unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Innovation is all about shifting focus. Most successful companies usually begin innovating by looking within--finding stale patterns of operating and new ways to streamlining operations. Using a list of more than 2,000 successful companies and organizations, world-renowned speaker and innovation scientist, Larry Keeley used a proprietary algorithm to determine ten meaningful categories of innovation. His book Ten Types Of Innovation shows us data, insights, and patterns on innovation to help companies find opportunities and understand their performance against competitors. In this episode, Larry shares details on how you can use these innovation principles to bring about meaningful and sustainable growth within your organization. Find out how the Ten Types of Innovation concept has influenced thousands of decision-makers and companies around the world, plus get the insider look on how to actually implement it.Episode Quotes:Is the definition of innovation too abstract for people in the field? And how do people doing the leg work experience innovation?I've talked to a gazillion engineers and trained some of the best ones. And they are the first to say, “I really don't mind if I have a lot of failures if my handful of successes are so wildly successful that it pays for all my sins”. What do venture capitalists look for when reviewing a startup’s innovation capability?In a venture capital firm, they listen for the opposite. They don't listen for the low-hanging fruit. They listen for the hardest bit you have to get right. And then they're relentless and driven about trying to determine whether that hard bit you have to get right is, in fact, going to be cracked by this team or not. If it will not be cracked by this team, the first thing they do is they change the team. And if they can't find a team that can crack it, then they kill it. And that is great. That's how you focus on something that's a true breakthrough.What are the comparative advantages between large companies and startups, and are there specific types of innovation for which they are better suited?[Larry] You tell me. You teach an awful lot of talented graduate students. If I said, “How many of you think big companies are more innovative than little companies”? What percentage of the hands would go up? [Greg] Oh none! [Larry] And if I said, “How many of you think little companies are more innovative than big companies? [Greg] Oh, that, they'd all raised their hand. [Larry] Okay, so here's the right answer. Again, this is so important, Greg. This is why I like to call myself an innovation scientist. These kinds of bullshit answers to bullshit questions need to be rooted out and understood with greater precision. The right answer, the technically correct answer, is that it's an unfair question. Why do you think big design firms are unstable, and why it's important to invest in innovation during a recession?This is the time to innovate. When everybody around you is losing their head and scared and all the resources are effervescing away. For God's sake, think about how to reinvent your category. It's the perfect time to do it.Time Code Guide00:02:02 What is an innovation scientist and understanding it as an interdisciplinary science00:04:49 Is the way we talk about innovation too abstract and unrealistic to be really understood by practitioners on the ground?00:11:47 Startups: the importance of rigor and setting up systems00:23:14 Is there a way to lessen the risks of testing a hypothesis?00:26:42 Are there industries where velocity is not as important when testing and innovating?00:29:48 Is there a way that you can learn both an organization and as an individual so that your capacity for learning continues to get better and better?00:36:08 Do you think universities are really teaching students to be innovative?00:43:29 How do you overcome silos without giving up the reason they exist, in the first place?00:49:36 Role of outsourced consultants when it comes to innovating00:55:37 Taking advantage of the pandemic and grabbing the opportunity to innovateShow Links:Guest ProfileProfessional Profile on Sterns Speakers Academic Profile at the Institute of DesignLarry Keeley on LinkedInProfessional Profile on DoblinHis WorkTEDx Academy featuring Larry Keeley: Flipping Adversity to AdvantageTEDx Chicago featuring Larry Keeley: Design for the Opportunity Society: the 21st Century Plan of ChicagoSingularityU featuring Larry Keeley: Australia Summit 2018 (Corporate Innovation)SingularityU featuring Larry Keeley: Indian Summit 2017 (Forcing Secrets out of Innovation)SingularityU featuring Larry Keeley: Brazil Summit 2018 (Organization of Innovation)Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Textiles have played a significant role in our history and culture, starting with the Stone Age and continuing to the present. As award-winning journalist Virginia Postrel tells us, thread and fabric played are catalysts in revolutionizing human labor and innovations that economic historians often overlook. The Fabric Of Civilization is Virginia's book on textile history that stitches our aesthetics, history, and cultural identity. It focuses on textiles as among the oldest, most essential, and most pervasive of human inventions.In this episode, Virginia reminds us that people around the world are all woven together through our shared experiences, from using a string to hunting food to making clothes with artistic patterns. Episode Quotes:What is the significance of a string to man during the Stone Age?Lots and lots of things become possible because of string. One of which, as you alluded to is you can take your stone, weapons or whatever, your stone knives, and you can attach them to a stick and make a spear or an arrow. Those sorts of things become possible. So it's a critical, very early technology.Why do scholars often overlook the contributions and importance of textile in human history?There was a paper published where people had identified Neanderthal strings that were 50,000 years old, really old strings. So it's very important technology, but string rots and stones don't so that people didn't really think about looking for string and or later on, 10,000 years, rather than 50, looking for textiles. Our minds are shaped by what is left and what is left is the hard stuff.How did spinning machines affect the economy of weavers in the late 18th century?Before the spinning machines, weavers had often been idle because they couldn't get enough thread to weave. Once the spinning machines came in, there was an expansion of demand for weavers and weavers made good money for the day. And it was what one historian calls a golden heyday for them, but that lasted about a generation.Why did the group of Luddites resist the use of power looms despite improving the productivity of weavers?They