BigSpeak Voice

Aug 5, 2014

The Future of Finance

Disaster tends to breed a touch of schadenfreude in all of us. As a new generation of Gorden Gecko’s burn under the blowtorch of angry nations and world leaders brace themselves for the bill from mass bailouts – it’s easy to answer the question ‘what is the future of finance?’, by simply asking another; ‘is there a future for finance?’. As it happens, the answer to that question is yes, but not as you knew it. How the consumer experience of finance is set to change is something that I have been thinking about lately for some of my clients....

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Aug 3, 2014

Changes Mundane Meetings into Moments of Impact

Innovation Strategist and Design Thinker Lisa Kay Solomon Changes Mundane Meetings into Moments of Impact…

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Aug 2, 2014

Strategic Conversations: How Toyota Solves Big Problems

How often do you find yourself in a meeting when someone says “we need to think differently here?” We are living in a world of rapid change and surprises. “We’ve got to become more innovative” is the popular leadership response to handling uncertainty and change. But it’s not often followed up with concrete examples of what “being innovative” actually looks like. As a result, you often see a lot of talking in circles, references to “strategy,” and a lot of “we should…” until everyone goes back to business as usual. Rather than search listlessly for something bright and shiny to...

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Aug 2, 2014

Moonshots for Managers

Part 1 … If you’re a professional manager, here’s a question for you: What’s the obstinate, knotty management problem you’re working to solve—the one that bedevils your organization, that lies beyond the boundaries of best practice, and has no obvious solution? In other words, are you working on anything that might advance the state of the art in a fundamental way? Are you aiming to fundamentally improve the technology we use to mobilize human resources to productive ends—that is, the technology of management? If no, why not? Geneticists hope to dramatically improve human health—by untangling the complexities of the genome....

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Aug 2, 2014

One Astronaut’s Wish for the Holidays

From orbit, the Earth is so beautiful. But for many who live on our planet, life is a terrible struggle with hunger, thirst, and disease. When we look at the Earth from space we are faced with a sobering contradiction. On the one hand, we see the indescribable beauty of the planet we have been given. On the other hand, we know that millions of people on it do not have access to clean water, go to bed hungry at night, and die from preventable and curable diseases. It is truly moving to look at the Earth from space. And...

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Aug 2, 2014

Why You Hate Work

THE way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep. Increasingly, this experience is common not just to middle managers, but also to top...

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Aug 2, 2014

Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact

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Aug 2, 2014

Turn Your Next Interruption into an Opportunity

Modern life, particularly work life, has become increasingly hectic. There are relentless demands from meetings, emails, text messages, questions to answer, problems to solve, fires to put out. It can begin to feel like there is never any time to get “real work” done. If you feel overwhelmed by endless interruptions at work, you are not alone. One of the most powerful lessons I have learned in my over thirty five years of leadership experience is that these thousands of little interruptions aren’t keeping you from the work, they are the work. When you look at it this way, a...

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Aug 2, 2014

Restore Trust at Work with These 3 Words

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Aug 2, 2014

Encourage Your Employees to Talk About Other Job Offers

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Aug 2, 2014

Originality Is Not All That Original

What do William Shakespeare and Led Zeppelin have in common? They both pinched much of their material from artists that came before them. The Bard, who added a few thousand original words to the English language and gave us our most unique phrases, was unabashed in his thievery of complete tracts from well-known poets and playwrights of his day. Most of his plays recycle stories from history and other literary works, and his stylistic flourishes are inspired by things that his contemporaries were already doing. Now it appears that Led Zeppelin, those icons of originality for a generation in motion,...

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Aug 2, 2014

Innovation Starts In Dark Places

There is a dark, untold back story of innovation that may disturb you: many of the earliest forms of the world’s biggest technological advancements were pioneered by bad people in morally corrupt contexts. The most radical innovation in video streaming started in the pornography industry. The most sophisticated uses of messaging technologies started with drug traffickers and terrorists. Counterfeiters have pimped digital technologies to such an advanced state that governments are rethinking the use of paper-based currencies. Why does innovation often start in dark places? When you’re working in the fringes, the normal risks and rewards associated with radical change...

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