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4 Generations in the Same Office - Dealing with Differences Simultaneously between Baby Boomers and Generation XYZ

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4 Generations in the Same Office - Dealing with Differences Simultaneously between Baby Boomers and Generation XYZ

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The new way of leadership needs to know how to deal with the differences between generations in their teams and in the interface areas within the corporation, in order to leverage the advantages of each generation, exploring collaboration and learning between generations.

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The Brain that Learns and Self-Develops through Applied Neuroscience to Business

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The Brain that Learns and Self-Develops through Applied Neuroscience to Business

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Recent discoveries in neuroplasticity applied to leadership teach how leaders can "hack" neuronal and emotional processes to create business cultures that thrive on change and constant learning. A fascinating journey into the human brain and its incredible influence on collective cooperation.

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Thinking outside the box is easy to say, but to do it, one must look at the causes and effects of problems. We will start this cycle here, exercising systemic vision to break the paradox of creative limitation. The idea is to provide exercises for emerging leaders that help unlock innovative solutions using existing resources, without the need for additional investments.

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Virtualized Environments as Platforms for New Businesses

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Virtualized Environments as Platforms for New Businesses

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The billion-dollar movement in metaverses and gaming platforms is currently under construction. Companies are testing how services should absorb forms of entertainment to engage consumers. Together, we'll consider how slices of the next generations will migrate to virtual environments and their impacts on physical businesses.

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Challenges and Engagement Hypotheses in Hybrid Work Formats

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Challenges and Engagement Hypotheses in Hybrid Work Formats

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Engaging and motivating teams, whether near or far, is perhaps one of the greatest challenges of management today. How can hybrid work keep teams aligned and energized? What collaboration models maximize efficiency and create innovative reward systems that engage and motivate teams? We will discuss the possibilities.

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Smart Cities, Emerging Opportunities for TKE

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Smart Cities, Emerging Opportunities for TKE

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The Internet of Things infrastructure for prediction and greater flow control is an extremely current trend that can significantly impact the TKE business. Products like service platforms to create better experiences in cases that show the paths to practical applications for public and private clients.

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Cultural differences can be a problem—or a solution. Through strategies to view different cultures as an asset, we encourage leaders to see themselves as architects of bridges, facilitating mutual understanding and respect. Cases and exercises that prove that the sum of different repertoires is fundamental for TKE today.

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Deciphering Data to Generate Business Value

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Deciphering Data to Generate Business Value

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Everyone talks about data being the new oil and the focus of corporations. But what does that really mean? How do innovative minds visualize their data? How and what should one learn to have a culture of agile, analytical decision-making that is data-oriented? With practical cases, we will see how leaders who do this handle the topic.

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[About Speaker] - Gabriela Aires - Product @ Itaú BBA | Community Lead @ Global Shapers SP II WEF | CEO for a Day 2022 | ForbesBLK 2023 | Young Leaders Program '24 | Gen Z in the financial market

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[About Speaker] - Gabriela Aires - Product @ Itaú BBA | Community Lead @ Global Shapers SP II WEF | CEO for a Day 2022 | ForbesBLK 2023 | Young Leaders Program '24 | Gen Z in the financial market

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🌇 She is from Bahia, multilingual, and has been creating market experiences for 8 years with agility, digital transformation, products, marketing, project management, and team management.

📚 She is the ESG Product Owner at Itaú BBA, focusing on managing and iterating decision-making platforms, discoveries, and AI-oriented features. She also worked at XP Inc. in Martech Growth, managing backlogs, acting as an agilist, and producing market studies focusing on consumer insights and data.

Additionally, she is a young leader at the World Economic Forum in São Paulo and is part of the ForbesBLK community.

In 2022, she was chosen as a future CEO in the CEOx1 Day program by Odgers Berndtson, a program that prepares future leaders through a buddy system with career executives.

In 2024, she is part of the Young Leaders Program class at Instituto Anga, which prepares young leaders to have an even greater impact on their companies.

💻 She studies technological phenomena impacting Generation Z and Alpha in Brazil and around the world – her career vision includes focusing on predictive actions for businesses through foresight, data, and goal analysis.

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750 million+ members | Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.

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[About Speaker] - Angela Mansim - Head of Business Unit Experiences @Officeless

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[About Speaker] - Angela Mansim - Head of Business Unit Experiences @Officeless

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I'm a long-term Brazilian traveler. I combine knowledge of branding, design, culture, and management to oversee the remote culture and strategy of tech companies. I also co-founded a brand management studio

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[Article About] The Virtual Enterprise: Building a More Connected, Expansive Business

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[Article About] The Virtual Enterprise: Building a More Connected, Expansive Business

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The Virtual Enterprise: Building a More Connected, Expansive Business

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Today, new imperatives, such as sustainability and security, are top of mind for business leaders, while at the same time these leaders must address new geopolitical and market challenges that are impacting their supply chains, talent, and costs.

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[Article about] Leading Global Remote Teams: 11 Strategies For Success

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There has been a noticeable uptick recently in discussions about companies mandating a return to a hybrid, or in some cases a 100% in-person work model. These discussions are often fueled by claims of enhanced productivity, increased collaboration and improved mental health outcomes for employees-the merits of which are worthy of its own article.

Regardless of which model is better, remote and distributed work teams allow for the luxury of choice. This is especially true when high-value team members are based in different states, or even different countries, as is the case with my team.

As an e-commerce development agency, we depend heavily on the ability to bring exceptionally skilled project managers and developers to our work. In many cases, these resources are not available/affordable in the local or even national markets. As a result, any requirement for in-person work isn't a realistic option and, more importantly, unnecessarily limits our ability to find the best.

Hiring Effectively

For companies in a similar place, I suggest these four cornerstones for hiring and maintaining a vibrant, productive and happy workforce.

1. Design a thoughtful and effective skills and compatibility assessment process with the goal of hiring skilled, flexible and self-driven individuals.

2. Engage in open communications about pay structure given the various geographies involved.

3. Equip staff with the necessary tools to work seamlessly and collaboratively with their team members.

4. Implement innovative team-building strategies to cultivate a healthy, enjoyable and inclusive remote-first work environment.

While managing a team spread across different states, countries, time zones and cultures presents unique challenges, with time and commitment to these four efforts, virtual businesses can expect benchmarks for productivity, innovation and happy employees that are similar to, if not better than, comparable businesses requiring hybrid or fully in-person operations.

Strategies For Managing Global Teams

Building on these four cornerstones, here are 11 strategies we deploy for effectively managing our global team:

1. Clear And Regular Communication Channels

Make it a priority to employ a mix of communication tools to cater to different preferences and needs. Platforms like Slack, Jira, Confluence and Zoom offer real-time messaging, ticket and code management, video conferencing and collaboration features, helping to ensure effective communication.

I feel it's important to clearly define communication expectations, response times and preferred channels within the team to avoid misunderstandings and make sure everyone is on the same page. As needed, use translation tools to overcome language barriers.

2. Efficient Work Management Platforms And Knowledge Sharing

Ensure that all team members, regardless of location, have access to the necessary technology and information to do their best work. There are a number of tools on the market today. For example, we've found Atlassian's Jira project management tools give us a robust and flexible set of structures to work with. They help us organize tasks, set deadlines and monitor progress, while their Confluence platform helps us create a centralized knowledge base for sharing best practices, resources and documentation.

Additionally, solutions like Google Workspace provide centralized employee controls and security protocols that are essential for a global workforce.

3. Regular Training And Skill Development

In our world of e-commerce, technology and software evolve quickly, and if we're not on top of the latest developments, we're unable to provide our clients with the best solutions. For this reason, we invest heavily in ongoing training and skill development programs so that our remote team members stay up to date on industry trends and maintain a high level of expertise.

4. Data Security Training

Remote work often involves the exchange of sensitive information, so ensuring your team members follow secure protocols is crucial. For this reason, I recommend to conduct frequent and regular training sessions on data security practices.

5. Time Management And Flexibility

While we establish clear expectations regarding work hours and deadlines, we encourage flexibility to accommodate different time zones so team members, regardless of location, can maintain a healthy work-life balance.

6. Fostering A Sense Of Team

Collaboration among teams and departments is crucial for a holistic understanding of projects and for fostering innovation.

We hold regular video calls for informal discussions, all-hands meetings and to celebrate personal achievements. The feedback from team members is that this makes them feel more connected and invested. In addition, regular one-on-one check-ins help leaders understand individual concerns and provide personalized support.