were not ideologues. They were not people who had some cultural distaste for technology or something like that. They were just guys who didn't want to lose their jobs, at a time when losing your job could mean starving. This is serious business. But they smashed looms and the government said you can't do that. Few people were executed, actually because of violent actions. A lot of people were deported to Australia. But the looms continued and we had this enormous expansion of productivity.On weaving as the birthplace of computing.Weaving is the original binary operation. Because you either are lifting a thread or you're not lifting. You're going over or under, you've got this one or zero intrinsic process. And so, people have been figuring out ways to record and remember those patterns for thousands and thousands of years. In the 19th century, Jacquard came up with a way of mechanizing or automating really some of the most complicated kinds of weaving, which had been done on what are cultural looms.How can traditional textile artisans around the world preserve their art?The thing that I think is important is that for these crafts to survive in ways that don't condemn people to eternal poverty is they have to be luxurious. They have to be things that are special.Time Code Guide:00:02:19 The String Age00:04:42 Archeologist’s work on prehistoric textile00:08:15 The Development of Spinning Machine in the Industrial Revolution00:10:47 The labor-intensive process of making thread for Viking sail00:11:43 The Women-dominated Thread industry00:14:49 Silk weaving before the Industrial Revolution that produced economic ecosystem00:17:31 Industrial espionage in the Silk Weaving Technology00:20:00 Resistance movements against production and technological advancement in textile0:23:00 Metaphors of weaving in English language00:25:18 Weaving as the original binary operation00:28:27 Creating patterns through weaving00:30:55 Mathematical concepts in weaving00:33:54 The European Cloth Trade00:36:58 Stinky fabric dyes from snail glands00:42:09 Global production of indigo dye00:44:14 Aesthetic expression in historic textiles00:45:01 The human value of aesthetics00:48:56 The art of expressing identity through clothing styles00:52:57 Meanings of clothing styles evolve over timeShow Links:Guest ProfileVirginia Postrel's Official WebsiteVirginia Postrel on LinkedInVirginia Postrel on TwitterHer WorkThe Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the WorldThe Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual PersuasionThe Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and ConsciousnessThe Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For the past decade, Michael Wade, professor of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School, and his co-authors studied the thought process of inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists. The product of this collaboration is the book A.L.I.E.N. Thinking: The Unconventional Path To Breakthrough Ideas. Wade and his colleagues learned that these people’s out-of-the-world ideas helped them to make leaps and bounds in discovering game-changing solutions. In this episode, Michael talks about the five patterns of thinking that distinguish these innovators from the rest of us. He shares how Attention, Levitation, Imagination, Experimentation, and Navigation—make for a fresh and flexible approach to problem-solving. Find out how to free your imagination and detect hard-to-observe patterns. Episode Quotes:Was this book intended to be more general, since most of your books are about digital transformation? Throughout your career as a professor and researcher, do you see yourself becoming more generalist in your approach?I think probably Greg it's the opposite with me. I had a very traditional academic career path. I was a professor in the MIS area. Way back when I was really interested in digital things before it was called digital. But I did find, I have to tell you, that I felt a little bit constrained in a traditional university environment. Where, you know, you're pigeonholed into a department, and my department was the MIS department. So if I wanted to do marketing, strategy, or leadership, I was locked out to a certain extent.How can keeping people outside their comfort zone help them become motivated to learn and energized?And that's one of the reasons we chose the metaphor of the alien because you can imagine Greg, an alien comes down to earth. That alien sees everything for the first time. And so, everything's new. But we lose that. We completely lose that. So, you know, the expression 'déjà vu'? So, déjà vu is, you look at something, you think I've seen that before. I'm sure I've seen that before. You get that sense of déjà vu. We want people to have the opposite of that.Thoughts on rest, levitating and taking time off to reflectThe L is a fun one. It's also a bit counterintuitive. This idea of levitating and levitating is all about —you talked about zoom in, zoom out before — it's about timeout and time off. We just do not give our minds enough time to disengage. I'll ask a question, an open question. How many of you take your phones into the toilet with you? It's probably a shockingly high number. You don't; we don't even give ourselves those two and a half minutes of time for our mind just to reflect.How do we lose our ability to exercise our imagination and creativity? You know, all kids are imaginative. They have great imaginations. But you know, life tends to beat it out of us. School beats it out of us. Our careers beat it out of us. And eventually, there's not much left. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said, “We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”Time Code Guide:00:02:30 Experience at IMD: Thoughts on not having core interests and not being caged within a department00:03:51 Do you think that working with real executives and companies rather than startups help shape your thinking to see real obstacles and become an alien thinker?00:07:32 How the book can help readers who just joined immersive work experiences stay motivated and energized?00:10:52 Paying attention to situations, zooming in and out, and changing perspective00:13:17 Hypothesis-driven inquiry vs. data-driven discovery00:17:45 How to be intentional on doing nothing and plotting rest in the calendar00:20:23 Remote work not being conducive for levitation00:23:41 What happens when you yourselves in pigeonholes and when you become fixated on your function?00:27:43 Using your imagination to innovate and enhance customer experiences in restaurants using online and digital tools00:30:31 How to improve brainstorming process?00:33:03 How do you stick to scientific methods without confirmation bias kicking-in?00:36:43 Understanding the scientific method: how the human brain can learn naturally and how we learn from machines00:39:08 