innovation

Change agents are your organization’s real leaders

Market change, economy change, technology change, workforce change, communication change, today change riddles stress cracks in organization foundations. Whether 80-year-old companies, Fortune 500 stalwarts, or new-technology dynamos, change is as much an on-going assault on organizations as rust is an on-going assault on metal and your change agents are your organization’s saviors. You see tomorrow’s relevance [...]

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Tagged as: change, change management, innovation, leadership, strategy

Organization innovation dies when industry myopia prevails

Industry myopia is business risk. People who grow in one industry or cycle through only one industry may seem safe to hire, because they may slot in quicker or bring competitive advantage, but industry myopia rarely meets innovation’s need to break things to start over or to view things from a new angle. Innovation depends on [...]

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Tagged as: diversity, hiring, human capital assessment, innovation, recruit, recruiting, risk

Fistful of beans 09/21/2011

4 of things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Why being wrong is good for you — CNN.com Most of us go through life assuming we are right, almost all the time, about pretty much everything: our political, our values, our tastes, our religious beliefs, our view of other people, our memory, our [...]

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Tagged as: diversity, innovation, Kathryn Schulz, patent, The Economist, Wall Street Journal

Influence of The Modern Firm

The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth by John Roberts Brief: The most fundamental responsibility of a general manager is to craft strategy and design an organization where the strategy can succeed within the economic, political, legal, regulatory, social, and the technological environment the firm operates. A direct challenge to the design is finding alignment within the [...]

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Tagged as: economics, influen, influence, innovation, leadership, management, organization design, strategy

Fistful of beans 05/11/2011

4 of things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Think About Diversity of Thought — Diversity Executive Magazine Organizations have cultural norms that employees are expected to work within. Ideas presented by employees need become judged on value, not judged on the different perspectives they represent. Thought diversity introduces not only different viewpoints, but also differences [...]

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Tagged as: CFO, change, change management, collaboration, diversity, Diversity Executive, health care, innovation, invention, magazine, Wall Street Journal

Fistful of beans 05/04/2011

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. How Genius Works — The Atlantic Great art or innovation begins with an idea. Sometimes the idea is vague or even simply a bad idea. In this brief, The Atlantic looks into 17 of America’s foremost artists to discuss and find out about how genius [...]

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Tagged as: David Blei, Human Resource Executive, innovation, magazine, retention, Sean Gerrish, Talent Management, The Atlantic, The Economist

Fistful of beans 04/06/2011

3 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Learning Fosters Psychologically Healthy Workplaces — CLO Magazine The American Psychological Association (APA) recently awarded 8 companies with their Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards (PHWA). The companies were rated on five different criteria: employee involvement, health and safety, work-life balance, employee recognition, and employee growth and development. [...]

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Tagged as: Booz & Company, Chief Learning Officer, CLO, EBay, innovation, learning, magazine, morale, process, research and development, Talent Management

Fistful of beans 03/30/2011

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Still too big to fail — CFO Magazine Too-big-to-fail is defined as the government using taxpayer dollars to rescue “systemically important” banks. Few debate that the expectation of bailouts provides banks little incentive to guard against excessive risk. Today the solutions being debated may elevate overall [...]

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Tagged as: CFO, coaching, innovation, magazine, mission, strategy, Talent Management, The Economist, vision

Fistful of beans 01/26/2011

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Capabilities-Driven Mergers & Acquisitions — Booz & Company A video conversation on the role that capabilities can have to drive successful, strategic mergers. This 18-minute, question and answer, interview-style video is broken down in 5 chapters: The New Meaning of Scale; The Path to Coherence; Capabilities Roadmapping; Integrating [...]

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Tagged as: Bloomberg Businessweek, Booz & Company, Chief Learning Officer, CLO, culture, engagement, fistful of beans, Gerald Adolph, Glock, HR Capitalist, innovation, magazine, mergers and acquisitions, Paul Leinwand, rewards

Fistful of beans 01/12/2011

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. New Year, New Measurement Challenges — Talent Management Magazine Measuring talent management effectiveness requires knowing the answer to questions such as “Is the organization attracting better quality applicants?” or “Is the organization retaining its most productive employees?” While relatively few organizations measure the effectiveness of [...]