7. Team Autonomy And Empowerment

I learned early on that providing autonomy fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility, and contributes to increased motivation and productivity. So aim to empower and encourage teams to make decisions independently of the leadership team.

8. Cultural Sensitivity

In my experience, acknowledging, understanding and respecting cultural differences unquestionably leads to better collaboration and communication, and fosters a more inclusive work environment.

9. Conflict Resolution

As a result of language or cultural differences, some remote team members may encounter misunderstandings. Establishing clearly defined protocols and a structured approach to conflict resolution will help you maintain a positive team dynamic.

The starting point? Clarify past communications, understand everyone is on the same team, and assume each person is doing what they believe is best.

10. Addressing Pay Disparities

It's important to be transparent about your company's compensation policies, and emphasize fairness and equality. This helps build trust and understanding among team members.

Acknowledge and address any pay-grade differences based on geographic locations. Ensure fair compensation that considers cost of living, market rates and the value each team member brings to the organization.

11. Global Compliance And Regulations

Last, but by no means least, stay informed about local labor laws and regulations in the states and countries where your team members are based. Adhering to global compliance standards is essential for legal and ethical considerations.

Leading a global remote team is not easy and comes with its challenges. However, with effective communication, strategic use of technology and a commitment to making sure the team feels connected despite being apart, it's not necessarily harder than having everyone in the same place. And I think the benefits of nurturing a strong, flexible team and fostering a diverse and collaborative remote workforce far outweigh any challenges.

Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?

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Council Post: Leading Global Remote Teams: 11 Strategies For Success

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Regardless of which work model is better, remote and distributed work teams allow for the luxury of choice.

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[Article about] What Great Remote Managers Do Differently

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No one anticipated the massive shift to home-based remote work that happened in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. A new study surveyed managers and employees alike for what worked and what didn't as they navigated managing and being managed remotely. The key finding was a subtle but important shift in how employees expected their managers to work with them. They wanted their managers to be present, hands-on, and operationally vigilant without being intrusive. They don't want their managers to micromanage them; they want their managers to micro- understand their work. The author explains what micro-understanding is, cites examples of it in practice, and identifies three situations in which it is particularly important: Setting priorities and clarifying, problem solving, and checking in and showing compassion.

"It's like learning to drive on the wrong side of the road," exclaimed Larry when I asked him how he experienced the shift to leading remote employees. "You have to get to the same destination as before, but you now have different signals, cues, and controls - and that does take some time getting used to!"

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What Great Remote Managers Do Differently

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No one anticipated the massive shift to home-based remote work that happened in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. A new study surveyed managers and employees alike for what worked and what didn't as they navigated managing and being managed remotely.

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[Article About] 
Platforms: the digital revolution in the economy and business

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[Article About] 
Platforms: the digital revolution in the economy and business

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Plataformas: a revolução digital na economia e nos negócios - MIT Sloan Management Review Brasil

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Descubra como as plataformas estão moldando a nova economia e transformando os modelos de negócio, com insights da MIT Sloan Review

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[Article About] Metaverse challenges companies to think about an immersive future

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[Article About] Metaverse challenges companies to think about an immersive future

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Metaverso desafia empresas a pensarem futuro imersivo

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A possibilidade de criarmos uma realidade paralela há muito tempo fascina o ser humano. Isso já foi tema de filmes, livros e de tentativas da indústria de tecnologia de gerar essa aproximação com um número maior de pessoas . Leia na íntegra na Forbes Brasil.

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Bernardo Mendes - WoW Gaming Ventures | LinkedIn

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With a passion for gaming and a drive for innovation, I co-founded WoW Gaming Ventures… · Experience: WoW Gaming Ventures · Education: Universidade Federal do ABC · Location: São Paulo · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Bernardo Mendes’ profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.

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Jean Philippe Rosier is an expert on creativity and creative processes, Tedx speaker, educator and partner of Perestroika, the largest school of creative activities in Latin America, now also present in Europe.
During his career, he attended to SIY Program (Born at Google based on Neuroscience, Mindfulness and Leadership), LEGO Serious Play, Kaospilot School and Holacracy Certified .
He is also a speaker of international events such as PTTOW!(Los Angeles), Worldz(Hollywood), Ouishare(Paris), CLEIN (Colombia).
And over the last 3 years worked with Red Bull, Oracle, Walmart, Coca Cola, Linkedin and others global brands.

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[Related Content] How generational stereotypes hold us back at work

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[Related Content] How generational stereotypes hold us back at work

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Subtitles available in multiple languages, just click on the right corner of the player to change.

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Leah Georges: How generational stereotypes hold us back at work | TED Talk

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The Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, Gen Z -- we’re all in the workforce together. How are our assumptions about each other holding us back from working and communicating better? Social psychologist Leah Georges shows how we’re more similar than different and offers helpful tactics for navigating the multigenerational workplace.

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[About Speaker] Richard Fonseca - Teacher @FGV and Doctorate @Universidade Humboldt

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[About Speaker] Richard Fonseca - Teacher @FGV and Doctorate @Universidade Humboldt

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For fifteen years, he has been developing and teaching strategies aimed at strengthening Leadership and Organizational Culture through the lens of philosophical knowledge and competencies, as a guest Professor in the MBA courses at Fundação Getulio Vargas. Due to this professional experience, he is constantly invited to work in private companies, both national and international, identifying issues in Organizational Culture Management and Leadership, offering training, capacity building, lectures, and consulting on Leadership, Ethics, and Culture.

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[Article About] Getting Serius About Diversity

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[Article About] Getting Serius About Diversity

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[About Speaker] Daniel Rodrigues Alves - CEO & Co-Founder Innoway by Semente

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[About Speaker] Daniel Rodrigues Alves - CEO & Co-Founder Innoway by Semente

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Transformational entrepreneur, he specializes in building meaningful business platforms driven by shared purposes. He strikes an excellent balance between marketing execution, innovation, and branding excellence. With extensive experience managing billion-dollar P&Ls for leading brands across various product and service categories, he thrives on innovation. His career is built on the exponential development of people, technologies, data analytics, and strategic partnerships.

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[Article About] The Neuroscience of Leadership: Understanding the Brain’s Role in Effective Leadership

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[Article About] The Neuroscience of Leadership: Understanding the Brain’s Role in Effective Leadership

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The Neuroscience of Leadership: Understanding the Brain’s Role in Effective Leadership

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Effective leadership is not just about charisma and authority; it’s also deeply rooted in the intricate workings of the human brain. As we…

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Richard Fonseca - Professor de Ética, Cultural Organizacional e Responsabilidade Social nos cursos de MBA - FGV Brazil | LinkedIn

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Especialista em Comunicação Persuasiva, Ética e Formação de Liderança I Pessoas, Oratória e Cultura I Filosofia e Retorica Para o Desenvolvimento Pessoal e Profissional I · Há quinze anos desenvolvo e ensino estratégias voltadas para o fortalecimento da Liderança e da Cultura Organizacional pela ótica de conhecimentos e competências filosóficas, como Professor convidado nos cursos de MBA da Fundação Getulio Vargas. Por conta dessa experiência profissional sou constantemente convidado para atuar em empresas privadas, nacionais e internacionais, identificando problemas na Gestão da Cultura Organizacional e na Liderança, oferecendo treinamento, capacitação, palestra e consultoria sobre Liderança, Ética e Cultura.

Iniciei minha carreira profissional aos vinte e dois anos de idade, como supervisor de Call Center na antiga TELERJ (Telecomunicações do Estado do Rio de Janeiro). Ali desenvolvi meu primeiro projeto alinhando valorização profissional, pluralidade, qualidade de vida no trabalho e as estratégias da organização.

Atuei como entrevistador de pesquisa de mercado no Infoglobo, do Jornal O Globo, como Pesquisador na Academia de Ciências de Berlim–Brandemburgo/Alemanha e Professor de Cultura Organizacional e Ética para os funcionários públicos do Governo de Angola/África, em projeto coordenado pela Fundação Getulio Vargas.

As experiências acima e minha formação em Filosofia foram determinantes para o convite de assumir a Coordenação do curso de Graduação em Administração da Fundação Getulio Vargas, no Rio de Janeiro, continuando ligado aos cursos e projetos de MBA.