How preferring negative feedback, anticipating blockers and welcoming challenges help you churn out innovative ideas00:42:14 How manual drawings help architects solve problems better00:44:34 How to open more organizations to creativity and idea generation00:46:39 Becoming an expert but learning other things from different areas and practices to bridge gaps in the organizationShow Links:Guest ProfileFaculty Profile at IMDProfessional Profile at The Conversation NewsletterMichael Wade on LinkedInMichael Wade on TwitterHis WorkMichael Wade on Google ScholarALIEN Thinking: The Unconventional Path to Breakthrough IdeasHacking Digital: Best Practices to Implement and Accelerate Your Business TransformationOrchestrating Transformation: How to Deliver Winning Performance with a Connected Approach to ChangeDigital Vortex: How Today's Market Leaders Can Beat Disruptive Competitors at Their Own Game Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Experimental research has been a perennial practice in the natural sciences, but social scientists have taken it up in recent decades as well. Randomized trials have been used to design policies aimed at increasing educational attainment, lowering crime rates, enhancing employment rates, and improving living standards among the poor. In his book, Randomistas, Andrew Leigh, an economist turned politician, tells the stories of radical researchers who uncovered what works and what doesn’t using experiments. From finding a cure for scurvy to improving social policies, Andrew talks about how randomistas are changing the world. In this episode, he shares fascinating accounts of randomized trials and studies from across the globe, and the challenges of gaining acceptance for their findings. Learn from Andrew and Greg as they draw out key lessons from the book and their thoughts on applying these principles to real-life trials.Episode Quotes:Why does measuring the effects of social programs help address our society’s problems?I don't take any sense of pessimism about our ability to change the world. Well, I think we ought to regard tackling problems such as long-term joblessness. As being as difficult as tackling health challenges like cancer, HIV. And we need to approach them not with blind ideology, but with scientific rigor. Discarding theories but not losing any of our passion for solving these big social problems.How do randomistas use data from randomized trials?So, I think the best randomistas are now moving away from whether a particular tweak works or not, to how do we understand the world? And the great thing about randomized trials, unlike natural experiments, is that you can design the experiment very precisely to test the theory.What can companies and organizations learn from Toms Shoes in terms of having a scientific method for its CSR programs, and do people support causes that take this approach?One of the firms that's most impressive in that space is Toms Shoes. Toms was founded with the notion that if you bought a pair of shoes in an advanced country, somebody in a poor country would get a pair of shoes as well. So, this wasn't corporate philanthropy bolted on, it was part of the model. And then, after that had been going for about a decade, they asked a team of researchers led by Bruce Wydick to evaluate using a randomized trial. What happened when a community received Toms shoes? And they found that, in general, those getting the shoes had other shoes beforehand. So, they were upgrading the shoes rather than getting their first pair of shoes. It didn't improve school attendance, and that it did increase the sense of dependency on outsiders. And Bruce has a lovely response to it where he says, “Many companies would have looked to bury that result, but Toms didn't.” They saw the result; they adapted, they moved from loafers to sneakers. They looked at ways of giving the shoes through the parents and the community and as incentives for school attendance, looking to improve their program rather than attack the researchers. If Tom's can do that for an evaluation which really struck hard at the very heart of their model, then I think anybody else should be able to do the same with the result that makes them uncomfortable.What have you learned from Obama’s campaign in terms of connecting better with your constituents?There are all kinds of little ways in which you can just tweak what you're doing. And for me, that's a part of staying fresh. We should always be looking to learn. I'm always asking colleagues about their ideas on better connecting with constituents because we're in this world, Greg, of declining trust in politicians. And so, it's incumbent on all of us in elected office to be thinking about, how do we do better at connecting with the people who we represent? What are the platforms we can reach out through? What are the ways in which we can connect with people?Thoughts on experimentation, conversations, and reducing political conflictsThere are good amounts of evidence that encouraging people to have those cross-party conversations can make a difference. I'm surprised as to how many people think they're engaging in politics when they're speaking only to people who voted the same way as they did in the last election. If you want to change the next election result, you've got to find someone who voted one way from the last election and persuade them to do something different. That involves having a conversation with someone who might have different views than you. And guess what? That's the best way in which we've always done politics.Time Code Guide:00:01:19 How did he become interested in field experiments00:02:30 Thoughts on progress, discrediting bad policies and ideas, and discovery of new impactful policies00:04:40 Resistance to the use of experimentation in policies00:08:26 Why narrowly focusing on what works and what doesn't means missing opportunities to discover underlying mechanisms00:09:45 The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (H.I.P.P.O. Effect)00:10:33 Why testing something obvious is still important00:12:31 In randomized trials, where have we seen the biggest improvements in scenario policy?00:14:37 How do you respond to people who are not comfortable becoming experimental subjects?00:16:53 The cost of randomizing and not randomizing studies00:19:49 Thoughts on governments and universities having a centralized or explicit approach to experimentation00:21:39 When trying something new, should our existing practices and protocols be forced to go through a test as well?00:24:05 What have you learned in the areas of education and crime prevention that helped form your approach to making policies?00:26:13 Philosophical approach as one of the most effective approaches to policymaking00:27:11 Passion-driven in comparison to data, and result-driven policies00:28:50 Development as an area where a lot of this experimentation is happening00:35:03 High standards in politics and resistance to greater use of experimentation in the world of policymakingShow Links:Guest ProfileAndrew Leigh’s Official WebsiteProfile on Australian ParliamentAndrew Leigh on TwitterHis WorkReconnected: A Community Builder's HandbookInnovation + Equality: How to Create a Future That Is More Star Trek Than TerminatorRandomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our WorldChoosing Openness: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special: Why global engagement is best for AustraliaThe Luck of Politics: True Tales of Disaster and Outrageous FortuneEconomics of Just About Everything: The Hidden Reasons for Our Curious Choices and Surprising Successes in LifeBattlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in AustraliaDisconnected Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

