One of the things I’ve learned over the years is just how hard it is to get things right. As a CEO just about every decision I made was one that couldn’t have been made lower down. They were the tough calls with no easy answers. As an author, I spent countless hours fact checking along with my publisher. We corrected hundreds of errors.

Yet read through the business press and you’ll find no shortage of simple rules and slogans that supposedly unlock success. We’re told to “innovate or die,” to fight a “war for talent” and to “find our…

Never has the need for transformation been so dire or so clear. Still, that’s no guarantee that we will muster the wisdom to make the changes we need to. After all, President Bush warned us about the risks of a global pandemic way back in 2005 and, in the end, we were left wholly vulnerable and exposed.

It’s not like pandemics are the only thing to worry about either. A 2018 climate assessment warns of major economic impacts unless we make some serious shifts. Public debt, already high before the current crisis, is now exploding upwards. Our electricity grid is…

Scientists studying data from Mars recently found that the red planet may have oceans worth of water embedded in its crust in addition to the ice caps at its poles. The finding is significant because, if we are ever to build a colony there, we will need access to water to sustain life and, eventually, to terraform the planet.

While it’s become fashionable for people to lament short-term thinking and “quarterly capitalism,” it’s worth noting that there are a lot of people working on — and a not insignificant amount of money invested in — colonizing another world. …

Every new era seems to start with turmoil. World War I gave way to the “Roaring 20s” and a 50-year boom in productivity. However, the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of a second World War and the post-war era. Vietnam and the rise of the Baby Boomers unlocked a cultural revolution that created new freedoms for women and people of color.

Our current era started with the 80s, the rise of Ronald Reagan and a new confidence in the power of markets. …

Anybody who has waited for a traffic light to change, in the middle of the night at an empty intersection, knows the urge to rebel. There is always a tension between order and freedom. While we intuitively understand the need for order to constrain others, we yearn for the freedom to do what we want and to seek out a vision and sense of meaning in our lives.

Yet as we have seen over the past decade, attempts to overturn the existing order usually fail. The Tea Party erupted in 2009, but had mostly sputtered out by 2014. #Occupy protests…

When Barack Obama appointed Aneesh Chopra as the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States he was sending a clear message: No longer a quirky trend, digital technology would become central to managing the country. He was, in effect, laying down a marker for how important information technology had become.

More recently, Joe Biden sent a similarly important message when he announced that not only would he be nominating Eric Lander, a mathematician turned geneticist, as director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but that he would be elevating the position to a cabinet-level appointment.

The simple…

In 1983, McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips published a paper in the journal, Human Resource Management, that described an “adoption penalty” for firms that didn’t adapt to changes in the marketplace quickly enough. His ideas became McKinsey’s first change management model that it sold to clients.

But consider that research shows in 1975, during the period Phillips studied, 83% of the average US corporation’s assets were tangible assets, such as plant, machinery and buildings, while by 2015, 84% of corporate assets were intangible, such as licenses, patents and research. Clearly, that changes how we need to approach transformation.

When your assets…

In the regulatory filing for Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Mark Zuckerberg included a letter outlining his management philosophy. Entitled, The Hacker Way, it encapsulated much of the zeitgeist. “We have a saying,” he wrote. “‘Move fast and break things.’ The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.”

At around the same time, Katalin Karikó was quietly plodding away in her lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She had been working on an idea since the early 1990s and it hadn’t amounted to much so far, but was finally beginning to attract some interest. …