Tenho Doutorado em Filosofia pela Uerj/Universidade Humboldt de Berlim/Alemanha e especialização em Metodologia Ativa (Problem-based-Learning), pela Universidade Maastricht University School of Business and Economics, na Holanda.

Fluente em alemão! · Experience: FGV Brazil · Education: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin · Location: Rio de Janeiro · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Richard Fonseca’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.

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[LinkedIn Profile] Daniel Rodrigues Alves

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[LinkedIn Profile] Daniel Rodrigues Alves

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Daniel Rodrigues Alves - REAG INVESTIMENTOS | LinkedIn

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Transformational entrepreneur, building meaningful business platforms via purpose-driven… · Experience: REAG INVESTIMENTOS · Education: Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing · Location: Santa Catarina · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Daniel Rodrigues Alves’ profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.

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AIs and People Collaborating in Developing New Businesses

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AIs and People Collaborating in Developing New Businesses

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Do you know what a centaur team is? This new term is the synthesis of human-machine collaboration and is the way companies seek to apply the use of Artificial Intelligence in their businesses. We'll explore tools to improve personalization and customer service (internal and external) and the use of generative models to simulate situations and test strategies.

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Há mais vinte anos tenho liderado projetos de consultoria estratégica e transformação… · Experience: CI&T · Education: Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing · Location: São Paulo · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Max Nolan Shen’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.

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[Article About] How generative AI can boost highly skilled workers’ productivity

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[Article About] How generative AI can boost highly skilled workers’ productivity

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A new study on the impact of generative AI on highly skilled workers finds that when artificial intelligence is used within the boundary of its capabilities, it can improve a worker's performance by as much as 40% compared with workers who don't use it.

But when AI is used outside that boundary to complete a task, worker performance drops by an average of 19 percentage points.

The findings have implications not only for worker productivity but for organizations looking to successfully navigate what the researchers have termed the "jagged technological frontier" of AI - specifically, generative pretrained transformers (GPT), which produce text after being given prompts. Understanding the upper limits of AI's abilities is imperative, particularly as those abilities continue to expand, the researchers write.

It's important for managers to maintain awareness of this jagged frontier, said Harvard Business School's Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, the lead author of the paper, because the researchers found that it was not obvious to highly skilled knowledge workers which of their everyday tasks could easily be performed by AI and which tasks would require a different approach.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers authored the paper, including Karim Lakhaniand Edward McFowland III from Harvard Business School; Ethan Mollick, SM '04, PhD '10, from The Wharton School; Hila Lifshitz-Assaf from Warwick Business School; and MIT Sloan's Kate Kellogg.

Here's a closer look at the study, along with some suggestions from Dell'Acqua, Kellogg, and Lifshitz-Assaf of steps organizations can take when introducing generative AI to a highly skilled workforce.

For best results, use cognitive effort and experts' judgment

The study was conducted in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group and involved more than 700 consultants who were assigned a skills assessment task and an experimental task.

The participants were sorted into two groups: One group was given a task designed to fall within GPT-4's capabilities of producing humanlike outputs, while the other group received a task "designed so that GPT-4 would make an error when conducting the analysis, ensuring the work fell just outside the frontier," according to the paper.

Within those two groups, study participants were sorted into three conditions: no access to AI, access to GPT-4 AI, and access to GPT-4 AI with an overview of how to use GPT.

The "inside the frontier" group was asked to imagine that they worked for a shoe company and that their manager had asked them to come up with a new product and present it at a meeting. Participants in this group were also instructed to complete several other actions, including coming up with a list of steps from pitch to launch, creating a marketing slogan, and writing a 2,500-word article describing the end-to-end process for developing the shoe and lessons learned.

AI had a positive effect on that group of participants: The GPT-only participants saw a 38% increase in performance compared with the control condition (no access to AI), while the performance of those who were provided with both GPT and an overview saw a 42.5% increase in performance compared with the control condition.

Interestingly, the researchers observed a bigger jump in performance scores for the participants in the lower half of assessed skills who used GPT-4 compared with those in the top half of assessed skills - at 43% and 17%, respectively - when they were compared with their baseline scores (i.e., no AI use).

The "outside the frontier" group was asked to imagine that they worked for a company with three brands. They were tasked with writing a 500-to-750-word memo to their CEO explaining which of the brands the CEO should invest in to drive revenue, and with suggesting innovative actions the CEO could take to improve the selected brand. The memo needed to include the rationale for their recommendation, and group participants were provided with interview comments and financial data from which they could draw. Additionally, participants were graded on the "correctness" of their recommendation - their reasoning or justification - by human evaluators.

AI had a negative effect on participants in this group. The GPT-only condition saw a decrease in performance of 13 percentage points compared with the control condition, while participants who had been provided with GPT and an overview showed a decrease of 24 percentage points compared with the control condition.

Dell'Acqua said that for the "outside the frontier" group, the researchers observed a performance decrease because people would "kind of switch off their brains and follow what AI recommends," which was more likely to be incorrect. However, even when an incorrect recommendation was made under one of the AI conditions, the quality of the participant's recommendation justification improved.

The quality improvement and decrease in performance indicates that, rather than blindly adopting AI outputs, highly skilled workers need to continue to validate AI and exert "cognitive effort and experts' judgement when working with AI," the researchers write.

Interface design, onboarding, role reconfiguration, and a culture of accountability

According to the researchers, there are several things organizations and managers should consider as they integrate AI into their employee workflows.

While it's tempting to use AI for knowledge work because it is fast, can boost rapid idea generation, and produces persuasive text, managers and professionals need to be cautious when using it for important tasks, Lifshitz-Assaf said.

Because some AI-generated answers look credible even when they're incorrect, "that suggests there's a role for internal or 'wrapper' developers to help design the interface in a way that makes it less likely that people fall into some of these traps," Kellogg said.

Developers can also help with figuring out where AI can be inserted into workflows and how to design technology for doing that.

Kellogg and Dell'Acqua also recommended that organizations have an onboarding phase so workers can get a sense of how and where the AI works well and where it doesn't and receive performance feedback. Relatedly, some people are very good at upskilling themselves, and those workers can be helpful as peer trainers. But they should be rewarded and recognized for their work.

Managers will also need to reconfigure roles.

"To use generative AI well, it's important to investigate the specific tasks along the work process," Lifshitz-Assaf said. "Some may be within the jagged frontier, and others outside."

Kellogg said that leaders can encourage role reconfiguration by having people from different positions experiment together to find the most productive structure.

Leaders should also encourage a culture of accountability. In talking with study participants, Kellogg said, one suggestion was that "we need to teach people to be able to explain what they did without using the term 'generative AI.'"

"Managers and workers need to collectively develop new expectations and work practices to ensure that any work done in collaboration with generative AI meets the values, goals, and standards of their key stakeholders," Kellogg said.

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How generative AI can boost highly skilled workers' productivity | MIT Sloan

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Generative AI can boost highly skilled worker productivity, if organizations establish a culture of accountability and encourage role reconfiguration.

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[Article About] Expanding AI’s Impact With Organizational Learning

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[Article About] Expanding AI’s Impact With Organizational Learning

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Expanding AI’s Impact With Organizational Learning

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Companies that change processes to facilitate organizational learning with AI realize the biggest business value.

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For over twenty years, Max has led strategic consulting and organizational transformation projects for Forbes 500 companies in marketing, innovation, branding, communication, and customer experience. The core of their work is based on anthropological research, ethnographic experiences, and a deep understanding of behavioral changes, new trends, and cultural movements. Unlike many senior professionals who distance themselves from consumers and fieldwork, this person has delved deeper into understanding humans and consumers. Insights and learnings are fundamental elements they apply in digital transformation and innovation to help companies become truly "human-centric."

In recent years, to enhance leaders' engagement with purposes and causes that have a positive societal impact, they have introduced practices and new management methodologies along with participatory processes to reinvent organizations and develop evolutionary leaders. This frontline approach focuses on organizational culture but is applied holistically with their vision of marketing and business. They utilize theories and tools such as Systemic Constellations, Theory U, Nonviolent Communication, Sociocracy 3.0, Integral Theory, and Anthroposophy for organizational transformation.

Some clients for whom they have led projects include Natura, Ambev, Bradesco, Coty, Hypera Pharma, Leroy Merlin, Prudential, EDP, Intel, Roche, Grendene, Reserva, Arezzo, IdeaZarvos!, Calvin Klein, Pepsico, Mondeléz, Danone, Anhembi Morumbi, Social Bank, Caloi. In addition to consulting work, they began their career working as a client at Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, and Siemens.

