How Reframers Unleash Innovation in Their Companies (And Beyond) by Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Prasad Kaipa, Simone Ahuja

There is a quiet revolution unfolding in your industry — led by some of your smartest competitors. If you are a manager, you may be completely unaware of it because you can't see it in the streets, nor watch it on the news. This new revolution is actually happening inside the heads of the leaders running your rival firms. We call it a mental model revolution. Let us explain....

A select group of smart leaders are reframing their mental models — i.e., radically shifting their perception of the world — to conjure up disruptive business model innovations that could rewrite the rules of the game in your industry. We call them the "Reframers." Here are examples of three:

Indra Nooyi, CEO, PepsiCo. Nooyi, ranked by Fortune as the world's most powerful woman, is reframing the very essence of what the food and beverage industry should be — shifting its vocation from feeding people to nourishing them. She is taking a cue from Ayurveda (India's 5,000-year old traditional medicine system) which states that "food is medicine and medicine is food." Until now, the food and medical industries have operated separately; Nooyi wants to bridge them by reframing PepsiCo as a wellness solution provider. To deliver this commitment, Nooyi is radically shifting PepsiCo's business model by flipping the ratio between "fun-for-you" products (e.g., Pepsi drinks and Frito Lay chips) and "good-for-you" products (sold under brands such as Tropicana and Quaker). Specifically, Nooyi wants to increase revenues from good-for-you products from $10 billion today to $30 billion by 2020.

Impressive lecture on time management by Randy Pausch

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch gave a lecture on Time Management at the University of Virginia in November 2007. Randy Pausch -- http://www.randypausch.com -- is a virtual reality pioneer, human-computer interaction researcher, co-founder of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center -- http://www.etc.cmu.edu -- and creator of the Alice -- http://www.alice.org -- software project. The slides for this lecture and high-res downloadable versions of this and other lectures can be found at: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Ra...

Why size matters....

how to manage generation Y (and what we can learn from baby boomers)

Recently, Harvard Business Review, in collaboration with Right Management, sponsored a webinar during which I spoke about the characteristics that I believe will make the members of Generation X strong leaders for the decade ahead. We didn't have time to get to all the questions that came in, so let's begin a discussion of some of them here. I hope you'll share your own views.

Characteristics of Gen X Outside the U.S.
You asked: Are the characteristics of the generation consistent, or do they vary by country? What about Gen X in Mexico? This concept seems to be completely foreign to our clients in the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. What about X'ers in India, China, or Brazil?
The characteristics of a generation are heavily influenced by events that occur during its members' formative years, roughly ages 11 to 14. Clearly, national, cultural, socioeconomic, religious, and other differences have a big influence on the views and behaviors we each develop.
However, Gen X is the first generation for whom the global reach of technology began to allow a significant number of individuals to share experiences across national boundaries in many (but by no means all) parts of the world. As a result, I find many common themes among those born in the 1960s and 1970s (my definition of Generation X). Economic uncertainty and domestic social change were common themes in many countries. Latin American economies were experiencing persistent financial crises, and the economy in the United States and much of Europe was in the doldrums. Many of the most common names for this generation reflect the disenfranchisement that many X'ers share: "Crisis Generation" is the term often used in Latin America, "Génération Bof" (meaning "whatever") in France, and "The Burnt Generation" in Iran.

Company culture: what we can learn from Zappos

Four Lessons on Culture and Customer Service from Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh

Zappos, the online shoe retailer, is legendary for its employee culture and customer service. Paying employees to quit; offering customers free shipping both ways and a year to make returns; and hiring 24/7 phone reps who are as courteous, kind, and upbeat as Four Seasons concierges are all part of the Zappos formula.
When I caught up with CEO Tony Hsieh in California a few months ago, we spoke about how his company's culture came to be, and about selling the company to Amazon for $850 million last summer (a deal now worth more than $1 billion with the appreciation of Amazon's stock). Here were the four lessons I took away from one of the great serial entrepreneurs of our time:

Matt Ridley on how ideas have sex...

At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.

Jeremy Rifkin on empathy and the impact on our society

Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.