digitaltonto

Economists have long been baffled by productivity growth, which rises and falls without any discernible rhyme or reason. The problem is that progress never follows a linear path. As I wrote in "Mapping Innovation," innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation, and those three things hardly ever happen in the same place or with...

Silicon Valley pundits have become obsessed with the concept of high agency, popularized by Eric Weinstein, who described it this way: "When you're told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind about how to get around whoever just told you that you can't do something?"

Yet long before Silicon V...

Sometimes the hardest thing is merely to make yourself understood.

Things that change the world, or even a small part of it, always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. That’s why great leaders need to be great communicators, because an idea that doesn’t gain traction is an idea that fails.

That’s easier said than done....

Every leader creates a shared identity, whether they are conscious of it or not. Often, they invoke a common enemy, such as a rival group, or a common threat, such as inefficiency, waste, or complacency. Other times they create an ethos around a particular methodology or philosophy, such as Six Sigma, stack ranking and the war for talent.

Yet enemies are rarely truly v...