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7 Steps to Bulletproof Problem Solving

Leading Blog

Step Two: Disaggregate the Issues. How do you disaggregate the issues and develop hypotheses to be explored? T HE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM’S Future of Jobs Report lists complex problem-solving as the number one skill for jobs in 2020. Organizations are looking for people that can define problems and form solid creative responses. Like leaders themselves, good problem solvers are made, not born. Yet these skills are rarely taught. That’s where Bulletproof Problem Solving comes in.

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7 Steps to Problem Solving

Skip Prichard

2: Disaggregate. Yes, we find the most common mistakes in complex problem solving are weak problem statements, poor problem disaggregation, and insufficient attention to good team norms. When teams fail to disaggregate problems well – we use logic trees and usually try several versions – they often fall prey to asserting answers from past models rather than really doing the work. Bulletproof Problem Solving. Complex problem solving is the core skill for 21st century teams.

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Strategy as a Problem Solving Process

Strategy Driven

How you disaggregate or cleave a problem has a big impact on the insight you get into a problem. “The old paradigm of strategy departments and planning cycles has been overthrown by agile and rapid team-based problem solving, providing better solutions and better organization alignment to implement.” These comments by Mehrdad Baghai, strategist and author, commend our book Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill that Changes Everything.

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How Demand Forecasting Can Boost Business Efficiency

Strategy Driven

Although there are many ways to do demand forecasting right, these key tips can help a business get more out of their investment in the practice: Remember that demand is not monolithic and try implementing a disaggregated model. The art of predicting the future is nearly as old as civilization itself.

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Making Diversity Central to Success: Q&A With Chevron’s Chief Diversity Officer

HR Digest

Lee Jourdan: One thing we’re doing, and it’s a bit subtle, is that we’re disaggregating the data we provide in our Corporate Responsibility report, so we can gauge how we’re progressing. Diversity is an overused word, but at Chevron it’s a perfect description of its corporate culture. How did it happen? The company’s 2018 Corporate Responsibility Report highlights how diversity and inclusion (D&I) feature so centrally in the company’s success story.

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As Work Changes, Leadership Development Has to Keep Up

Harvard Business Review

Work is being disaggregated into tasks that can be dispersed inside and outside of the organization — the “uberization” of work. IBM has been building a talent system that both aligns with and accelerates this phenomenon of the external disaggregation of work. As work itself is changing, some of the basic tenets of leadership development are being challenged.

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A Brief History of Blockchain

Harvard Business Review

When transaction costs drop past invisible thresholds, there will be sudden, dramatic, hard-to-predict aggregations and disaggregations of existing business models. Many of the technologies we now take for granted were quiet revolutions in their time. Just think about how much smartphones have changed the way we live and work. It used to be that when people were out of the office, they were gone, because a telephone was tied to a place, not to a person.

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Why I Tell My MBA Students to Stop Looking for a Job and Join the Gig Economy

Harvard Business Review

Instead of creating jobs, companies are increasingly disaggregating work from a job. When the students in the MBA course I teach on the gig economy ask me for the best thing they can do to prepare for their future careers, I tell them: “Stop looking for a job.” ” This may sound like odd advice to give MBA students.

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3 Ways to Get More Out of Your Web Analytics

Harvard Business Review

Instead of just celebrating, or making an investment across the board to bring in even more traffic, think about how you can disaggregate your data so you can better understand cause and effect in this situation. Looking at your numbers carefully and digging into disaggregated data allows you to take much more educated and focused next steps. Does this sound familiar?

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The Founder's Dilemma: To Sell or Not to Sell?

Harvard Business Review

It is hard to disaggregate the reasons, but doing so alongside answering each of these questions will help bring clarity to this crossroads. We recently did an informal survey of some of our venture capital colleagues. We asked, "What crossroads decisions are most common and challenging for entrepreneurs in the course of the business-building journey?". The most common responses to this open-ended question were whether to take an investment and whether to sell the company.

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Approximately Correct Is Better than Precisely Incorrect

Harvard Business Review

What they should be doing is disaggregating the drivers of these results, and focusing instead on who, or what, comprises those averages. There's no such thing as an average customer. A Harvard Business School marketing professor named John Deighton once came up with a vivid analogy to illustrate this and show why a business should sub-segment its customer base.

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The 3 Ways Work Can Be Automated

Harvard Business Review

The ability of such technology to enable traditional jobs to be disaggregated and to supplement or replace routine activities presents opportunities in efficiency, effectiveness, and impact. We are at an interesting tipping point regarding how and where work gets done. As business leaders and managers, we have become increasingly capable of engaging a workforce that is some combination of virtual and on site, part time and full time, permanent and contingent.

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From Zipcar to the Sharing Economy

Harvard Business Review

They enable the disaggregation of physical assets in space and in time, creating digital platforms that make these disaggregated components — a few days in an apartment, an hour using a Roomba, a seat in your drive from Berlin to Hamburg — amenable to pricing, matching, and exchange.

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Traditional Strategy Is Dead. Welcome to the #SocialEra

Harvard Business Review

So before we can explore the Social Era, we need to disaggregate two words — social is not always attached to the word media. When I say, "Social is and can be more than media," people resist. It's as if the two words (social and media) are now permanently fused together. But they shouldn't be. The fact that they are joined at the hip in so many people's minds means that marketing agencies are thriving — but that the rest of our organizations are not.

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How To Really Measure a Company's Innovation Prowess

Harvard Business Review

So it began disaggregating return on equity into three components. Who is the world's most innovative company? The editors of Fast Company say Nike. Last year , number crunchers at Forbes found that Salesforce.com is the company with the highest "Innovation Premium" baked into its stock price. MIT Technology Review didn't pick a winner, but on its recent list of top 50 "disruptors," the magazine mixed stalwarts such as General Electric and IBM with up-and-comers, Square and Coursera.

