The future is podular

One of the most difficult challenges companies face today is how to be more flexible and adaptive in a dynamic, volatile business environment. How do you build a company that can identify and capitalize on opportunities, navigate around risks and other challenges, and respond quickly to…

Everything is a service

The emerging service economy will require business and society to do some some fundamental restructuring. The organizations that got us to this point have been hyper-optimized into super-efficient production machines, capable of pushing out an abundance of material wealth…

Wrangling complexity

Businesses today are struggling to survive and thrive in an ever more complex and rapidly changing world. The good news is that a lot of the problems of addressing complexity and change have already been solved. They have been solved by the very same people who started all the complexity…

Connecting government

Government is a service.

The purpose of government is to serve the people. Thomas Jefferson and Mao Zedong may not agree on much, but they do agree on this.

A company is not a machine

Historically, we have thought of companies as machines, and we have designed them like we design machines.

A machine typically has the following characteristics:

Blowing Up Dams and Organizational Change

Last weekend my sister and I went out to see what was left of Northwestern Lake after…

Work-from-home Wednesdays

I was talking with my friend Eugene Kim the other day and he told me he’s been taking Wednesdays off. He’s not…

Our institutions don’t serve us. They serve themselves.