Seth Kahan

One way to ensure that your enterprise is nimble and capable of reacting effectively is to intentionally develop the skills to respond quickly to customer need. Here are three activities that will raise the bar on your ability deliver with speed: 1.    Own the speed in your industry. Create the criteria for measuring speed that […]

In ordinary parlance, a dojo is a place where martial artists convene to work out, train, and hold contests. But, literally translated it is Japanese for the location of the way. The way is more than the way of the martial artist, more than the way of judo, karate, tai kwan do, or whatever system

The Holy Grail is a sacred object in religion and literature. It derives its power direct from the divine. In some traditions it is said to be the cup Christ drank from during the last supper. However you interpret it, it is clear that it represents a lost connection to the divine. It is a

Because there are always at least two parties involved, value always has at least two faces, one for each. The fact is that usually there are more than two. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an ecology to cultivate value. Every participant – including partners, suppliers, allies, beneficiaries, and

I once attended a conference that included about 300 participants. Our emcee took us into the lobby and had us stand in a huge arc holding hands. She asked us to send a hand-squeeze from one end of the arc to the other. That is, the person on the far left was to squeeze the

I meet people all the time who tell me nothing is original. They say, there is nothing new to write, nothing new to say, nothing new to invent. Don’t believe them. They’re wrong. Oh, I suppose if you step back far enough every story can he reduced to eleven plots, or every relationship can be

If business is a web of interrelated activities, value is at the center. Value is what customers pay for, members show up for, and investors write checks for. Value drives the enterprise. When it’s present, all the other pieces of the puzzle form a clear picture. When it’s missing, everything falls apart. Traditionally value has

Rasmus Nyerup was designing a museum and at the same time admitting ignorance. It was not just his lack of knowledge he was lamenting, but everyone’s. The year was just 1806. He was the director of an organization that would become the National Museum of Denmark. He wrote in his book, Review of the Country’s

Innovation is the ongoing, intentional exploitation of circumstance to generate more and greater value. Innovation is intentional. What I am talking about here is not an accident. It is sought after. Sure there are the great stories of how mistakes turned into great profits, like when Will Kellogg took some stale wheat in 1894 and

Frederick Jackson Turner addressed the American Historical Association at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893 at the age of 31 with a paper that changed forever the way the world thinks of Americans while at the same time bringing the French word frontier into English parlance. Since that time he has been rebutted and debated,