Why and How to Build an In-House Consulting Team

Why and How to Build an In-House Consulting Team

In-house strategy and consulting groups are growing in popularity, supplementing and increasingly winning business from, many high-profile companies including Cisco, Google, IBM, Samsung, Siemens and Disney. But building an internal consulting group is an unprecedented endeavor for many companies. Harvard Business Reviews reports back on what has been learned about how to establish a successful internal…

Zombie Projects: How to Find Them and Kill Them

Zombie Projects: How to Find Them and Kill Them

Zombie projects are the enemies of well-intentioned innovation initiatives in many organizations, regardless of industry or region. These projects fail for whatever reason and do not fulfill their promise. Yet they trudge on, sucking up resources without any real hope of positively impacting a company’s strategy or revenue prospects…   To read more, click here. Image (source)  

Why the Gettysburg Address Is Still a Great Case Study in Persuasion

Why the Gettysburg Address Is Still a Great Case Study in Persuasion

APRIL 09, 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War – just a month after the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln. Needless to say, Lincoln became one of America’s most revered presidents and his best-known speech is, of course, the Gettysburg Address. This speech is often studied for means of rhetorically claiming its…

Tactics for Asking Good Follow-Up Questions

Tactics for Asking Good Follow-Up Questions

In life – regardless of whether you are looking to hire someone or decide to trust someone – the better you are at judging people, the better. Unfortunately, effective communication is a challenge of most people, and it’s even harder to read others. Several decades of research has focused on the mental processes we use to interpret…

What MIT Is Learning About Online Courses and Working from Home

What MIT Is Learning About Online Courses and Working from Home

“Virtual work” is increasingly just “work” for most of us – whether we’re dialing into a conference call with our branch offices in London and New York, or VPN-ing in from home to catch up with work after-hours, remote work is the new normal. But Peter Hirst is helping to lead MIT into a new…

Is Innovation More About People or Process?

Is Innovation More About People or Process?

The proposed question is ever- relevant: What’s more critical to producing a breakthrough innovation – finding creative people or finding creative ideas? This is a question Pixar head Ed Catmull has asked, and he says they tend to be pretty much split on it 50/50. A trip through HBR’s archives shows that he’s hardly alone…