NASHVILLE — Whenever people who are concerned about the environment gather, the conversation invariably turns to questions of how to live more gently on the earth. Concerned people are always asking how they can eat more responsibly, shop more responsibly, keep house more responsibly. How can they lower their carbon footprint? How can they tend...Read More

Article (PDF-766KB) Seven years ago, we unveiled research highlighting the existence of innovation’s eight “essentials”—a collection of attributes and behaviors that appeared to underpin superior innovation performance. 1 1. The eight essentials themselves comprise some 100 specific practices that are critical to innovation-led growth. For more, see Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston, and Erik Roth,...Read More

Full Report (PDF-7MB) African governments have made impressive progress in fostering development and improving people’s lives. The continent’s spending on infrastructure has doubled to around $80 billion a year in the past decade, investments in health systems have helped to halve infant mortality rates since 1990, and the average time African children spend in school...Read More

Icon will 3D-print six more tiny homes at a property in Austin housing the city’s homeless population. Katie Canales/Business Insider Icon is an Austin startup that designs 3D-printing technology capable of building tiny homes in about a day for a fraction of the cost of traditional construction methods. Icon cofounder Evan Loomis told Business Insider...Read More

Will work for data We’ve been running a data science experiment over the past few months. Our first goal was to compare and contrast the amount of data we could actively gather using a link to an online survey (please click here to take it) vs. the amount of data we could passively gather using...Read More

Thought leadership isn’t just another buzzword. According to LinkedIn and Edelman, more than 60 percent of C-suite executives said they were more willing to pay a premium to companies that create thought leadership with a clear vision, and 55 percent of business decision-makers said they increased spending with an organization based on its thought leadership....Read More

In his opening remarks to the C40 World Mayors Summit – a forum for member cities to present innovative actions to slow global warming – the Secretary-General noted that cities, which contain more than half the world’s population, and have an “enormous climate footprint”, are “on the frontlines of sustainable and inclusive development”. Urban citizens,...Read More

“What gets measured,” Peter Drucker famously observed, “gets managed.” One might add a corollary that what goes unmeasured—or gets measured only superficially—risks being mismanaged or, at least, undermanaged. So it is with transformations. As we’ve noted before, the term “transformation” can be vague, and it too often refers only to minor or isolated initiatives. What...Read More

Fortunately, there are several ways to minimize these tasks or eliminate them from your company. There are thousands of books on time management, and thousands more on work/life balance, but almost all of them either nibble around the edge of the problems or pretend they don’t exist. So, here’s the straight skinny: The reason most...Read More

That’s the conventional wisdom: improve one part at a time, then move to the next, methodically and consistently. But it’s clear that this traditional view, with stability as the primary value, is increasingly wrong. It misses the intersections between the parts, which are where value tends to be lost. Research by our colleagues (see Kevin...Read More