To understand how humans react and adapt to economic change, we need to study how these people who live in harsh environments survived these conditions. From war zones to natural disasters and failed states, to aging societies and those who are challenged by technological advancement. In his book, Extreme Economies, economist, and journalist Richard Davies features stories of communities that experienced seismic shock or have been violently changed in some way. In this episode, he gives an account of how people living in these odd and marginal places are often ignored by number crunching economists and politicians alike. His timely and revealing insights shed light on how markets recover from catastrophic events. Listen as Greg and Richard talk about humans living in extreme situations, and of the financial infrastructure they create.Episode Quotes:What motivated you to study the places featured in your book Extreme Economies?I started out at university, actually as a medical student, and I switched to philosophy and economics after a year of that. And one of the interesting things from the sciences is that there are these landmark cases. One that I mentioned is this English physician, William Patti, and his discovery of human circulation. One that will be more famous, I think, to listen to in the States —is the case of a patient called Phineas Gage, who was a Canadian railway man, who was shot through the head —this gruesome injury which separated his brain. And the point is that these one offs, this case allowed medics because the person survived. Because the person was resilient to find out something really important about how human anatomy works —the general human anatomy for the rest of us.The first idea of looking at extremes I had been that one which is, ‘Can I find places where something radical has happened and yet, their economies survived?’Is entrepreneurship a natural human tendency?There is something innately human about entrepreneurialism. I’m convinced of that now. And why is that? Because if you take people, and you strip them of everything, so they're left with just the basic assets that they have— their time, some skills, some kind of natural source, they will start to trade. In what ways do the reconstruction of tenements in Glasgow provide insight into the social capital, which is not represented in public housing data?There are hundreds of stories across Glasgow that become more or less popular in the social sciences. But I think we would call it social capital— the norms, traditions, non-market based ways of interacting and providing for one another. When the tenements were destroyed, they built these high-rise buildings with external developments. But they didn't build a single shop, pub or communal area because they just didn't think of that. And again, that’s my point about data. You need to look at all the data. They just looked at the other housing. Is the house bigger? Yes. Is it better? Is it cleaner? Yes. But they didn't look at all the other things that make a neighborhood. And that's one of the reasons, I think, talking to people, those places did so badly and made Glasgow sink from one of the best cities to the most troubled city in Europe by the mid-1960s to early '70s.Time Code Guide:00:06:04 Places with Extreme Economies00:07:21 Entrepreneurship created from necessity00:16:52 Beyond physical needs00:17:41 The urban decline of Glasgow00:21:07 Thriving economy through social capital00:24:19 Social capital’s non-mainstream definition00:26:35 Ineffective government intervention00:28:01 The Network of Trust00:31:48 Building back disrupted markets00:38:56 The economic malfunction in Kinshasa00:43:52 Informal privatization of a collapsing civil service00:50:55 Inequality in Santiago01:11:11 The Economic ObservatoryShow Links:Guest ProfileRichard Davies at University of BristolRichard Davies on TwitterRichard Davies WebsiteAcademic Profile at the London School of EconomicsHis WorksArticles on Economic ObservatoryArticles, blogs, and videos at Chartwell SpeakersExtreme Economies: What Life at the World's Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most billion-dollar startups are founded by non-technical individuals— one of the many insights that Ali Tamaseb notes in his recent book. Ali spent countless hours manually collecting what may be the biggest data set ever on startups — comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to succeed. In his book Super Founders, Ali brings together 30,000 data points on nearly every factor that influences a new business: number of competitors, market size, the founder's age, academic performance, quality of investors, timelines of fundraising, and others. In this episode, Ali shares stories from the early days of billion-dollar startups, and talks about the founders and investors of Dropbox, Coinbase, and Facebook. Tune in as Ali busts some myths on entrepreneurship and startups by sharing key findings from his book.Episode Quotes:Should founders look outside their domains for problems to solve, or should they focus on solving the problems that they themselves have encountered?I think that's another thing that gets talked about. Solve your own problem, be your own customer. And that seems like perfect advice. But that's why we have so many valet parking and grocery delivery app companies. It's nobody's problem — climate change is nobody's specific problem. Agriculture, food, security, water scarcity— these are not anyone's specific problems. But these are hundreds of times larger problems by economics, by the scope, than grocery delivery, or valet parking, or any other consumer thing that you may be a customer of. So, when I looked at these billion-dollar companies, in a lot of these cases, they were not solving their own problems. They deliberately went on to find the right idea.Thoughts on why repeat founders to succeed more than first-time foundersSo, practice does make perfect. It's the experience of generating