A recent article from the World Economic Forum (the Davos folks) examined an OECD study of how well countries are preparing students for the workforce. An interesting result is that Singapore tops the list when it comes to collaborative problem solving skills among 15-year olds, a key metric in the study. What does this mean? […]

Firms in Asia face a challenge their Western counterparts might not. I was giving a talk earlier this year when the subject of innovation came up. An employee from an engineering firm (in this case, a Western multinational’s operation in China) raised his hand and said, “In China, we were raised not to question things, […]

Fans of the Fox TV show Arrested Development — cancelled back in 2006 — were happy to see it reappear with a new season on Netflix in 2013. Though other cancelled shows have returned to television in the last few years (Family Guy and Futurama come to mind), Arrested Development returned online. That may set […]

Creativity and bureaucracy may seem like two completely different animals but, like monkeys and pandas, they can learn to coexist (Do monkeys and pandas coexist? Even if they don’t, it makes for a nice mental picture). You expect your employees to do the new things: create new content, design new graphics, imagine new products, come […]

Earlier this summer the Designing Leaders team had a chance to visit a major creative technology firm in Shenzhen, China. Being such a large company you might expect them to have a pretty large, and they did. In fact, they had 8 of them. As we drove from the building for our meeting to the […]