Posts tagged with "asymmetric-payoff"

Cost of Delay is a very different animal to many of the concepts that people try to shoe-horn it into. Sometimes those are useful analogies. Other times, it’s not helpful, and leads to confusion

There’s been quite a lot of kerfuffle in New Zealand about the fact that Peter Thiel has been granted Citizenship. Given his background in PayPal, Facebook and other startups, I don’t thin

From this article by Cath Everett about some of the rather desperate tactics some companies in Silicon Valley are experimenting with to get more out of their people: “As to how to go about creat

From Amazon’s “2015 Letter to Shareholders“: To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations em

I recently gave a talk at a conference about “Tilting the playing field in product development”. I went through a number of “False Friends” – things that seem like a good

Q: What are the biggest obstacles organisations face when it comes to innovation? Three things: culture, culture and culture. This manifests in different ways in different organisations but at its roo

What “job” do customers hire your product or service to do? A lot of the time, customers aren’t actually buying what you think they are. Let’s take Flappy Bird as an example. O

Developing new and improved products and services is an interesting problem space. Part of what makes it interesting is the presence of risks, uncertainties, and the possibility of Black Swan events.

From a BBC interview with Astro Teller, “Capitain of Moonshots” at Google[x]: You must reward people for failing, he says. If not, they won’t take risks and make breakthroughs. If yo

The desire to make software development “cheaper” is something I hear a lot. It’s also usually a red herring. The irrelevance of “cheaper” becomes apparent when you start

One of the components to consider when trying to understand Cost of Delay is the value of Information Discovery. This can take on two basic forms: knowing which paths will likely lead to success, and;

One of the most painful parts of product development is the estimating part. Dan Milstein talks (at length) about the complexity of this in his post about why we all suck at making estimates. When you

The Cost of Delay for organisations that are not market leaders is very high. Whilst companies employing a “Fast Follower” strategy don’t have to invest as much time to discover what

Simon Schama’s “A history of Britain” is deliberately titled “A history” rather than “The history” for the simple reason that there are many versions of Brita

Happy 20th Birthday, SMS. Wow, haven’t you grown?!  Sure, you’re still only 160 characters long, but none of us would have guessed 20 years ago how much a part of our lives you would become