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Tagged as: CFO, culture, fistful of beans, HR Capitalist, innovation, magazine, strategic planning, strategy+business, The Atlantic

Fistful of beans 12/15/2010

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Twitter for Talent — Talent Management Magazine A great take on social media and social networking productivity benefits and insights that can be used to round out formal performance and talent rating and ranking processes. 2. Saul Griffith’s House of Cool Ideas — Inc. Magazine Saul Griffith is [...]

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Tagged as: Boston Globe, Crash Course, Fast Company, fistful of beans, Inc., innovation, mergers, motivation, non-profit, Saul Griffith, talent, Twitter

Our big letdown with leaders

A good piece in Sunday’s Boston Globe Ideas section reveals we human beings disappoint easily. And if we are easy to disappoint we are acutely set up for big letdowns from leaders all around us. However, the big letdown and disappointment we beings feel really may have more to do with us then the leaders themselves. Here [...]

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Tagged as: Art Markman, Boston Globe, change, Drake Bennett, Eleanor Roosevelt, innovation, Jeremy Burrus, Justin Kruger, Laura Kressel, leaders, leadership, transformation

The key to change is circular reasoning

Innovation is based on circular reasoning and the key to innovation is change, but change relies on community, but what does community rely on? Let’s try to break into this circle [stay with me, further down the list reveals why I started on 2.]: 2. Can’t have community without transparency 3. Can’t have transparency without [...]

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Tagged as: change, change management, community, innovation, Likert scale, motivation, Peter Block, risk

In review: Golden parachutes reward risk or moral hazard?

September 2010 in review. A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Golden parachutes reward risk or moral hazard? — No matter the solutions recently suggested, like England’s Cadbury and Hampel codes for public companies, America’s recent financial-reform act, or clawback clauses, there remains one conflict: business ethics will never win over moral hazard. The bureaucrat and bureaucracy revisited [...]

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Tagged as: Abraham Maslow, bureaucracy, bureaucrat, competency models, Competing Values Framework, Emotional Intelligence, golden parachute, Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory, innovation, moral hazard, organization performance, risk

The key to innovation may be better employee hygiene

Today’s drive for continual innovation, as it is taught, as it is written about, as it is sought, and as it is crowd sourced has a lot to do with early pioneers in management theory. For example why is hygiene important to innovation? Innovation needs motivation and motivation needs hygiene to succeed. The humanistic management school emphasizes, [...]

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Tagged as: Abraham Maslow, fear, Frederick Herzberg, Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory, Herzberg's Two Factor theory, innovation, leadership, management, motivation, od, organization development

In review: Organization sabotage and the butterfly effect

July 2010 in review. A roundup of blogs from the previous month: Organization sabotage and the butterfly effect — As a manager, running a team takes more than lining people up and pointing to the finish line. People are all not only motivated by salary. A leader or a manager may feel sabotaged when their [...]

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Tagged as: change, change management, content, economy, innovation, investment, James Fallows, leadership, management, motivation, organization, project, talent, tax, The Atlantic, venture capital

Can you engineer regional innovation clusters?

Innovation comes from opportunity and diversity. Can diversity and innovation be engineered? We all see the newspaper pronouncements of local, state, or federal tax incentives to draw investors and to build innovation clusters . The key for clusters to succeed is for clusters to cultivate of high, value-add industries and supply chains as well as [...]

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Tagged as: Boston, cluster, innovation, investment, seed investment

Venture Capital and the descent into irrelevance

The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. Elemental finance: you assume the amount of risk suitable for an expected payoff. You assume bigger risk and its bigger payoff with the full caveat that there is an equally big downside loss that could happen. Invest in a money market and get slow, steady, decimal-point-% returns; [...]

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Tagged as: entrepreneur, innovation, private equity, relationship, risk, VC, venture capital

How do you measure innovation: tax revenue

When we talk innovation, innovation is usually connected to a firm or a region. Interest with innovation at the regional level is usually couched in economic development. So, what is economic development other than politicians, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and glad-handing photo-ops? Why are so many incentive packages being offered? Tax havens being offered? Tax holidays? Who [...]

