Imagination

A Nice Knock-Down Argument

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 20, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Sales and the Gantt “Why exactly does he want to meet again?” I could sense the exasperation in Karl’s voice, faintly; the sales manager wasn’t about to slip out of his professional demeanor over some perceived technical triviality. But for the fact that the request was coming from his newly-hired PMI maven, he probably would [...]

Design Thinking and Process – Is It In You? (1 of 2)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ September 21, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Continuing a bit on my recent Design meme; I talk about the current relevance of design thinking, and the impact it can have on change management – but if it feels a bit foreign, how can you tell if you have it in you? Do You Think Visually? Interesting how Design always seems to have [...]

A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 9, 2010 ⋅ One comment

Spoiler alert: It can’t be taught … One of the questions I get – and I’m getting this a lot lately – is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about [...]

Managing Change: Inspiration, Art, Science, and Execution

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 15, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Often, when trying to figure out how to “make things happen”, your focus switches between multiple targets. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And How can I get the others to understand what I am doing? Real change happens along a continuum that stretches from The Big Idea to Real Results, and [...]

A Company is like a Sphere

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ September 15, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit – I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring. A company is like a sphere. As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the larger a company gets, more people get embedded and [...]

Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 22, 2008 ⋅ One comment

I’m exchanging email with someone interested in establishing a skunk works, and they are asking some very interesting questions about the nature of innovation and the ingredients for an “environment of possibilities” … … things are … [as they are] because someone already tried unsuccessful alternatives … [This] begs the question: when it is required, [...]

BigDog: Impressive Robotics

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ March 21, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

I don’t often post YouTube videos, but this one elicited a “wow” … I’ve only dabbled in AI-type programming, but I can appreciate the amount of computation that’s going on in real time here. The Big Dog recovers nicely from a hard shove at about 0:40, but that’s nothing compared to scrabbling on the ice [...]