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3 weeks ago | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
Creating value for others has long been a staple of morality, Who has not heard, “Love your neighbor as yourself"? Today, paradoxically, creating value for others has become the key to business success. The Mirage Of Scientific Management This is quite recent. For more than a century, businesses often lost sight of the importance of creating value for others.
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1 month ago | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
in a crisis, the needs of customers don’t go away. If you can imagine new answers to meet those needs, you may make major gains.
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1 month ago | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
When everything is in chaos, think clearly; fix the things that need fixing anyway; grab obvious opportunities; but also think entrepreneurially to make major gains.
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1 month ago | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
With the launch over recent weeks of a global trade war by the United States against all the major economies of the world, including its closest trading partners, individual firms face an exponentially more uncertain context. Firms practicing traditional management practices, which even before the global trade war were already falling behind, are likely to encounter even bigger difficulty. The global trade war is a battle of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs.
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2 months ago | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
As the American public struggles to understand ongoing reorganizations, such as the huge downsizing of the entire U.S. federal government and the much smaller reorganization of the MSNBC television network), it can be useful to recall why reorganizations occur, and why they are often traumatic.
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2 months ago | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
In January 2025, the International Organization for Standardization(ISO) released ISO 56000:2025-01 which “defines terms for and establishes the fundamental concepts of innovation management.” The document, which is the product of many authors and endorsed by the standardization bodies in scores of countries, aspires to describe the concept for innovation in millions of organizations, public and private, around the world.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
On December 19, 1154, in Westminster Abbey in England, Henry FitzEmpress, an educated 21-year old, became the first man to dare to crown himself “King of England”. His aspiration was to create a nation. His problem? The country was in chaos. After a disastrous civil war, robbery was rampant. After the crusades, squatters occupied vacant castles. No one knew who owned what.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
Most firms today are excited if they manage to launch a single successful innovation in the rapidly changing marketplace. They find it difficult to imagine, let alone implement, major innovations happening over and over again on a sustained basis. Continuous Sustained InnovationIn my last three articles, I delineated what’s involved in achieving continuous and sustained innovation. It means generating a fundamentally different way of thinking, working, and being throughout the entire firm.
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Dec 29, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
In the summer of 2002, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on vacation. His firm had survived the dot-com crash of 2000, with an obsessional focus on customer value. Amazon had grown very fast. Yet Bezos felt frustrated. Again and again, Bezos had vowed, despite his dictatorial way of speaking, to run Amazon with an emphasis on decentralization and independent decision-making, rather than as a top-down hierarchy. By 2002, he could see that, despite speaking louder and louder, decentralization wasn’t working.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
forbes.com | Steve Denning
My article “How Networks Of Competence Are Crushing Hierarchies Of Authority” sparked lively conversations. Some readers were surprised at the headline. They should not have been. It is hardly surprising that, in a knowledge economy, decisions based on competence outperform decisions based on positional title.
