a major part of their job responsibility).

10 - Have a dedicated budget for innovation. Appointing a chief innovation officer isn’t enough. Too often companies have appointed someone to lead the innovation charge but then ran up against the crippling “who owns the budget?” problem. A dedicated budget is a vital component of successful innovation.

Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

Bill Gates presented this month an interesting lecture on energy and environment at TED2010. About the lecture, from TED: "At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050."

After Gates left his day-to-day role with Microsoft, he focused on philanthropy through his foundation. He has a website entitled The Gates Notes, where he publishes his thoughts, ideas and notes. Recently, he started to use Twitter to share his ideas.

Bill Gates published a post with some comments on his lecture: "It’s the first time I’ve spoken in public on the topic, but I’ve been studying energy and climate change over the last couple of years, and have been lucky to meet fairly regularly with some of the leading scientists in the field."

"In the presentation, I talked about the massive innovation effort needed to deliver “energy miracles,” breakthroughs that will make zero-carbon energy generation possible. There are many promising approaches which we need to continue pursuing aggressively: CCS, Nuclear, Wind, Solar PV and Solar Thermal – but they all have challenges that must be addressed. And the only way to get there is through innovation."