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Disruptive Technologies Create New Growth Opportunities for Your Professional Services Business
New technologies can help professional services businesses to grow their business beyond billing hours of one-to-one client services. The one-to-one service model has dominated the professional service industry for years and the value proposition has been built around a richly personalized one-to-one real-time interaction. Like everything these days, technology has disrupted this model and created…
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Evil Geniuses Win $6.6 Million Playing Video Games: eSports May Be Good for You
The prevailing parental narrative about video games is that they are likely to be an anti-social addictive waste of time or, at best, mind-numbing entertainment. It might be time to reconsider that narrative. Imagine an arena with tens of thousands of fans and millions watching online cheering for their favorite team in a team-based video…
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The Power of Persistently Pointless Processes: Have You Balanced Your Checkbook Lately?
Technology historians routinely point to examples of legacy hardware design driving new products in odd ways. This “path dependence” is often cited as a barrier to innovation and the cause of long-term inefficiency. The layout of the letters on your keyboard is a common example. This so-called QWERTY keyboard layout originally designed for typewriters is…
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“Super School” Project Challenge: Seven Steps to Re-Inventing High School
The Huffington Post reported recently that Laurene Powell Jobs has pledged $50 million to crowdsource designs for the next American high school. The campaign website, XQ: The Super School Project, makes the case that public high schools have been “frozen in time for the last hundred years while America has gone from the Model T to…
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Don’t Accept the Defaults! What Are You Doing to Customize Your Life?
Most technology is designed to be “feature rich.” This means that there are multiple menus and multiple ways to do everything. In short, it means you won’t use 80% of the capabilities and it would take forever to figure them out anyway. The way most designers deal with the “feature rich” problem is that they…
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How Students Taught Me the Best Strategy for Changing the Game
It was 1973 and I was sitting in the faculty lounge at a New England boarding school listening to the veteran teachers bemoan the state of “students today.” The consensus seemed to be that students were unmotivated, unengaged, poorly prepared, and lazy. “They never speak up in class and just sit there like bumps on…
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Two Strategies for Enjoying the World Beyond Broadcast Television
We bought a TiVo with a lifetime subscription the day they went on the market 15 years ago. When friends asked how we liked it, I said, “we are spending a lot less time watching a lot more good television.” There were no more missed episodes of family favorites. We became experts at fast forwarding…
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Three Secrets to Making an Impact: Pipelines, Timing and Exploring the “Adjacent Possible”
1. Prepare your pipeline of possible projects. I had a colleague once who explained to me that every year her boss told her that the organization’s priorities for funding had changed and that they would be looking for projects in other parts of the business to develop and promote. She should scale back her program. She smiled…