I have been tracking book and blog authors who write about organizational innovation with the goal of helping translate their knowledge into language that resonates with educators. I strongly recommend reading an interview with Rowan Gibson, author of Innovation to the Core, offered in a three part series by Braden Kelley on the Innovation Excellence [...]
Late last week I was able to join a Twitter conversation with three great educators, Bo Adams, Laura Deisley, and Jill Gough about the nature and role of failure in schools. We all expressed our discomfort with how schools define, describe, and deal with failure, what an aberration it is from how success and failure [...]
Catching up on great blogs and reads over the weekend. Here are links about innovation, revolution, creational thinking, and customer service that all pertain to how we need to upgrade what we do tomorrow from what we are doing today: Catherine Constaninides describes a “customer-centric” environment that increases how we interact with our clients to [...]
For most of us, the downside of not asking the right questions or not organizing information in the right way is that we do poorly on a test, lose money in a business deal, have to re-work a design drawing, or take another shot at drafting that proposal. For young men and women in uniform [...]
I was sitting on the sofa with my 23-year old daughter over the weekend, scrolling the TV menu, and up came “Out of Africa”. I asked my daughter if she had ever seen it and she replied “Oh, yeah that’s the one about the Swedish lady who grows coffee; we watched it with you when [...]
Schools are knowledge-based organizations. We may want to change the balance of skills and content instruction, but our core business is and will always remain rooted in knowledge. We don’t make things; we make “things” (people) smarter through the management of knowledge. Two blog posts grabbed my attention over the weekend as I am working [...]
Yesterday I was writing a chapter of the new book dealing with innovation in schools. This singular point stuck out: Innovation is hard because it is about the future, and most predictions about the future turn out to be wrong. This creates the highest level of risk for organizations that have to commit large amounts [...]
More than a year ago, Keith Evans, Head of Collegiate School in Richmond, and one of the brightest, most forward-thinking educators I know, sent me a list of about five metrics that he had created (yes, a bit tongue-in-cheek) to measure true effectiveness of his school. I added to the list. I swear I cannot [...]
About 25 years ago a very wise mentor gave me a piece of timeless advice: always pick the path that provides the greatest number of options. To this day I cannot recall a single instance where it has failed the test of hindsight. I remember telling my own children that the reason prison or jail [...]
What does real innovation look like in schools and how do we know we are not just stirring up a bunch of cool, but unrealistic, new ideas? Rita Gunther McGrath, responding to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, admonishes us that lots of companies talk about their focus on innovation but empirical data suggest [...]