value, building something, selling it, and generating some revenue. Whatever that is. It doesn't matter how much it is. It's that experience that you learn.Thoughts on maximizing the likelihood of success for the early stages of fundraisingBut, I think the thing about founders is that things are a little bit more obvious to VCs. Or that hot deals are hot deals for a reason. These are some of the hot deals that become obvious to VCs. And, it's the VCs who are fighting for those deals. It tends to be that these companies are more likely to become the billion-dollar companies at the end of the day as well. But it's important that as a new fund, you can get yourself into the right 40%. And as a new founder, which is not a super founder or doesn't have a big degree, you can become part of that 40% that gets to the billion-dollar outcomes.Do you think that we'll ever be able to use machine learning for at least some parts of the venture process?My goal with the book is the reverse of that, how we can use data to decrease biases. To put aside, things that don't matter. Because right now, a lot of VCs, a lot of people create these scoring things, like a lot of these judged competitions and stuff. Like, people have the scores. Okay, I'm going to give five scores to this element and five scores to this element. And you see, the scoring system is wrong. The book that I'm trying to do is, 'Okay, just throw away that scoring system because half of it is the wrong elements you're looking at. You're looking at the domain expertise of the founder, five scores. It turns out that's not correlated with success. What are you scoring? So, a big part of this book is putting aside things that don't matter. Age, gender, race. Things that don't matter should be set aside. And then, how can we use data to better source founders and source companies? I think something that's becoming more and more useful.Time Code Guide:00:00:53 How Ali gathered data for his book00:02:04 Motivation for writing the book00:04:38 The different kinds of VCs00:06:02 The extent of work the author had to go through to collect the 30,000 dataset00:07:39 The extent of work the author had to go through to collect the 30,000 data sets00:11:02 Archetypes, stereotypes and how each dataset relates to one another00:13:58 Patterns on the data about founders00:16:26 Importance of having technical and non-technical founders onboard00:18:27 Data on VCs funding family members and relationships between founders00:25:48 Were you able to find data indicating any biases from VCS when it comes to funding startups00:30:11 Were you able to find data indicating any biases from VCS when it comes to funding startups00:35:18 The relationship between defensibility and scale00:44:03 Should startups immediately to get into an accelerator program and start grabbing seed money as soon as possible?Show Links:Guest ProfilePartner Profile at DCVCAli Tamaseb on LinkedInAli Tamaseb on TwitterHis WorkSuper Founders Official WebsiteFollow Ali Tamaseb on MediumAli Tamaseb on Inc.Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our collective ability to deal with infections has impacted human development for over 5,000 years. Through unprecedented advancements in hygiene and medicine, humanity has been able to break free of epidemic cycles, which has resulted in a world that is urbanized, globalized, and unimaginably wealthy. Global trade, however, made us more vulnerable to newly emerging diseases. Today, there is a strong demand from the whole world to work together on sustainable health programs, such as the global effort to produce Covid-19 vaccine, which poses a risk to millions of lives and trillions of dollars of global output.In this episode, Charles Kenny talks about his timely book, The Plague Cycle, which examines the relationship between civilization, globalization, prosperity, and infectious disease over the last 5,000 years.  Listen as Charles and Greg discuss the causes and vectors of epidemics, the human toll of deaths and suffering, and our progress in battling communicable diseases.Episode Quotes:What are the main things that we can be proud of when it comes to human development?If you look at global trends, even in income, but even more in health, worldwide the average life expectancy a century ago was around 30 years. Now, it's up around 70. If you look at education, that was the reserve of a small minority a century ago. And now, even in the poorest countries, we're seeing 80- 90% of people in primary school at least. There is a long way to go but they’re at least in school for some time. Sometimes even learning! If you look at global trends in violence, at least in warfare, they've been on the decline at least sort of since the middle of the last century, at least since the second world war. Democracy, if you go back a century, obviously most of the world we're living in. Now we've seen backsliding, in democracy over the last ten years. If I were to update the book today, I'd be a little less confident on democracy than I was ten years ago. But still, huge progress over the last century.How closely tied are our health outcomes to expenditures and investment in healthcare?The best way to keep populations healthy is not to have them get sick in the first place. So, it is things like vaccines, bed nets. It’s things like clean water, and sanitation. These technologies have really created a global health revolution, and they're not terribly expensive, most of them. There are sanitation systems can get up there. Building a sewage network in a large city is a multi-billion dollar operation, but still, comparatively, they're pretty cheap.Thought on putting monetary and statistical value on human life?And it's interesting, the way we come up with a statistical value of life, you know? To use in calculations about how much are we willing to pay to rid the risk of death in various ways. We do it by looking at human behavior. How much people are willing to pay in their everyday life to reduce their risk of dying. We take their decisions, and add them up, and we say, ‘that's the value of life we're going to use’. The problem with it is, that richer people are willing to spend more on saving their lives than poorer people. So, if you follow that approach to the end of the line, you get values of life in developing countries that are a fraction of the value of life in rich countries. And frankly, you get values of lives of poor people in rich countries that are fractions of values of life of rich people.Why do you think pestilence and disease as fields of history were never really given a lot of attention? Why are we only paying attention to it now?I think maybe it's been historically ignored because it was just such a given. You know, it was such a background of everyday life and pretty much was an inevitability. Most people were dying of infectious diseases for