Disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship and organizational transformation
Disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship and organizational transformation
In a world where traditional benchmarks are faltering, leadership is facing a profound crisis. We are no longer confronted with calculable risks, but with genuine uncertainty — a situation that calls into question our individual, collective, and societal mental models. This rupture requires us to reconsider our understanding of leadership. But on what basis?
(more…)In an increasingly complex world, collaboration has become essential. Executives and consultants tout its benefits, including increased innovation, knowledge sharing, organizational agility, and optimized collective performance. However, the considerable efforts required to develop collaboration often yield disappointing results. The imperative to collaborate often goes unheeded, and everyone returns to their silo. Why is collaboration, with its obvious benefits, so difficult? Because collaborative efforts come at a cost.
(more…)How can uncertainty be reduced? This is the question that is preoccupying all executive committees in France and the rest of the world in these troubled times. The most obvious temptation is to mobilize the arsenal of predictive thinking: foresight, scenarios, modeling, customer surveys, and nowadays, of course, AI. However, uncertainty is not resolved through forecasting, but through action. And in this regard, the most powerful action is cooperation. One blind person holding the hand of another blind person? Not necessarily: cooperation means that we no longer need to predict in order to act creatively and move forward without being paralyzed.
(more…)When discussing the rapid advance of technologies such as AI, two opposing reactions emerge: a strong fear of the consequences (“The accounting profession will disappear”) and unbridled enthusiasm (“Everyone can be a Michelangelo now!”). Both reactions assume that professional skills will become less important in the face of machines. However, this is far from certain. An interesting decision made by the US Navy sheds light on this issue.
(more…)There is a paradox in business: many of those who are supposed to lead it sometimes admit their inability to move forward with their innovation or transformation projects. And this is not just true of middle managers. I often hear people say, “There’s nothing I can do at my level”. Coming from senior executives, this admission is surprising. The reason is often that these leaders have not recognized the political dimension of their role. By political dimension, we mean the ability to influence the group to move in a particular direction, in this case, to move stalled projects forward. This ability rarely rests on formal authority; it must be built. A useful historical example is how Lyndon Johnson managed to dominate the US Senate before becoming President of the United States.
(more…)The best management lessons is not always found in management books. Sometimes literature offers a much richer perspective. Such is the case with Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, published more than a century ago. It is about finding your way in a complex and uncertain world.
(more…)In an ideal world, the presentation of objective facts should naturally lead individuals to revise their beliefs. But experience tells us a very different reality: we are trapped in our beliefs and opinions, even absurd ones, and we often remain unshaken in the face of contrary evidence. Donald Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) electoral base is an extreme textbook case that fascinates researchers. But, as always, there is a “but…”, and the lesson is not what it seems.
(more…)Under the slogan “Stand up for science,” marches were organized on March 7 to defend science as a pillar of democracy. These demonstrations were aimed at protesting the budget cuts and massive layoffs in American organizations and universities decided by the new Trump administration. No institution, even the most prestigious, seems to have been spared from this wave of repression. But academic institutions are not simply innocent victims. They bear a large part of the responsibility for the crisis of legitimacy they are experiencing, having long since forgotten the ideal of truth in order to serve ideological causes.
(more…)A member of parliament who voted in favor of low-emission zoning (banning older vehicles from city centers) recently confessed to the writer Alexandre Jardin, who is strongly opposed to this measure: “We wanted to do the right thing, even if we misjudged the impact”. One might have thought that laws were passed precisely on the basis of their expected impact, but this is clearly not the case. Instead, they seem to be passed on ideological principles. In this respect, they constitute what economist Thomas Sowell calls categorical solutions, claiming to provide a single, simple answer to what are in reality complex social problems. Categorical solutions have become commonplace today, eclipsing pragmatic, nuanced and fair approaches, and the consequences are catastrophic.
(more…)With the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United States on January 20, we are entering a period of radical uncertainty even greater than we’ve experienced in recent years. We thought we lived in an uncertain world? We haven’t seen anything yet. Accepting this uncertainty means accepting a kind of vertigo, a sense of a world out of balance. For the philosopher André Glucksmann, accepting the vertigo of renouncing certainties is a source of strength. Vertigo is a form of liberation that allows us to think clearly and is a lever for creativity and transformation. But there’s no guarantee that we’ll have this power.
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