They work with purposes and causes such as Women's Empowerment, Emerging Culture, Youth Culture (Gen Z), Regenerative Culture, Afrocentrism, Afrofuturism, Ancestral Knowledge Revival, Diversity & Inclusion, Sustainable Lifestyle, and the Power of Nature.

Their interest also includes the use of technology to humanize relationships: Futurism, Networked Work, Exponential Mindset, Business Agility, Digital Transformation, CX/UX Design. They hold a degree in Mechatronics Engineering from POLI-USP with studies in fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence.

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[About Speaker] - Bernardo Mendes - Partner and Chief Gaming Officer @DRUID Creative

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[About Speaker] - Bernardo Mendes - Partner and Chief Gaming Officer @DRUID Creative

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With a passion for gaming and a drive for innovation, I co-founded WoW Gaming Ventures, the first holding company dedicated to crafting end-to-end gaming marketing campaigns. Based in São Paulo, Brazil, our team thrives on strategic planning and flawless execution, offering a comprehensive approach to transcend traditional marketing strategies. From strategic management to immersive experiences and community management, we specialize in in-game and livestream advertising, game map development, and beyond. Our commitment to innovation ensures that we constantly push boundaries to deliver unparalleled results for our clients.

Simultaneously, as the Founder & Chief Gaming Officer at DRUID Creative Gaming, I lead a team recognized for achieving remarkable results for brands in both traditional and digital agencies. Our expertise in marketing, advertising, and media translates seamlessly into the gaming world, where we connect our passion for communication with our passion for gaming. DRUID is not just a company; it's a Business to Gamer venture, bridging the gap between brands and gamers with creativity and expertise.

Additionally, I am involved in various gaming ventures as a partner, including DruidScara, Pixel Hunters, Rogue Unit, Warlocks, and Warrior Streaming. These ventures reflect my ongoing commitment to driving innovation and excellence within the gaming industry. I am also an investor in Hiperfy and a proud member of GV Angels.

With a background that includes roles such as Game Specialist at Cheil Brasil and Business Development Manager at ESL (now EFG), I bring a wealth of experience in sales, business development, and partnerships within the gaming and esports sectors. My journey in the industry has been marked by a dedication to building strong relationships, identifying opportunities, and delivering impactful results.

I am always open to sharing knowledge and engaging in discussions about the gaming industry. Feel free to reach out to me here, via email, or by phone. Let's connect and explore the exciting opportunities in the dynamic world of gaming together! 🎮✨

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[Article About] How to Unlock Your Team’s Creativity

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[Article About] How to Unlock Your Team’s Creativity

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How can leaders unleash the full range of creative potential on their teams? If a team is creatively blocked, a first step for managers is to examine whether the processes that surround people are holding them hostage in their thinking. An over-reliance on systematically following rules can shut down collaborative brainstorming, as some may feel they have no flexibility to express outside options that run counter to the standard process and way things have always been done. If this is the case, try removing the limitations of particular procedural structures during creative sessions, so that everyone can feel freer to contribute without bureaucratic constraint. To inspire creativity, leaders should encourage healthy conflict and debate. Instead of micromanaging, empower others and give them the reins to explore and take risks, which can lead in unexpected directions. Guide people to step out of the norm, crack their old assumptions, and stay open to new possibilities for creative insights.

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[Article About] Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity

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[Article About] Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity

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One island of stability in the sea of conversation about the future of work is the conviction that our jobs will become increasingly creative. The World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and nearly every major think tank seem aligned around this hypothesis, offering heaps of data to support it. The trend is not just about the delegation of rote tasks to automation; it's also about the accelerating pace of change and the increasing complexity of business, which demand original responses to novel challenges far more frequently than ever before.

Many companies now include creativity as a core competency for employees at all levels-especially those on the front lines-and across all functions, from sales and marketing to accounting and operations to customer service. Individuals and talent managers must therefore get smart about what it takes to foster and manage this skill. Although the science of creativity is young compared with other areas of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, our growing understanding of it points to new directions for creative development. In this article we offer a typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are actually different or more usefully divided into parts; figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now.

Most of us tend to think in just one of these four ways, and we benefit from knowing which one comes naturally to us. We can also learn to hone our creativity in the other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to increase innovation across the workforce.

Integration

Integration may be local-stitching together a few concepts-or sweeping: a grand unifying theory.

The 17th-century mathematician Isaac Newton was a genius at integration. After coinventing calculus, itself enormously integrative, he happened upon the idea that would make him even more famous. The story does involve an apple, but it didn't fall on his head. Instead, looking out a window one night, he noticed that a two-inch piece of fruit on the ground 20 feet from him occupied the same amount of visual space as did the faraway moon. He wondered not about the trick of perspective but whether the force drawing the apple to the ground was the same as what held the moon in orbit-an idea that gave rise to his inverse square law: that the gravitational attraction between two bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. Integration is often at the heart of scientific discovery.

It's also a key form of corporate innovation today. Consider the Apple iPhone. Its designers' success lay in recognizing that when tools such as cameras, phones, and music players are digitized, they are all capturing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting data in the same way, through semiconductors and liquid crystal displays; therefore, they could be combined in a single device-perhaps the most powerful tool now at our disposal. Four decades ago the phone hanging on your wall had nothing to do with the boom box sitting on your console or the camera filled with film you'd soon drop off for developing.

How does integrative creativity show up in everyday work? Let's consider a hypothetical office-supply retailer, Capella Paper, that wants to attract more Millennial customers. Jerome, an email marketer, is an employee working on the problem. He finds several studies showing that professionals in their twenties and thirties are vocal advocates of preserving hybrid or remote working arrangements postpandemic. He hypothesizes that two groups Capella treats as distinct-Millennials and remote workers-may in fact align as buyers of office supplies. Jerome retrieves an analysis by his team on a spike in home-office purchases in the spring of 2020 and looks to see which email promotions-all targeting newly remote workers-were most successful in that period. He selects an old promotion offering free printer-toner refills with bulk paper purchases and makes a few tweaks for the new target demographic, resulting in a 35% higher click-through rate compared with the company's average for Millennial customers.

Splitting

The opposite kind of creative thinking is splitting, and the history of science is full of examples. The periodic table of the elements splits earth, air, fire, and water into 118 parts. Medical breakthroughs regularly result from the separation of what was thought to be a single disease into several, each of which can be more precisely treated. One of the greatest manufacturing innovations of all time-the assembly line-involved splitting. Before the Industrial Revolution, one craftsperson might oversee the production of a good from start to finish. Guns, for example, were made by individuals skilled in both woodworking and metalwork; the same was true of steamer trunks and clocks. But then the Swedish inventor Christopher Polhem introduced the concept of interchangeable parts, which could be made separate from a whole and used for a wide variety of products. At first many people were skeptical: When, in 1785, the Frenchman Honoré Blanc publicly demonstrated that he could assemble a working gun by selecting components from a large pile of interchangeable parts, audience members were shocked. This idea led to further division-of human labor-allowing for faster, more consistent, and scalable manufacturing that is still in use today.

A more recent application is quantum computing, an important application of particle physics, which breaks matter down into its smallest components. Whereas in classical computing a bit can occupy only a single position, quantum computing's qubit can occupy multiple positions simultaneously, exponentially increasing computing power. In 2019 Google's quantum processor Sycamore took 200 seconds to finish a task that would take a classical computer 10,000 years to complete.

This type of creativity can be useful in many professional scenarios. Back at Capella, for example, a product manager, Carmen, has been studying which of the company's offerings are most popular with Millennials. She first separates consumer buyers from business buyers; the latter typically purchase for their small companies. Business buyers can be further divided into people who order a variety of supplies and whose purchases are waning, and those who buy just one or two products in large amounts and whose orders are holding steady or even increasing. Focusing on this second group, Carmen arrives at her "aha" by zeroing in on the product most frequently purchased by 30-something business buyers: Capella's trademark 6″ x 8″ grass-cloth-bound notebook. Through interviews she learns that people buy this item for two reasons: for note-taking by employees and for client gifts. Because Capella sells the notebooks only in bulk to businesses, they have become coveted. With that insight Carmen pitches a new line of luxury notebooks in a wider range of sizes and colors, available to both individual and commercial buyers with an option to emboss initials or a corporate logo on the cover. Thus a single product is split into several lines for distinct purposes.