most of history. Every year, year in, year out. And the pandemic strikes an interest because, you know, eight times as many are dying of infectious diseases in a single year. But, the sort of background deaths from smallpox and measles and so on go unnoticed because it's the way the world is. And that's why, if you look for historical sources, writing anguished reports on smallpox deaths. You won't really find very many of them, and it's because, well, you know, of course, it's God's will. It is the way things are. Unlike battles, regicides, or the kind of thing that fills your average history book. Those were noted at the time and reported on at length, and infectious disease wasn't. It was just part of the life of the household, if you will.Do you think that people from the 20th century had an overly optimistic view of the potential of science and were able to become completely oblivious to epidemics that have been eradicated, like measles? At least until the onset of Ebola and HIV?The combination of improved sanitation and better housing and so on, followed by vaccines and antibiotics, made infection a bit of a distant force in people's lives for much of the 20th century. And frankly, I think that was one of the reasons that the anti-vaxxer movement gained steam. It was quite easy to worry about the risk of vaccinations when for most people, they'd never seen a case of measles, certainly never seen smallpox. So, you know, the very success that we've had against infection made it seem like a bit of a distant threat. The advantage, if you will, for public health professionals worried about that kind of thing is that infection has been such a major part of human evolution. That we actually have a bunch of evolved responses to worry about it. Even in the period pre-Covid, we had periodic mass hysteria almost, about the risk of infection. I mean, the extent to which the market for antibacterial goods expand that, you could get antibacterial everything in 2000s, when we were going through one of the latest spikes of infection.Time Code Guide:00:05:04 Why do international agencies focus so much on market economy, output indicators? Are there other better metrics on the indicators of the quality of life?00:07:47 Thoughts on the intellectual history of how developed countries inject capital in developing nations and improving life condition00:14:55 The relationship between income and health00:29:33 Aren't we going to return to an era where pathogens and microbes are going to be much more, dangerous?00:32:19 Other inexpensive ways communities can improvise and solve diseases00:34:49 How can medical information and materials can be made more accessible00:38:26 Disparity on the impact of coronavirus in highly developed countries and less developed countries00:41:41 Institutional architecture of society imprinted in history00:45:32 Plague as disease of trade and product of Globalization00:47:43 How other countries around the world responded to SARS00:52:55 Will the current pandemic and vaccine development affect education and literacy00:56:37 What inspired the author to write a kids’ bookShow Links:Guest ProfileCharles Kenny on the Center for Global DevelopmentCharles Kenny on Energy for Growth HubCharles Kenny on LinkedInCharles Kenny on TwitterHis WorkGoogle ScholarYour World, Better: Global Progress And What You Can Do About ItThe Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious DiseaseClose the Pentagon: Rethinking National Security for a Positive Sum WorldThe Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Good for the WestGetting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For many established companies, enormous resources and risky decisions stand in the way of innovation. There are ample opportunities for innovation in large companies, both in terms of technology and business models. But often, a plateau happens when the mindset becomes stagnant. Striking the balance between short-term needs and committing resources to bold innovation is critical.Gary Pisano, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the Harvard Business School, advises business leaders to pursue transformative actions creatively. His intensive research in his book, Creative Constructions, suggests injecting innovation capacity through the right strategy, systematic changes, and reframing culture.Tune in to this episode as Greg and Gary tackle crucial innovation questions and how large companies can overcome them for sustained profitability.Episode Quotes:What factors affect the innovation capabilities of a company?As organizations get larger, they get more complex. There are more interconnected pieces. And when there are more interconnected pieces, any change gets harder to make because it involves other pieces. It can get exponentially more complex to engage in certain things. I think the other thing that happens is organizations build up capabilities, skills, and complementary assets like distribution and brand that become very powerful. But then they become an anchor. They feel like they have to continue to exploit those, they look for ways to exploit those, but it narrows down their focus. The other thing is culturally they, don't attract the right people, they don’t attract people who are creative or risk-taking. They attract people who want the safety of a large company and sometimes a large bureaucracy.How to best analyze a company strategy?Ultimately, strategy comes down to, I think, in the book strategy is where you spend your money. So don’t tell me what your strategy is, tell me where you're spending your money, and I'll tell you what your strategy really is. But, you know, strategy is a pattern of commitment to a pattern of behavior, and you don’t always do the same thing. Can financial analysis become a systematic way to measure the results of a strategy and help business leaders set a framework for innovation? So you think about analytic as a process for structuring your thinking in a logical way, and a rigorous way to invite discussion and to invite exploration that is going to help the senior leaders make a better judgment. And at the end of the day, it's judgment. And that's all these things do, and that's what leaders do. They make judgment calls. But they want to make good judgment calls, and they want to make sure that they're not being biased. They want to make sure they're asking all the right questions.How can we eliminate silos that create impermeable boundaries inside an organization?You actually need people who can really bridge gaps, and you need talented people to do it. Technically talented people who become architects if you will, of the vision of a technology and who could say, 'Aha, this insight from field A and this insight is from the very different field B. It is something really powerful that nobody's thought about.' I mean, it's intellectual arbitrage