Seth Kahan

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,

Innovation is a nice-to-have when things are going well. But in a turbulent environment it is a necessity. Strong leaders focus always on the three core activities of business, with unrelenting clarity of purpose. This becomes imperative when times are most challenging. The three activities are: 1.    Operations – no matter what happens, the doors

Last week Good360 released the paper, The Business Case for Product Philanthropy. It provides the bottom line numbers that show donation is a better financial choice than either liquidation or landfill when it comes to unloading product that cannot be moved. The paper provides two worksheets you can put to use immediately, (1) Return On

Business innovation is about creating new methods of operation, products, and services that win in the marketplace. Innovation is a lot like life itself. Circumstances are always changing. We have to shift and correct our strategy to adjust to new developments. When we are successful the effort we put in results in improving our situation.

Innovation across the planet started in slow waves that could be measured in millennia, spans of a thousand years. These waves have been speeding up. Take a look at this chart I made of some of civilization’s most far-reaching innovations: 200,000 – 150,000 BC Hunting & Gathering 10,000 – 5,000 BC Agriculture 1400 – 1700

In 2011 the monument to Martin Luther King, Jr, on the mall in Washington, DC, was completed. His presence has now been added for posterity along with Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt, and others. I am often downtown. This last week I took the opportunity to visit this monument along with Albert Einstein’s and be