On April 13, we drop our new book — The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. We began writing it more than a year ago, but the direct research started even further back. In some ways, the three of us have been working on this book in […]

It might seem a peculiar time to talk about talent. Aren’t most people these days happy just to have their jobs? Aren’t employers more concerned about outplacement than recruiting? And what company has the budget to fund expensive training programs? Even these questions indicate a dated view of where talent is and how to get […]

Of all the business books we have on our shelves–and between us there must be more than twenty thousand volumes–likely one-quarter of them discuss how the world is speeding up. Peter Drucker probably started the trend in 1968 with The Age of Discontinuity. The most persuasive might be Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, which […]

In our previous post we suggested a new collaboration curve was emerging in which the more participants and interactions you bring together in one place, the more performance and learning improve. We pointed to World of Warcraft, and touched on SAP’s Software Developer Network (SDN), and the world of big wave surfing. And we suggested […]

There’s a classic story in economics primers illustrating the power of network effects. It tells how the first fax machine gave little value to its owner–after all, there was no one else with whom to send and receive faxes. As time went by, however, the value of that first machine increased as other people bought […]

For the big German software company SAP, it was a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. The year was 2003, and SAP was just releasing its new NetWeaver platform–a nifty piece of software that fit on top of and around its existing enterprise applications, helping them talk to each other and to non-SAP applications. SAP was trying to […]

The past belonged to push, but the future belongs to pull. That’s an argument we’ve made before and in our most recent post, “Why Do Companies Exist?” –as well as more expansively in this Journal of Service Science article. What will pull-based institutions look like? How will they be organized? What dispositions, or mindsets, will […]

We’re moving from a world of push to a world of pull. Push programs operate on one key assumption – that it is possible to forecast future demand. When demand can be forecast, we can efficiently push resources to where they will be needed when they will be needed. But what happens when our forecasting […]

As the deep forces underlying the big shift accelerate the world around us, many people feel a certain helplessness. Are markets, industries, and even whole economies descending into chaos? Recent financial market turmoil only heightens the fear. Are sudden and nonlinear shifts outrunning our ability to make sense of a chaotic world? Chaos is always […]

If you follow the logic laid out by historians such as the late Alfred Chandler, who wrote classics like Scale and Scope and Strategy and Structure, companies exist to exploit the benefits of being big. They exist, in other words, to maximize efficiency at scale. The experience curve nicely represents this relationship: The bigger a […]

In recent posts we’ve described a massive institutional transformation that will occur as part of the big shift: the move from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The core questions we all need to address are: who will drive this transformation? Who will be the agents of change? Will it […]

Where’s the money? Used to be the answer was simple: in stocks of knowledge. If you knew something valuable, something nobody else could access, you had, in effect, a license to print money. All you needed to do was to protect and defend that knowledge and then deliver products or services based on that knowledge […]

In our last post, we discussed talent development as an operational challenge. This time around we’ll explore how the organization itself needs to change so that it develops a talent edge. It goes without saying that no matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. […]

We believe in the power of edges. We even named our research outfit at Deloitte the Center for the Edge. It seems reasonable to ask, though: what is an edge? And how does it differ from a fringe? Fringes are marginal, by definition. A political group with extreme views. An artistic movement without commercial ambition […]

Most Wall Street analysts and investors tend to focus on return on equity as their primary measure of company performance. Many executives focus heavily on this metric as well, recognizing that it is the one that seems to get the most attention from the investor community. But is it the best metric? Even though more […]