Figure-Ground Reversal

The term "figure-ground reversal" comes from the study of vision and refers to our ability to shift focus from the foreground to the background to produce a radically different picture. The well-known black-and-white silhouette of two faces in profile-or a vase in the middle-demonstrates how our minds can toggle back and forth between the two.

One of the most important neuroscientific discoveries of our lifetime was the default mode network, a set of brain regions involved in our mental downtime, and it happened owing to an accident of figure-ground reversal. Functional-imaging researchers were mapping the brain's "task positive" networks-the regions that light up when we engage in focused activities such as solving anagrams and listening to lectures. In most of those experiments a control condition consisted of rest periods, during which the brain might be expected to go dark and quiet. Instead, scientists across numerous studies found that certain midline and medial-temporal-lobe brain structures consistently lit up during rest, suggesting not stasis but vibrant activity. We have since learned that the same thing happens when we daydream, and what we do during those periods is imagine and plan. Researchers weren't trying to find the state in which we do some of our best thinking, but they did.

Here's another example of figure-ground reversal: In 1957, when the Soviet space program launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth, the U.S. military used two widely separated points on Earth to track Sputnik 's speed and position by means of the Doppler effect. But only in 1958 did it become clear that the far more profound application of the technology was for the exact opposite purpose: using points in space to track objects on Earth. In that year the Advanced Research Projects Agency developed Transit to calculate the position and speed of any moving object using two widely separated satellites in space. Today we know this technology as the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

We see figure-ground reversal all the time in industry, too. Amazon Web Services was developed in response to Amazon's need to scale up its infrastructure. The software developers Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black, who led the work, realized that others would want the solution they were envisioning-that it could be a compelling product to offer externally. Today AWS is a foreground business for the company, accounting for $45 billion in revenue in 2020. Similarly, Slack, the ubiquitous messaging platform, started as an internal product to help Stewart Butterfield's company Tiny Speck develop a video game. That business fizzled out, but the team pivoted to the messaging app, and Slack went public in 2019. In 2021 Salesforce bought it for close to $28 billion.

Imagine that Robert, a manager at Capella's Chicago store, has just returned from a leadership meeting where he learned about the company's push to attract Millennial customers. Over the next several weeks he spends time observing patrons' shopping habits in the store. He focuses on customers in professional attire who appear to be in their late twenties or early thirties, but he sees very few of them, and he can't identify any particular patterns in what they're buying. Though Robert normally works weekdays, he's called in one Saturday to cover for a colleague and continues his observations. At first he doesn't see anyone in his target demographic, but then he recognizes a repeat customer from earlier in the week, this time not in business casual but dressed down and shopping with what appears to be his school-age daughter. Robert realizes that he's overlooked a half dozen other Millennials that day alone because they were shopping not as professionals but as parents and were consistently looking for art and school supplies. He decides to stock those items in the middle aisles, with office supplies flanking them, and within a few months his store leads the region in sales to the target demographic. Robert explains to Capella's leaders that it came down to focusing on the broader, whole-person context of Millennials' lives.

Distal Thinking

Finally, distal thinking involves imagining things as very different from the present. Many a creative genius has been characterized as someone who envisioned a radically new future that the rest of us initially couldn't see. The inventor Nikola Tesla, for example, once described his process as building and refining an object entirely in his imagination-even operating it in his mind. His distal brainchildren included the radio, the neon lamp, AC power, and hydroelectric power.

Sometimes innovators think so far ahead that the market isn't ready for their ideas. The computer scientist and cryptographer David Chaum invented anonymous digital cash in a 1983 paper, just as personal computers were coming into vogue, and well before access to the internet was ubiquitous. In 1994 his company, DigiCash, sent the first electronic payment. But the economic and technological ecosystem needed to support widespread adoption of digital currency did not yet exist, and DigiCash folded in 1998. Like many other first movers, Chaum paved the way for followers but benefited from only a small fraction of his invention's success.

More-successful distal innovators bridge the gap between the present and the future in one of two ways. The first is by accelerating market maturity, through promotions, partnerships, and focused launches. An example of this is another digital-payments company, PayPal. When it launched, in 1999, adoption of its full slate of intended uses was low. So rather than try to advance an ambitious vision before consumers were ready, the company focused on developing its user base through eBay, a platform where such payments were becoming the norm. The symbiosis was so perfect that eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, but within a decade, as PayPal usage expanded well beyond its parent company, the entities split. Today PayPal is used in 200 countries, and its 2021 revenue topped $25 billion.

A second way distal innovators help their radical vision ultimately become reality is with "backward" innovation-developing intermediary technologies that are immediately marketable and will move stakeholders along the maturity curve toward readiness for the actual invention. Take self-driving cars, which exist but aren't yet prevalent for many reasons, including technological, infrastructure, and regulatory barriers. Another obstacle is consumer mistrust: Drivers are not yet ready to hand over the wheel. Thus we see stepping-stone products such as cruise control and automatic parking. These are incremental offerings that people will use and that should make them more comfortable with a driverless future.

The electric car company Tesla logged a distal win by selling EVs as luxury purchases before the economics worked to make more-mainstream models. It is now trying to pave the way for fully autonomous vehicles by offering precursors: both traditional autopilot and something called "full self-driving capability," which gives the car even more control. Led by its creative founder, Elon Musk, Tesla is training us to eventually embrace a previously unpalatable vision.

Even in organizations where innovation is more incremental, distal thinkers can often find big challenges that offer them a chance to shine. Piper, a Capella designer, has for years been asking her managers how the company will operate when offices are entirely paperless. Encouraged by the new mandate to attract Millennials, she describes her vision of this future: eco-conscious digital natives operating in a fast-paced, mostly virtual work environment who will eschew office supplies for fully online tools. And yet, Piper says, many will still want physical products that link to the digital world for promotional or commemorative purposes. She describes a new line of memorabilia to honor project progress: commercial-real-estate "deal toys" with screens that change as the building is constructed, or customer-appreciation plaques with displays that show up-to-date utilization metrics of marquee software products the customer has purchased. Piper's pitches make Capella think bigger and more boldly about what this demographic needs and demonstrate her unique ability to help the company get ahead of industry trends.

How to Proceed

Which type of creativity do you use the most? Each one offers a unique advantage-and potential blind spots. Integrators may try to see synergies where they don't exist, while splitters may overcomplicate a simple solution.

Understanding your strengths as an individual is the first step. Look for places to apply them and watch out for overuse. At your next opportunity to innovate, push yourself to think in the styles that come less naturally to you. Before you settle on a path forward, challenge yourself to define at least one option for each of the four styles.

If you lead a team, how do you complement your skill set with other types of creative thinkers? When receiving proposals from your team, do you get options that explore all four forms of innovation? If not, ask for them.

At the organizational level, reflect on your business's recent innovations, both internal and external. Do any patterns emerge? Are your products typically the result of splitting, for example? Or integration? When was the last time you capitalized on a figure-ground reversal? Do you have enough distal thinkers in your midst who are pushing others to expand their thinking? How often are hiring managers considering the mix of innovation types on teams as they grow?

Creativity is an imperative for our new world of work. Cultivating all four types of divergent thinking at every level will afford greater odds of converting each new challenge into successful innovation.
Editor's note: Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman are the authors of Tomorrowmind (Simon & Schuster, 2023), from which this article is adapted.
A version of this article appeared in the January-February 2023 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity

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In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well.

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750 million+ members | Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.

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[About Speaker] Fernando Gomes de Oliveira

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[About Speaker] Fernando Gomes de Oliveira

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Restless, curious, and a serial entrepreneur, he is the father of three children and passionate about cycling, reading, traveling to unconventional destinations (such as Easter Island, Ushuaia, Kenya, Egypt, India, and Norway), and exploring new experiences. Born in the countryside of São Paulo, he moved to the city in 1990 to study Computer Engineering at USP's Polytechnic School. With over 34 years of experience in Technology, Innovation, and Telecommunications, he has worked for national companies, multinationals, and NGOs, leading large-scale projects across Latin America and the Middle East.

