Pantea Lotfian PhD, Camrosh Ltd.

Donald Rumsfeld, when serving as secretary of defence under G.W. Bush , famously said:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know”.

In the documentary by Eroll Morris, 2013, titled the “Unknown Known”, about Donald Rumsfeld and his years in office, there is another part to this famous quote, that Rumsfeld added when interviewed during the making of the documentary. This may be the result of the years of contemplation and hindsight. He adds, when discussing his own quote that there are also:

“…Unknown Knowns, that is to say things that you think you know, that turn out you did not”. [Read more…]

Benchmarking is the process of studying in detail and identifying the best practices and processes of the top company in the industry and use it as model/benchmark. It is hoped that the learnings from the process will enable the benchmarker to create effective improvements resulting in increased competitiveness. The process of benchmarking is a snapshot in time of a company’s success, that the benchmarker hopes to imitate.

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A lot of ink is spilled on the importance of innovation, and much is said about how to innovate, overcome barriers to innovation, transform the organizational culture for innovation etc. Industry leaders are constantly thinking of what is next in their industry and what can they bring next to the market to stay ahead, remain relevant, or just survive. In this flurry of activity they often forget to ask why they innovate.

The question “why do we innovate?” may come across almost obnoxious or irrelevant at first. As we take it for granted that innovation is the lifeblood of growth and the mantra is “innovate or die”, there should be no doubt for anyone why to Innovate. [Read more…]

Innovation is the buzzword everywhere in the media, in daily conversations and at work it is repeated so often that it has lost its ability to excite. In business circles some people refrain from using it as it has become a cliché and words such as genesis are favoured! However, it does not matter what you may call it, the essence of the thing remains very much the same, namely from whatever there is, the process of innovation or genesis creates something new, fascinating, and most importantly it disrupts the status quo. [Read more…]

Last week I participated in a mini workshop on building high performance teams, ran by “realizing ambition” (http://www.realisingambition.com) in Cambridge. It was a fun morning leading to some valuable insights.

We were divided into four teams with different numbers of team members, given a couple of tennis balls, an office bin and four rules of the game. We played four rounds. You are right in guessing that the first lesson learned was that one has to be a rule breaker and better start breaking them rather sooner than later. However, the whole thing was subtler than that. Observing the team dynamics and how we evolved was a delight. [Read more…]