My jaws clench when I hear the term “thought leadership.” Promiscuous, the term makes me think of grandiose, otiose and comatose. Grandiose because we all stand on the shoulders of giants, everything has been thought of or said before, and modesty goes a long way. Otiose because thought leadership conveys…
Coffee, tea, or electricity? From the Daily Stat by Harvard Business Rev., Feb. 22, 2011: “Research subjects who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes of the brain were 3 times more likely to come up with the fresh insight needed to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than people…
Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (Yale Univ. 2009) at 3, points out the pernicious recurrence in historical writing of teleology. When someone describes what a law department did over a period of years to change “we tell the tale of change as if everything…
Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly 2007) at 7, attacks the myth that innovation has a methodology. One reason we can’t follow a recipe to be creative is that we can’t take an objective view. “The problem is that we’re biased by what we can’t see.” We rarely see,…
New management practices can boost the pioneering law department or can hobble it. We tend to think that the first-mover gains a competitive advantage: if you are the first to pay firms by credit card or the first to beta test software or the first to do anything, that boldness…
Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1972, proved that no voting system can satisfy a limited set of rational and reasonable conditions. That’s sad, but, still, several methods to vote exist, flawed though they may be. One is the preference intensity method,…
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 110 to 123, discusses five ways to make more fertile your intuitive, serendipitous inventiveness. Go for a walk, he suggests, or more generally relax and direct your mind to something in the foreground you…
In mathematics and logic, a set is a collection of items. RFPs [r], for example, are a member of the set of outside counsel management methods [M], so we could write in set notation r ∈ M. Dotted line reporting [d], another management idea, is not a member of the…
A trade-off appears to exist: as you become more expert in a knowledge area (such as tax law) you become less flexible. An article dubs this “cognitive entrenchment,” and to explain the phenomenon grounds it in schemas of knowledge (Acad. Mgt. Rev. 2010, at 579). Schemas resemble networks of knowledge.…
When you want new solutions to a problem, you should realize some researchers believe that traditional brainstorming posits an old-fashioned view of creativity. It divorces inspiration from analysis, which is far from the way the brain operates. According to strategy + bus., 2010, Issue 61 at 24, “There is no…