With almost 60% of employees saying they are very or extremely interested in participating in upskilling programs per a joint Gallup-Amazon survey, chances are your employees are interested too. So why are 57% of workers taking their education into their own hands? Most corporate learning programs aren’t cutting it because they lack the necessary element of creativity. When I was brought on as Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney 10 years ago, I was asked to embed a culture of innovation and creativity into the company’s DNA. The company had recently bought Marv ..read more

When you go to your favorite restaurant, do you read the menu, listen to the specials and still order the same thing? Do you sleep on the same side of the bed each night, even when you’re staying in a hotel room? Have you ever commuted home, pulled up to your house and wondered, “How did I get here?” Yes? You’re not alone. This happens because, as you encounter the same stimulus day in and day out, your brain shuts down, not waking up until you reach your destination. We’re all prone to developing habits. While this is normal, the tendency to perform the same behaviors can limit our creative t ..read more

Instead of assuming that you’ll just never be able to understand the latent needs and insights of your team, think again. Artificial intelligence (AI) may be able to do many things, but one thing’s clear: You won’t find empathy in any AI tools. It might be able to recognize patterns and make predictions, but AI can’t reflect on subjective emotional responses. It can’t blend humanity into the mix. (This isn’t just my opinion; a peer who’s heading up Google’s DeepMind project agrees that empathy is the last human trait that can be programmed.) However, to underscore the importance of empathy, le ..read more

Generation Z may not want to work for you. Try not to take it personally. Gen Z may not want to work for anyone. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to work. They’re just off starting their own businesses. According to LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence survey, which surveyed 21,637 randomly chosen LinkedIn members between December 4, 2021 and January 28, 2022, “25% of Gen Z respondents say they hope or plan to leave their current employers within the next six months.”  For older generations, these career choices may be hard to understand. We were told that the most proven path t ..read more

Everyone’s worried about AI’s effect on our performance. Will it take away our ability to create? Or will it simply create for us while we get lazy? This is unlikely. Although AI is a transformative innovation, it’s far from capable of possessing the human traits that lead to pure creative thought. On the contrary, I believe it’s removing one of the biggest barriers to tapping into our imagination: stuff. Not fun stuff. Work stuff—mundane tasks like weekly reports, safety briefings and compliance training. Ask anyone why they can’t create, and they’ll probably say it’s because of all the borin ..read more

Innovation often seems constrained by not enough time and resources — but really, it’s a lack of playfulness that prevents our best ideas from emerging. Entrepreneurs often assume that the biggest barrier to developing great ideas is a shortage of time or resources — but that’s not true. It’s the lack of playfulness in their innovation processes. According to recent reporting by Fundera, more than 70% of business owners work more than 40 hours per week, and almost 20% work more than 60 hours per week. Yet, they still lack creative solutions to their problems. As someone who ..read more

It may take a few decades to affect everyone, but the future is a mixed-reality world, and virtual reality is about to get a lot more real. After years of rumors about if, when, and how Apple would enter the AR/VR space, the company finally unveiled its first “mixed reality” device at its 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference. But even with all the anticipation, the announcement received as much skepticism as it did praise. But does the lack of fanfare mean the device is destined to fail? Absolutely not. In fact, I’d argue with enough time, it will become one of th ..read more

You might feel like it’s odd to bring the world of gaming into your company. However, gamification is clearly a winning solution if you want to keep engagement, performance, innovation and development high. The standard thought process says that working can’t be all fun and games. Well, maybe it should be. A surprisingly high number of adults see online games not as “kids’ stuff” but as an acceptable pursuit. According to 2022 research by the Entertainment Software Association, approximately two-thirds of Americans game. Of those two-thirds, 65% are 18 or older. In other words, your worke ..read more

Well before ChatGPT gained widespread recognition and became a well-known entity, I shared the stage with Nicholas Thompson, then editor-in-chief of Wired. During his presentation, Thompson stated that he believes AI will replace 20% of all occupations by 2030. At the time, this declaration seemed outlandish. How could a robot replace 1 in 5 workers? But today, this outcome is far from fiction. Just look at IBM, which recently announced that it expects 30% of its noncustomer-facing workforce to be displaced by AI over the next five years. Don’t Fear AI T ..read more

In January, new reports on Apple’s long-awaited augmented reality/virtual reality headset were released. And if what’s in these reports is even partially true, Apple is poised to give the world one of the most jaw-dropping, powerful pieces of technology in history (again) — which is why it was a bit surprising that this news didn’t make more of a splash. This is the same company that has fans enter lotteries for tickets to corporate keynote addresses! Yet, outside of the usual tech blogs and a few newspaper columns, the future of Apple’s AR/VR device went largely ..read more