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Why Your Salespeople Are Pushovers

Harvard Business Review

Without clear guidance, most reps simply slip into "order taker" mode, closing small, disaggregated, price-driven deals at a discount all in the name of "giving customers what they want.". This blog, the third in a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line. Its conclusions are based on data from a global study of more than 6,000 sales reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries.

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The World Needs a DARPA-Style Project to Prevent Pandemics

Harvard Business Review

And it’s not as effective as it could be, because the money is allocated in a disaggregated manner. When the Blizzard of ’78 hit the Northeast, it caught the region by surprise. Some meteorologists had predicted only a minor snowstorm, and forecasts were still unreliable enough that many people simply went about their regular business.

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The Best Investment You'll Ever Make

Harvard Business Review

If the star quality of our employees isn't immediately apparent, disaggregate their package into component skills until you find the disruptive skill that can make them a star performer, and deploy him/her accordingly. With nervous, but mostly eager, anticipation I walked up to the C-suite floor to meet with a senior manager at Merrill Lynch. When I'd initially met him two years earlier, he'd seemed quite supportive of my career as a sell-side analyst.

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Who Wins in the Gig Economy, and Who Loses

Harvard Business Review

Work is being disaggregated from jobs and reorganized into a variety of alternative arrangements, such as consulting projects, freelance assignments, and contract opportunities. The winners and losers in the U.S. economy have traditionally been easy to identify. If you had a full-time job, you won. A full-time job provided the steady income needed to support our traditional version of the American Dream: the highly leveraged, high-fixed-cost house; the cars; the latest consumer goods.

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Why AOL Should Double Down on Patch

Harvard Business Review

The startup is trying to build a platform that could replace a disaggregated network of local news sources. Disclosure: The author is a shareholder in AOL. It's been funny watching the financial press and the tech community eviscerate AOL's Patch.com since last week's disappointing earnings call. The irony is that Patch is AOL's last, best chance to build a growth engine. Investors shouldn't be calling for AOL to back off the business.

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Design Your Own Profession

Harvard Business Review

A disaggregated laptop that is lighter and more versatile, since I can use the screen by itself as an e-reader and the keyboard with other devices. The world is coming apart in many interesting ways. I recently bought an iPad. After using it for a few days I bought a wireless keyboard. A week later I bought a case that puts the iPad in one half and the keyboard in the other. Presto!

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5 Questions That Will Help You Stay Ahead of Your Disruptors

Harvard Business Review

Unsurprisingly, the group’s targeted segmentation and disaggregation efforts ended up dramatically improving response and resolution times for typical customers. Aggravated and depressed by the decline of their core memory business in the 1980s, Intel’s top management struggled for strategic clarity.

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What a Changing UK Can Learn from Multinationals

Harvard Business Review

Previously, there has been a presumption that there was no need for a disaggregation of the interests of the UK as a whole and England, on the grounds that it contains 85% of the UK population. Following Scotland’s rejection of independence in the September 18 referendum, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, has enlarged the scope of Britain’s constitutional debate.

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The Fight Over Tesla Shows How Little Value Dealerships Add

Harvard Business Review

In disaggregated markets with many sellers and buyers and where search costs are high, intermediaries provide considerable value. Last week New Jersey started enforcing a ban on direct sales by Tesla Motors of its path-breaking model S. Tesla’s direct sales have also run into hot water in a number of other states: Ohio lawmakers are debating a ban on Tesla’s direct sales and Texas, Arizona, and Virginia are also opposed.

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Why You Should Let a 5-Year Old Design Your Next Product

Harvard Business Review

Quirky has created an innovation engine more suited for the Social Era — in which work and jobs are no longer the same thing, and collaboration happens outside of organizations as much as within it — in three ways: It disaggregates the process of innovation from the innovator''s work itself. All his life, he hated brushing his teeth. Getting toothpaste onto a toothbrush can be messy if your fine motor skills are still developing.

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A Business Model for Bangladesh

Harvard Business Review

But producers in many of the newer entrants (such as Bangladesh) tend to be small and highly disaggregated. The death of over 800 people in the collapse of Rana Plaza , a building with garment factories in Bangladesh, spurred widespread outrage over working conditions in offshore factories. In the search for blame, many commentators point to the absence of building codes, lack of workplace safety rules, and the greed of US corporations.

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How To Really Measure a Company's Innovation Prowess

Harvard Business Review

So it began disaggregating return on equity into three components. Who is the world's most innovative company? The editors of Fast Company say Nike. Last year , number crunchers at Forbes found that Salesforce.com is the company with the highest "Innovation Premium" baked into its stock price. MIT Technology Review didn't pick a winner, but on its recent list of top 50 "disruptors," the magazine mixed stalwarts such as General Electric and IBM with up-and-comers, Square and Coursera.

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The Truth About How Uber’s App Manages Drivers

Harvard Business Review

The company manages a large, disaggregated workforce of “driver-partners” that deliver a relatively standardized experience to passengers, while simultaneously promoting drivers as independent entrepreneurs whose work is characterized by freedom, flexibility, and independence. Since Uber was founded, in 2009, its workforce has continued to grow exponentially: 400,000 drivers are considered “ active ” on the Uber platform today, and 1.1

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The Human Element in Digital Prototyping

Harvard Business Review

Disaggregate the drivers. Given that few products and services these days exist without a digital component of some sort, companies are increasingly being required to do live prototyping of a digital solution. There’s a common perception that product development for digital solutions is easier than it is for physical ones. While this can be true, we’ve seen many digital solutions fail because the product development process is too far removed from the user and lacks a human touch.