of bringing an idea from one field over to another or combining ideas. I think that's what innovation is. And going back to Schumpeter, he talked about innovation as recombinations, and it's that, I think, is huge. But to get that to happen, again, you need some mechanisms inside the organization to bring those ideas together, and you actually need people who do it. And they really do have to be intellectual like an architect who can see all the pieces.Which aspect of the corporate culture tends to be the hardest one to implement for leaders who pursue innovation?I think innovative cultures are really tough on people. They're not necessarily the most pleasant places to be. I think, as an organization and as a leader, your job is to make sure that the organization is prepared for this. It's not a walk in the park. It's more like climbing Mount Everest. The view's great when you get there, but there's hell to pay along the way.Time Code Guide:00:02:25 Why do large companies have lesser innovation capacity00:05:16 What makes Innovation unique from other businesses decisions00:07:59 Identifying the purpose of Innovation00:10:09 The Innovation Strategy00:12:06 Financial Analysis as a Framework00:16:11 Innovation leads to dematurity of industries00:24:02 Allocating resources to develop new capabilities00:25:36 The Value Chain of Innovation: From Search to Synthesis to Selection00:28:49 Active ideation00:35:07 Onboard people with intellectual arbitrage00:38:16 Constructing mechanisms for cross-connections00:40:50 Building teams outside the silos00:45:26 Strategy, System, and Corporate CulturesShow Links:Guest ProfileGary Pisano’s Profile at Harvard Business SchoolGary Pisano on InstagramGary Pisano on LinkedInGary Pisano on TwitterGary Pisano’s Official WebsiteHis WorksThe governance of innovation: Vertical integration and collaborative arrangements in the biotechnology industryCreative Construction: The DNA of Sustained InnovationProducing Prosperity: Why America Needs a ManufacturingScience Business: The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of BiotechOperations, Strategy, and Technology: Pursuing the Competitive EdgeHarvard Business Review on Managing High-tech IndustriesThe Development Factory: Unlocking the Potential of Process Innovation Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

According to today’s guest, the human mind is both genius and pathetic, brilliant and idiotic. As a species, we have learned to control fire, established democratic institutions, walked on the moon, and sequenced our genome. Our societies and technologies are extremely complex, but most of us do not really know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? In his book, The Knowledge Illusion, cognitive scientist Steven Sloman points out that the key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: our environment and the community with which we interact—without realizing it.In this episode, Steven and Greg unpack how collaborative minds enable humans to do amazing things. Join us as we learn why and how our true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using our communities.Episode Quotes:How did cognitive science change over the years, especially the theories about the brain being like a computer?So, you're absolutely right that cognitive science originated with the idea that the mind was effectively a computer. What's often called a von Neumann computer or a Turing machine type computer. One that processes information serially, one step at a time, in the way that most modern computers do. And I think that that view has largely been abandoned for multiple reasons. One of them is that it turns out that you can show that the brain doesn't operate in that serial fashion, but rather operates through massive parallel processing. The best models of memory and reasoning and perception, and problem-solving all have this character — that rather than processing information step-by-step — what people seem to do is to take huge amounts of information and figure out how they constrain the solution that we're looking for.Why do people often need stories or narratives to make sense of causal mechanisms?I mean, if you're telling a story, you're generally describing a chronology of events. But you're doing so by having a bunch of characters, and those characters have motivations, right? What are motivations? They're causes of behavior, and the characters take actions in order to change the world in some way that has consequences. And the consequence is a causal effect. So, narratives are very human, understandable ways to understand the causal processes that govern the world.How humans depend on each other to understand the environment around themWhat has really changed my world and my understanding of thought is this observation: that we don't think inside our skull, but rather we depend on other people to think, that we live in a community of knowledge. And the mind really exists in that community. So, the reason I think we experienced this knowledge illusion, this sense that we understand things better than we do, is because other people understand things. And we inherit the knowledge that's sitting in other people's heads. And as we go through life, we're constantly making use of other people's knowledge without being aware that we're doing so.Do you think companies in Silicon Valley are starting to lean towards people with generalist knowledge when hiring?One thing we discussed in the book is, some venture capital firms that aren't willing to fund ideas. But rather, they fund teams because they know that it's the quality of the team that matters. And there are people in business schools who are studying this. There's a fair amount of evidence now that if you want to predict the effectiveness of a team, you just can't do it by looking at the horsepower of the individuals, right? The IQ of the individuals is just not a good predictor of how well the team's going to do. But things, like how often they take conversational turns, turns out to be a better predictor.Time Code Guide:00:01:52 Is the intention to write a book that tackles cognitive science, anthropology and as a response to those, who are perplexed with how people think?00:03:48 The illusion of explanatory depth by Leon Rosenfeld and Frank Kyle00:05:27 Applying the illusion of explanatory depth in political contexts00:06:59 When interviewing people, did you find personality differences? Are there people more willing to acknowledge or learn the limits of their knowledge than the others?00:08:41 Correlation of preference of chocolate with instant and delayed gratification00:12:57 How do the heuristics in computer and processing unlocking new ways of doing things?00:15:03 Causal reasoning in contrast to computational view00:20:21 Why certain types of narrative archetypes do a better job of leaving an impact compared