Generative Orgs

Generous Products: How Products Do What They Do, as a form of Generosity

January 7, 2016

Tweet I’m “working out loud in public” with a rangy, rambling first draft. What I’m working to understand, with this draft, is how to explain ‘generous products’, and how to link ideas about generous products to current conversations about product design. This is a small piece of the puzzle, focused on how products themselves might be […]

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How Do We Know If Practices are Actually Generative?

December 3, 2014

Tweet Cause and effect. Intent and impact. There’s a vast gulf of questionable causality captured by those ‘and’s. How do we know if generative practices have generative impact? It didn’t surprise me when this question came up at the HBS Digital Initiative seminar, since it’s been haunting me for some time. The question haunts me because– […]

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Generative Business Practice: Questions from Harvard’s Digital Initiative

November 25, 2014

Tweet I got lots of feedback from the folks who participated in the HBS Digital Initiative seminar where I presented some big picture ideas about generative practices.   As promised, I’m summarizing what they shared with me on the index cards we used to gather up ideas. While I was so. glad. that I asked […]

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Two Tweaks for Generative Seminar Practices: Notes from Harvard Business School Digital Initiative

November 19, 2014

Tweet Two weeks ago I traveled up to Cambridge to talk about Generative Business Practices with the folks of Harvard Business School’s Digital Initiative. So much happened, and so many ideas were shared, that I can’t summarize them in one blog post — not even a super-long one. Instead, I’m going to take pieces at […]

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From Generativity to Generosity: What’s at the core of these new business practices?

October 2, 2014

Tweet I’m experimenting with shifting from generativity to generosity to describe what’s unique about the business processes I’ve been studying, trying to distill these ideas into a form that’s simple and easy to convey. Can the term generosity carry these ideas well? At the very core of generativity is the concept of generosity. It’s not for […]

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Growth Hacking To Scale Generosity

August 14, 2014

Tweet When a startup like Harrys.com launches with an outreach campaign that that gets 85K potential customers to share their email address, people are impressed. When the cofounder of that company writes a 3,700 word explanation of what they did to achieve those results, and then posts it on one of America’s most popular business blogs […]

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Only Transparent AND Open Practices Generate Opportunity For Your Network

June 24, 2014

Tweet Businesses need to be both transparent and open to create opportunities for themselves and their entire network.   Yet even though we know that  qualities like “open” and “transparent” are preconditions for innovation, we often aren’t clear about what these terms actually mean. Sometimes people even use the terms interchangeably, as though what’s transparent and what’s open are […]

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Why Be Disruptive, When You Can Be Generative? Friday Afternoon with MakeLoveNotPorn

May 23, 2014

Tweet Some businesses aim to make money. Some businesses aim to disrupt their industries. The very best businesses aim even higher — to generate new opportunity for each and every stakeholder. It was Friday afternoon clean-up-my-office time. That ‘end of the year, has it come down to this?’-moment of reckoning. Maybe while I sort out piles and […]

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Acknowledge, Affirm, and Amplify Good Business Practices: A Simple Generative Tip

May 22, 2014

Tweet What’s the absolutely easiest way to contribute ideas to a community while boosting someone else’s business at the same time? Use your platform to Acknowledge, Affirm, and Amplify the work of companies and individuals that you value. You’d be surprised to realize just how often you’ll find yourself in a position to use your […]

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Pattern Language for Generative Interactions: 3 Approaches to Learn

May 9, 2014

Tweet Designers use Pattern Language — a lexicon and grammar that communicate the details of how and why a design is terrific — to share expertise and promote good design. We need a pattern language for business-to-business relationships. We need to be able to define, design and simply talk about business relationships that are generative. “Good design” […]

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