Category: Generative Orgs
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Generous Products: How Products Do What They Do, as a form of Generosity
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 generous.…
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How Do We Know If Practices are Actually Generative?
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– if…
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Generative Business Practice: Questions from Harvard’s Digital Initiative
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 for…
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Two Tweaks for Generative Seminar Practices: Notes from Harvard Business School Digital Initiative
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 a…
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From Generativity to Generosity: What’s at the core of these new business practices?
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 nothing…
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Only Transparent AND Open Practices Generate Opportunity For Your Network
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 the…
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Why Be Disruptive, When You Can Be Generative? Friday Afternoon with MakeLoveNotPorn
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 piles…
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Acknowledge, Affirm, and Amplify Good Business Practices: A Simple Generative Tip
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 platform…