A specialist in Governance, Compliance, next-generation networks, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity, he currently serves as a CTIO, driving digital transformation and innovation for companies. His focus includes mobile connectivity and smart cities, where he aims to connect remote areas and create more sustainable, intelligent urban environments. He also acts as an angel investor and mentor for startups, leveraging his international experience—including a decade living in Dubai—to support promising businesses.

With expertise in telecommunications systems (4G/LTE, 5G, 6G, WiFi 6), he coordinates the 5G Working Group for Smart Cities at ACATE and collaborates with academic institutions and government bodies to develop Brazil's technology ecosystem. Passionate about innovation, he focuses on advancing solutions in 5G, AI, and cybersecurity for smart cities, Industry 4.0, energy, healthcare, and agribusiness. Additionally, he is an active member of technology associations and a frequent speaker and writer on trends in technology and innovation.

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[Linkedin Profile] Fernando Gomes de Oliveira

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[Linkedin Profile] Fernando Gomes de Oliveira

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[Article About] Don't Tapscott on Digital Disruption

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[Article About] Don't Tapscott on Digital Disruption

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Don Tapscott on Digital Disruption - CKGSB

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The Digital Economy warrants a fundamentally new social contract, says Don Tapscott, a leading expert on business and technology issues

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[Article About] 3 ways to build a culture of data monetization

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[Article About] 3 ways to build a culture of data monetization

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3 ways to build a culture of data monetization | MIT Sloan

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Top-performing companies invest in CEO-level data leadership, data value realization, and data resource life-cycle measurement.

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Future Lenses to Explore New Business and Service Possibilities

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Future Lenses to Explore New Business and Service Possibilities

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Thinking about the future and acting in the present is a fundamental skill. This model, called ambidexterity, teaches us to imagine possible futures and, working backward, incorporate this culture of anticipation as a tool for leaders. Together, we will use tools to explore future scenarios.

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Kim works with future studies to help companies navigate complexity.

Over six years, Kim was part of WGSN Start's trend research nucleus, which mobilized over 2,000 brands in Brazil. There, she identified emerging changes, materialized insights, produced reports, and refined methodologies. At Aerolito, Kim was responsible for creating, developing, applying, and delivering proprietary methodologies for future research: Three Waves of Impact and Futures Listening.

In recent years, Kim has worked with organizations from various sectors, both national and international, including AB InBev/Ambev, Boticário, Microsoft, Sebrae, Nestlé, Natura, Klabin, 99app, Cyrela, Vale, Itaú, São Martinho, among others.

Kim is a master's student in management and business and was recently invited by the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM/SP) to lead the future research course for postgraduate students in the Brands For The Future program.

As a member of the World Federation of Futures Studies (WFSF), Kim contributes to the development and dissemination of future studies in Brazil and worldwide.

Nota: Para manter a consistência, seria ideal usar "Kim" em vez de "she" em todas as ocorrências. Aqui está a versão corrigida:

Kim works with future studies to help companies navigate complexity.

Over six years, Kim was part of WGSN Start's trend research nucleus, which mobilized over 2,000 brands in Brazil. There, Kim identified emerging changes, materialized insights, produced reports, and refined methodologies. At Aerolito, Kim was responsible for creating, developing, applying, and delivering proprietary methodologies for future research: Three Waves of Impact and Futures Listening.

In recent years, Kim has worked with organizations from various sectors, both national and international, including AB InBev/Ambev, Boticário, Microsoft, Sebrae, Nestlé, Natura, Klabin, 99app, Cyrela, Vale, Itaú, São Martinho, among others.

Kim is a master's student in management and business and was recently invited by the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM/SP) to lead the future research course for postgraduate students in the Brands For The Future program.

As a member of the World Federation of Futures Studies (WFSF), Kim contributes to the development and dissemination of future studies in Brazil and worldwide.

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750 million+ members | Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights and opportunities.

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[Article About] How to empower your workforce to master new 
technologies and navigate evolving risks

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[Article About] How to empower your workforce to master new 
technologies and navigate evolving risks

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[Article About] The Ambidextrous Organization

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[Article About] The Ambidextrous Organization

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The Idea in Brief

What's the secret to developing the breakthrough innovations you need to stay competitive-while also protecting your traditional businesses? Create organizationally distinct units-but tightly integrate them at the senior executive level.

Ambidextrous organizations segregate exploratory units from their traditional units, encouraging them to develop their own unique processes, structures, and cultures. But they also tightly coordinate these new units with existing organizations at the senior management level. Top-level integration ensures that fledgling units have access to established resources-cash, talent, customers-and simultaneously shields them from the innovation-chilling effects of "business as usual." Meanwhile, existing units-freed from the distractions of a start-up-can maintain their focus on refining operations, improving products, and serving customers.

Companies that use ambidextrous structures are nine times more likely to create breakthrough products and processes than those using other organizational structures-while sustaining or even improving their existing businesses.

The Idea in Practice

Consider these examples of ambidextrous organizations that have successfully pioneered radical innovations while pursuing incremental gains to their established businesses.

USA Today

When news consumers began turning to television and the Internet in the 1990s, USA Today -the United States' most widely read daily newspaper-knew it had to go beyond its traditional print business to survive. Initially it created a skunk works operation to launch online news service USAToday.com. But isolated from the print operation, USAToday.com was starved of cash, generated meager results, and began losing talented staff.

President Tom Curley adopted a "network strategy"-combining online, television, and newspaper organizations to promote cross-media content sharing. Units were physically separate, and their staffing models, cultures, and processes were distinct. But Curley insisted that all three enterprises be integrated at the top. The three business heads met daily to review stories and share ideas. They also trained print reporters in TV and Web broadcasting, outfitting them with cameras so they could file stories simultaneously in different media. A "network editor" was hired to help print reporters shape stories for broadcast media. Executives who didn't support the new strategy were dismissed. Incentives tied to cross-unit growth targets and willingness to share news content replaced rewards tied to unit results.

During the Internet collapse, when other papers' profits plunged, USA Today made $60 million.

Ciba Vision

To beat giant rival Johnson & Johnson, conventional-contact-lens maker Ciba Vision determined to produce a stream of breakthroughs while maintaining its conventional business. President Glenn Bradley created autonomous units for six innovation projects. Each had its own R&D, finance, and marketing functions, as well as distinct processes for hiring, development, and rewards.

To integrate new projects with existing businesses, innovation team leaders reported to one person-the vice president of R&D, who managed trade-offs and conflicts between the old business and new units. Innovation project leaders also attended executive-team meetings with established business heads.

Moreover, Bradley enunciated a new vision statement-"Healthy Eyes for Life"-that inspired cross-company teamwork by underscoring connections between the breakthrough initiatives and its conventional operations. Ciba Vision also revamped its incentive system, rewarding managers primarily for overall company performance-not individual units'.

Ciba's ambidextrous approach paid off. It successfully introduced several new contact lenses, a macular-degeneration treatment, and a low-cost manufacturing process, while maintaining a profitable business for its conventional lenses. Ciba overtook J&J in some market segments, and over the next ten years, its annual revenues grew from $300 million to more than $1 billion.

The Roman god Janus had two sets of eyes-one pair focusing on what lay behind, the other on what lay ahead. General managers and corporate executives should be able to relate. They, too, must constantly look backward, attending to the products and processes of the past, while also gazing forward, preparing for the innovations that will define the future.

This mental balancing act can be one of the toughest of all managerial challenges-it requires executives to explore new opportunities even as they work diligently to exploit existing capabilities-and it's no surprise that few companies do it well. Most successful enterprises are adept at refining their current offerings, but they falter when it comes to pioneering radically new products and services. Kodak and Boeing are just two of the more recent examples of once dominant companies that failed to adapt to market changes. Kodak excelled at analog photography but hasn't been able to make the leap to digital cameras. Boeing, a longtime leader in commercial aircraft, has experienced difficulties in its defense-contracting businesses and has recently stumbled in the face of competition from Airbus.

The failure to achieve breakthrough innovations while also making steady improvements to an existing business is so commonplace-and so fascinating-that it has become a battleground of management thought. For decades, scholars have spun theories to explain the puzzle and offered advice on how to solve it. Some have argued that there's no way out of the conundrum-that established companies simply lack the flexibility to explore new territory. Some have suggested that big companies adopt a venture capital model, funding exploratory expeditions but otherwise staying out of their way. Others have pointed to cross-functional teams as the key to creating breakthrough innovations. Still others have claimed that a company may be able to shift back and forth between different organizational models, focusing on exploitation for a period and then moving into exploration mode.