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Tagged as: goal, incentive, innovation, organization performance, performance management, policy

The maven or the laggard – Clive Thompson’s view

Those early market adopters, the techno-weenies that stood in line for Apple’s iPhone 4, they represent only about 13.5% of the potential market. It seems many consumer and technology products look for the big splash that Apple seems to land as a sign their company and their product are cool, hip, and successful. Early adopters [...]

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Tagged as: Apple, Clive Thompson, innovation, iPhone, market, product launch, strategy, technology, Wired

Low risk, low return human resources

My 11-odd-years in business and talent management consulting [the other 9 in marketing] have shown a few disturbing trends that I see from most poorly-run companies. These type of organizations, across all industries, ascribe to, what they believe is a low risk strategy, but in reality it is a low return strategy for human resources: [...]

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Tagged as: diversity, innovation, interview, job competency, job description, knowledge, recruiting, return on talent, risk management, skills, strategy

Innovation Boston and Budapest, or Dirty Water and the Blue Danube

13 years offers a great opportunity to revisit most relationships. At first blush, Boston and Budapest seem to have little to share or offer each in a study on innovation. However, both share unique innovation environments that reveal themselves upon further review. I am a Boston native and, after my undergraduate degree from Berklee College of Music, Boston [...]

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Tagged as: Boston, Budapest, China, diversity, Hungary, innovation, investment, nowEurope, venture capital

Googled again: cost of culture is innovation

What, really, is the cost of culture? Is culture tangible to business bottom line or is culture an intangible behavioral science term only useful for dissertations? Culture, innovation, values, diversity, opinion. Related? Perhaps to each other, but related to the bottom line? I read a recent blog on Fistful of Talent had me revisit diversity’s [...]

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Tagged as: cost of culture, diversity, Google, innovation, intangible, tangible

Innovation, the technical risk to IQ

I see and read so much about offers to teach or facilitate innovation, but what is innovation? Innovation is risk Innovation is dialogue Innovation is opportunity (also known as diversity) Are you innovative: Do you ask good questions or do you listen without judgment or without looking to interrupt? Do you allow yourself and people [...]

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Tagged as: creativity, diversity, Emotional Intelligence, EQ, innovation, IQ, risk

What Businesses Can Learn About Innovation … a comment about the numbers

I read Stephen Shapiro’s excellent blog on innovation and wanted to pull over one of his blogs and my comments with a chance to expand them here. This post brings together 2 topics that are powerful when coupled, but too often stand apart and at odds: numbers and stories. Innumeracy, numerical illiteracy, stands in the [...]

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Tagged as: conscious, creativity, innovation, innumeracy, Jeff Salz, statistics, Stephen Shapiro, unconscious

Ren Pope, Information Architect, Industrial Medium

“I have worked with Toby Elwin on a continual basis for over five years. During this time, I have seen Toby produce and provide world-class, time-critical products that supported programs vital to the highest echelons of national security. Toby was able to analyze a complex organization in chaos, develop the course of change and then [...]

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Tagged as: analyze, change, communicate, consulting, innovation, national security, presentation, program, Ren Pope, small business

Quick Bio

Toby Elwin has lived around the world and worked globally with, and for, some of the most highly-respected leaders and organizations in their fields.

This site, and thoughts, are rooted in the role leadership and talent have on an organization's motivation to influence, achieve, and sustain.

Toby's work combines systems theory, organization development, marketing, and portfolio and project management from more than 15 years in post-merger integration.
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Blog Archives
Biggest Influences – So Far

See Influence page for more detail:

The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth by John Roberts

The Workforce Scorecard by Mark A. Huselid, Brian E. Becker, and Richard W. Beatty

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig

The Truth About Thriving in Change by William S. Kane

The Motivation to Work by Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner, and Barbara Bloch Snyderman

The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott

Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

The HR Value Proposition by Dave Ulrich

The Strategy Paradox by Michael Raynor
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