The Music Industry’s Best-Kept Secret? A Gender Creativity Gap

October 19, 2020

By Noah Askin   Female solo artists are more likely to put out more creative songs than their male counterparts. The key question is why. Gender inequality and representation in the industry may hold the answer. Do the Muses see gender? Historically, these archetypal feminine figures of inspiration were known for igniting the spark of genius […]

Innovation Plucked from the Zeitgeist

October 19, 2020

By Michaël Bikard   A method to quantify the phenomenon of simultaneous discoveries sheds insight into how one innovation wins and another is left on the shelf. Have you ever had a bright idea at nearly the exact moment as someone else? It’s bizarre, yet difficult to explain. Consider Newton and Leibniz inventing calculus nearly at […]

How Netflix Finds Innovation on the Edge of Chaos

October 12, 2020

By Benjamin Kessler   In recent times, rapid market and technological changes have taxed the creative capacities of even the most resourceful firms. Netflix is one of an elite few that have surfed each unexpected wave successfully, turning turbulence into disruptive advantage. From its initial incarnation as a DVD-by-mail business, the company morphed into a video […]

Making the Commute of the Future Happen

October 12, 2020

By Geoff Tomaino   Mobility as a service (MaaS) is an attractive form of public transportation that offers a variety of benefits. Enticing consumers to abandon their private cars, however, will be tricky. Imagine it’s 8.00 am on a workday in the year 2025. You’re about to head to the office – a less frequent occurrence […]

From General Manager to CHRO

October 5, 2020

By Claire Harbour   Three stories of business leaders who moved to the top human resources role and reinvented HR in their company. In 2005, Fast Company published the now famous article “Why We Hate HR”. Echoing a popular workplace belief, the authors asked why HR was broken and how it could be fixed. HR […]

What to Do When Stress Puts You in “Survival Mode”

October 5, 2020

By Renita Kalhorn   Do you believe that constant stress is unavoidable? Good for performance? Actually, neither is true. Liam, a telecom executive, has been a critical player in scaling a new business from zero to US$300 million in five years. He’s widely recognised in the organisation as a high performer. When we started working […]

Better Networking Begins With Your Beliefs

September 28, 2020

By Ko Kuwabara   It doesn’t take very much to bridge the “knowing-doing” gap in networking – even during a pandemic. Be honest: What do you miss least about working life before Covid-19? After the long commute, a close second might be networking events. It’s well known by now – and research confirms it – that […]

What the War Between Alibaba and Tencent Says About Strategy

September 28, 2020

By Guoli Chen   In emerging markets or nascent industries, plan-as-you-go has proved to be a winner many times over. Cross the river by feeling the rocks. – Chinese proverb     When Alibaba Group went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on 18 September 2014, CEO Jack Ma said of the record-setting […]

How to Make the Most of a Chief Sustainability Officer

September 21, 2020

By Guoli Chen   Shift the focus from doing less bad to doing more good. A novelty in the C-suite not so long ago, the chief sustainability officer (CSO) is fast becoming a fixture in companies of note as climate change and inequality increasingly dominate global attention. In the past year alone Citigroup, General Motors […]

The Central Conundrum of Covid-19 Entrepreneurship

September 21, 2020

By Vikas Aggarwal   A recently released report reveals how one entrepreneurial ecosystem is responding to the pandemic. To get to the top and remain there, businesses must constantly develop new capabilities as they leverage existing ones. Keeping both priorities in play is tricky in the best of times, which is why legacy companies of late […]