We recently decided to test these and other theories by taking a close look at the real world, examining how actual, contemporary businesses fare when they attempt to pursue innovations that lie beyond their current products or markets. Do they succeed in achieving breakthroughs? Do their existing businesses suffer? What organizational and managerial structures do they use? What works, and what doesn't?

We discovered that some companies have actually been quite successful at both exploiting the present and exploring the future, and as we looked more deeply at them we found that they share important characteristics. In particular, they separate their new, exploratory units from their traditional, exploitative ones, allowing for different processes, structures, and cultures; at the same time, they maintain tight links across units at the senior executive level. In other words, they manage organizational separation through a tightly integrated senior team. We call these kinds of companies "ambidextrous organizations," and we believe they provide a practical and proven model for forward-looking executives seeking to pioneer radical or disruptive innovations while pursuing incremental gains. A business does not have to escape its past, these cases show, to renew itself for the future.

Exploiting and Exploring

To flourish over the long run, most companies need to maintain a variety of innovation efforts. They must constantly pursue incremental innovations, small improvements in their existing products and operations that let them operate more efficiently and deliver ever greater value to customers. An automaker, for example, may frequently tweak a basic engine design to increase horsepower, enhance fuel efficiency, or improve reliability. Companies also have to make architectural innovations, applying technological or process advances to fundamentally change some component or element of their business. Capitalizing on the data communication capabilities of the Internet, for instance, a bank can perhaps shift its customer-service call center to a low-labor-cost country like India. Finally, businesses need to come up with discontinuous innovations -radical advances like digital photography that profoundly alter the basis for competition in an industry, often rendering old products or ways of working obsolete.

All these types of innovation can have different targets. Some may be aimed at a firm's current customers. Others may be delivered to an existing market that lies beyond a company's current customer base-a car insurer may create a new kind of policy for boat owners, for instance. Still others may be focused on serving an entirely new market that has yet to be clearly defined-people who download online music, for example. As shown in the exhibit "A Map of Innovation," the types of innovation and the targeted markets can be plotted in a matrix.

To compete, companies must continually pursue many types of innovation-incremental, architectural, and discontinuous-aimed at existing and new customers. Plotting your companies' innovation efforts in the matrix below will immediately reveal any areas you may have overlooked.

In our research with colleagues Wendy Smith, Robert Wood, and George Westerman, we studied how companies pursued innovations throughout this matrix. In particular, we looked for companies that attempted to simultaneously pursue modest, incremental innovations (toward the lower-left area of the matrix) and more dramatic, breakthrough innovations (toward the upper-right area). We ended up focusing on 35 attempts to launch breakthrough innovations undertaken by 15 business units in nine different industries. We studied the structure and results of the breakthrough projects as well as their impact on the operations and performance of the traditional businesses.

Companies tended to structure their breakthrough projects in one of four basic ways. Seven were carried out within existing functional designs, completely integrated into the regular organizational and management structure. Nine were set up as cross-functional teams, groups operating within the established organization but outside the existing management hierarchy. Four took the form of unsupported teams, independent units set up outside the established organization and management hierarchy. And 15 were pursued within ambidextrous organizations, where the breakthrough efforts were organized as structurally independent units, each having its own processes, structures, and cultures but integrated into the existing senior management hierarchy. The exhibit "Organizing to Innovate" provides an overview of these four structures.

We tracked the results of the 35 initiatives along two dimensions. First, we determined their success in creating the desired innovations, as measured by either the actual commercial results of a new product or the application of practical market or technical learning. Second, we looked at the performance of the existing business. Did results hold steady, improve, or decline as the firm worked on its breakthroughs? We found that the organizational design and management practices employed had a direct and significant impact on the performance of both the breakthrough initiative and the traditional business.

When it came to launching breakthrough products or services, ambidextrous organizations were significantly more successful than the other three structures. While none of the cross-functional or unsupported teams and only a quarter of the functional designs produced real innovations, more than 90% of the ambidextrous organizations achieved their goals. (An exception was breakthrough innovations intended to directly substitute for existing products; in these instances, functional designs performed as well as ambidextrous designs.)

The superiority of ambidextrous designs became even more apparent when we examined eight cases in which a company originally organized its breakthrough initiative around functional designs, cross-functional teams, or unsupported teams and then shifted to an ambidextrous design. In seven of the eight cases, the initiative's performance increased substantially after the change. In contrast, three companies started from an ambidextrous design and then moved to one of the others; performance decreased substantially in two of these cases.

When we measured the effects of all 35 initiatives on their existing businesses, we found that ambidextrous organizations were again clearly superior. In almost every instance in which an ambidextrous structure was used, the competitive performance of the existing product either increased or held steady. By contrast, the results of the traditional operations frequently declined where functional designs, cross-functional teams, or unsupported teams were employed. At a theoretical level, it's easy to explain why ambidextrous organizations would outperform other organizational types. The structure of ambidextrous organizations allows cross-fertilization among units while preventing cross-contamination. The tight coordination at the managerial level enables the fledgling units to share important resources from the traditional units-cash, talent, expertise, customers, and so on-but the organizational separation ensures that the new units' distinctive processes, structures, and cultures are not overwhelmed by the forces of "business as usual." At the same time, the established units are shielded from the distractions of launching new businesses; they can continue to focus all their attention and energy on refining their operations, improving their products, and serving their customers.

But how exactly do ambidextrous organizations work? By looking more deeply into the experiences of two such organizations- USA Today and Ciba Vision-we can begin to identify the key managerial and organizational characteristics that underpin their ability to both exploit and explore.

A Newspaper Reinvents Itself

In the late 1990s, USA Today was a thriving business, but it faced an uncertain future. The national newspaper, a division of the Gannett Corporation, had come a long way since its founding in 1982, when its colorful brand of journalism was widely ridiculed by critics. After losing more than half a billion dollars during its first decade, the paper turned its first profit in 1992 and continued to expand rapidly, becoming the most widely read daily newspaper in the United States. With well-heeled business travelers making up the bulk of its subscriber base, it also became an attractive platform for national advertisers, bringing in a steady flow of revenue.

But as the 1990s progressed, storm clouds appeared on the horizon. Newspaper readership was falling steadily, particularly among young people. Competition was heating up, as customers increasingly looked to television and Internet media outlets for news. And newsprint costs were rising rapidly. Tom Curley, USA Today 's president and publisher, recognized that the company would have to expand beyond its traditional print business to maintain strong growth and profits; such expansion, he realized, would require dramatic innovations. The company would need to find ways to apply its existing news-gathering and editing capabilities to entirely new media.

Acting on his beliefs, Curley in 1995 chose Lorraine Cichowski, USA Today's general manager of media projects and former editor of the paper's Money section, to launch an online news service called USAToday.com. He gave her free rein to operate independently from the print business, and she set up a kind of skunk-works operation, bringing in people from outside USA Today and housing them on a different floor from the newspaper. She built a fundamentally different kind of organization, with roles and incentives suited to the instantaneous delivery of news and to an entrepreneurial, highly collaborative culture. With Internet use exploding, the venture seemed primed for success.

But results were disappointing. Although USAToday.com was making a small profit by the end of the decade, its growth was sluggish and had little impact on the broader business's results. The problem, Curley saw, was that the new unit was so isolated from the print operation that it was failing to capitalize on the newspaper's vast resources. Although Cichowski was a member of Curley's executive team, she had little support from other members. Viewing her unit as a competitor with the print business, they had little incentive to help her succeed and made few efforts to share their considerable resources with her. Soon, USAToday.com found itself starved of cash, as the newspaper continued to consume most of the available capital, and the online unit began losing talented staff.

Cichowski pushed to have her business spun out entirely from the newspaper, as other companies were doing with their Internet ventures, but Curley had a very different view. He had come to believe that the new unit required not greater separation but greater integration. In 1999, he decided that USA Today should adopt a "network strategy," in which it would share news content across three platforms: the newspaper, USAToday.com, and Gannett's 21 local television stations. Curley described his vision: "We're no longer in the newspaper business-we're in the news information space, and we'd better learn to deliver content regardless of form."