to other kinds of stories?00:22:10 Current innovation in machine learning and cognitive science00:26:29 Our very limited capacity to process information that’s out there00:29:24 Understanding the demand for specialists and the role of generalists00:35:26 Intentionality and animals working towards common goals as a unit00:37:28 Do the lack of proximity during the pandemic impair our ability to infer intentionality?00:38:34 To what extent is wisdom of the crowd susceptible to lack of sensible and critical thinking?00:41:31 Relying on experts and the possible problems of doing this00:43:30 What are the key skills that people should have, given we rely so much on the knowledge generated by others and on technology to do most of the memory storage and processing for us?00:47:11 Do you see your career as an embodiment of this jigsaw theory of knowledge?Show Links:Guest ProfileFaculty Profile at Brown UniversityResearcher Profile at Brown UniversitySpeaker Profile at the RSA OrgHis WorkArticles and Citation on Google ScholarThe Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think AloneCausal Models: How People Think About the World and Its AlternativesSimilarity and Symbols in Human Thinking (Cognition Special Issue) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Company Of Strangers by renowned economist Paul Seabright illustrates how fragile everyday life can be. In this episode, he talks about the book and describes how our ability to reason abstractly has enabled institutions such as money, markets, and banking systems to lay the foundation for the social trust we rely on daily.How did trust shift from smaller communities and family units to larger institutions like governments, states, and large companies? You won't want to miss out on Paul's insight into how disciplines like anthropology and biology explain how humans developed the ability to trust total strangers.Episode Quotes:What drew you to these other disciplines, biology, and anthropology, and see it as something adjacent to economics?I guess there are two answers to that. One is that I hung around with many biologists and anthropologists, and people in my youth. I met Richard Dawkins. I've been advised by a tutor in philosophy to read up some socio-biology, which was the stuff that was happening at the time. He put me in touch with Richard a very long time ago, when Richard had just become famous as the author of The Selfish Gene. And then I spent quite a lot of time with anthropologists. For me, it was just a natural way of thinking about the world. I almost felt that I had to put on a special uniform to be an economist. In contrast, I felt comfortable with just thinking about human beings as this kind of population that you could study, pretty much like the nature movies that I watched.On costly signaling and how brands are utilizing it to earn and build our trust as consumers:If it's somebody wearing the uniform of Amazon from which I'd buy a dishwasher, then I do it very, very quickly. If it's a uniform, but not one I've ever seen before, you know, I might stop, and I would think. And then I would sort of figure out, 'Okay, what kind of company has that uniform?' So, there is implicitly a complex model in which I have the whole human resources department of that company in mind. And thinking about what are their incentives to do background checks on people. When you have innovations in a corporate organization like Uber, people start to ask themselves these questions. I think lots of people hadn't asked themselves why it might be important that it was so difficult to get a taxi license until Uber came along. And people realized that actually, in a world in which it's much easier to become an Uber driver than to get a taxi license, there may be hidden dangers.. Uber itself started to implement new policies and to make a lot of fuss about that. I often think that when you get innovation in a corporate form that suddenly you realize, all of these influences that are going in your head under the radar of consciousness have to be brought up into consciousness and inspected.Thoughts on how women fit into a male dominated-narrative of trust in the 20th century?Now there's a whole set of questions about the 20th-century roles on, about where do women fit into the story? In the traditional conquering, killing, and slaying the dragon myth, the damsel is waiting for the hero, and she falls into his arms. She's not engaged in a similar kind of heroic myth or heroic narrative herself. And clearly, something had to give in the way firms were organized. They had to give a role to the working woman. And not just say that it's the woman's job to be there for when the man returns from his quest.How loyalty and trust is evolving in the workplace?But of course, then the other thing was when, you realize that more and more, there are demands from modern life for people to be flexible. People who are going to be Uber drivers, many of them want flexibility. But what flexibility doesn't deliver is a narrative about your place in the wider whole. You may, at some period in your young life, be thrilled to be an Uber driver because you can fit it in around looking after your kids or, doing a second job, or doing a more lucrative job, which you can't do all the time. I think Uber is great in lots of ways, but it doesn't offer people this sense of belonging that those big firms used to.Time Code:00:01:23 What drew you to biology and anthropology, disciplines that are adjacent to economics?00:04:34 What are the unique organizational, social and reproductive strategies of humans compared to gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos?00:08:14 Trusting at two levels; trusting kin and strangers00:11:48 Why is the notion of reciprocity hardwired and how did this become mutation-resistant?00:18:19 Violence inflicted between people because of fears00:20:36 How do we take face-to-face signaling models and turn them into these larger institutional signals00:23:52 How did trust shift from smaller communities and family units to larger institutions like governments, states, and large companies00:32:27 Can we still rely on churches for sense of community and belongingness?00:40:02 Sexual and gender relations of humans in comparison to other animals00:46:41 Signaling in human males and females00:49:49 Treating colleagues in a gender-neutral way00:52:54 The importance of narratives in building trust00:56:44 How strong and weak among women in marketplaces affect their careers01:00:16 How can educational institutions encourage more exposure to thoughts outside of our main discipline?Show Links:Guest ProfileProfile at Toulouse School of EconomicsProfile at VOX EUHis WorkOfficial WebsitePaul Seabright on Google ScholarThe War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the PresentThe Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.