To execute that strategy, Curley knew he had to create an ambidextrous organization that could sustain the print business yet also pursue innovations in broadcasting and online news. So in 2000, he replaced the leader of USAToday.com with another internal executive who was a strong supporter of the network strategy, and he brought in an outsider to create a television operation, USAToday Direct. Both the online and television organizations remained separate from the newspaper, maintaining distinctive processes, structures, and cultures, but Curley demanded that the senior leadership of all three businesses be tightly integrated. Together with Karen Jurgenson, the editor of USA Today, the heads of the online and television units instituted daily editorial meetings to review stories and assignments, share ideas, and identify other potential synergies. The unit heads quickly saw, for example, that gaining the cooperation of USA Today 's reporters would be crucial to the success of the strategy (print journalists are notorious for hoarding stories), and they jointly decided to train the print reporters in television and Web broadcasting and outfit them with video cameras so they could file stories simultaneously in the different media. The moves quickly paid off, as the reporters realized that their stories would reach a much broader audience-and that they would have the opportunity to appear on TV. A new position of "network editor" was also created in the newsroom to help reporters shape their stories for broadcast media.

At the same time, Curley made larger changes to the organization and its management. He let go of a number of senior executives who did not share his commitment to the network strategy, ensuring that his team would present a united front and deliver consistent messages to the staff. He also changed the incentive program for executives, replacing unit-specific goals with a common bonus program tied to growth targets across all three media. Human resource policies were changed to promote transfers between the different media units, and promotion and compensation decisions began to take into account people's willingness to share stories and other content. As part of that effort, a "Friends of the Network" recognition program was established to explicitly reward cross-unit accomplishments.

Yet even as sharing and synergy were being promoted, the organizational integrity of the three units was carefully maintained. The units remained physically separate, and they each pursued very different staffing models. The staff members of USAToday.com were, on average, significantly younger than the newspaper's reporters and remained far more collaborative and faster paced. Reporters continued to be fiercely independent and to focus on more in-depth coverage of stories than the television staff.

Because of its ambidextrous organization, USA Today has continued to compete aggressively in the mature business of daily print news while also developing a strong Internet franchise and providing Gannett television stations with coverage of breaking news. During the Internet collapse, when other papers' profits plunged, USA Today made $60 million, fueled in large part by the company's ability to continue to attract national advertisers and by revenues from its profitable USAToday.com operation.

A New Lens on Growth

Another company that has used an ambidextrous organization to spur growth through radical innovation is Ciba Vision. Established in the early 1980s as a unit of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the Atlanta-based Ciba Vision sells contact lenses and related eye-care products to optometrists and consumers. Although the company produced some innovative new products in its early years, such as the first FDA-approved bifocal contacts, by the mid-1980s it remained a distant second to market leader Johnson & Johnson. Making matters worse, in 1987 J&J brought out a new, disposable contact lens that threatened Ciba Vision's sales of conventional contacts. By the early 1990s, it was clear to Glenn Bradley, Ciba Vision's president, that J&J's dominance provided economies of scale that would doom his company to ever-shrinking profits. Without radically new products, Ciba Vision would slowly decline and ultimately fail. To survive and grow, Bradley saw, his organization would have to continue making money in the mature conventional-contacts business while simultaneously producing a stream of breakthroughs.

In 1991, Bradley launched six formal development projects, each focused on a revolutionary change. Four entailed new products, including daily disposables and extended-wear lenses, and two involved new manufacturing processes. In a controversial but necessary move, he canceled dozens of small R&D initiatives for conventional lenses to free up cash for the breakthrough efforts. While the traditional units would continue to pursue incremental innovations on their own, the entire corporate R&D budget would now be dedicated to producing breakthroughs.

Bradley knew that attempting to manage these projects under the constraints of the old organization would not work. Inevitably, conflicts over the allocation of human and financial resources would slow down and disrupt the focus needed for breakthrough innovations. Further, the new manufacturing process required different technical skills, which would make communication across old and new units difficult. He therefore decided to create autonomous units for the new projects, each with its own R&D, finance, and marketing functions, and he chose the project leaders for their willingness to challenge the status quo and their ability to operate independently.

Given the freedom to shape their own organizations, the new units created very different structures, processes, and cultures. The extended-wear team remained in Atlanta, though in a facility separate from the conventional-lens business, while the daily-disposables team was located in Germany. Each team hired its own staff, decided on its own reward system, and chose its own process for moving from development to manufacturing.

But even as Bradley understood the importance of protecting the new units from the processes and cultural norms of the old business, he realized they also had to share expertise and resources, both with the traditional business and with one another. He therefore took a number of steps to integrate management across the company.

First and perhaps most important, he had the leaders of all the breakthrough projects report to a single executive, Adrian Hunter, the vice president of R&D, who had a deep knowledge of the existing business and tight relationships with executives throughout the firm. Working closely with Bradley, Hunter carefully managed the trade-offs and conflicts between the old business and the new units. All the leaders of the innovation projects, moreover, were asked to sit in on Bradley's executive team meetings.

Bradley and his team also enunciated a new vision statement for Ciba Vision-"Healthy Eyes for Life"-that was meaningful to all parts of the business. While this move was largely rhetorical, it had an important effect. It underscored the connections between the breakthrough initiatives and the conventional operation, bringing together all employees in a common cause and preventing organizational separation from turning into organizational fragmentation. As Bradley noted, the slogan gave people a social value as well as an economic reason for working together. Like USA Today, Ciba Vision also revamped its incentive system, rewarding managers primarily for overall company performance rather than for the results of their particular units.

The ambidexterity paid off. Over the next five years, Ciba Vision successfully launched a series of contact-lens products, introduced a drug for treating age-related macular degeneration, pioneered a new lens-manufacturing process that dramatically reduced production costs, and overtook J&J in some market segments. The conventional-lens business, moreover, remained profitable enough to generate the cash needed to fund the daily disposables and extended-wear lenses.

At the time the new strategy was adopted, Ciba Vision's annual revenues were stuck at about $300 million. Ten years later, its sales had more than tripled, to over $1 billion, and the new drug, transferred to Novartis's pharmaceutical unit, was on its way to becoming a billion-dollar business. More recently, Ciba Vision has continued to reap the benefits of ambidexterity by pioneering so-called fashion lenses that allow people to change the color of their eyes.

Becoming Ambidextrous

The stories of USA Today and Ciba Vision reveal what it takes to become ambidextrous. (Also see the table "The Scope of the Ambidextrous Organization" for more on what's required.) One of the most important lessons is that ambidextrous organizations need ambidextrous senior teams and managers-executives who have the ability to understand and be sensitive to the needs of very different kinds of businesses. Combining the attributes of rigorous cost cutters and free-thinking entrepreneurs while maintaining the objectivity required to make difficult trade-offs, such managers are a rare but essential breed. Without people like Tom Curley, Karen Jurgenson, Glenn Bradley, and Adrian Hunter-managers who can be, as one of them put it, "consistently inconsistent"- USA Today and Ciba Vision would have had little chance of success.

Ambidextrous organizations encompass two profoundly different types of businesses-those focused on exploiting existing capabilities for profit and those focused on exploring new opportunities for growth. As this table indicates, the two require very different strategies, structures, processes, and cultures.

Another important lesson from the USA Today and Ciba Vision stories is that a company's senior team must be committed to operating ambidextrously even if its members aren't ambidextrous themselves. Resistance at the top levels of an organization can't be tolerated, which means that a shift to an ambidextrous organization can be a wrenching experience. USA Today 's Curley dismissed 40% of his executive team. Ciba Vision's Bradley asked some of the executives overseeing the traditional business to leave when they fought the decision to reallocate R&D investments to the new units. And both leaders backed up their actions with new incentive programs that institutionalized the new management approach.

We have also found that a clear and compelling vision, relentlessly communicated by a company's senior team, is crucial in building ambidextrous designs. These aspirations provide an overarching goal that permits exploitation and exploration to coexist. Curley's "network strategy" and Bradley's "Healthy Eyes for Life" were compelling visions that underscored the strategic necessity of ambidexterity and the benefits for all employees, both those in the traditional units and those in the breakthrough initiatives.

USA Today, well aware of the natural skepticism of newspaper reporters, took a particularly aggressive approach to communicating its new vision, strategy, and organization. Curley launched the effort by appearing at a company meeting dressed as a cyberpunk, complete with blue hair. The message, he recalled, was: "It's a new world, and we need to be ready to move into it." Jurgenson began sending daily e-mails to the entire news staff in which she highlighted the concrete accomplishments of the new approach-for example, explaining exactly how one reporter was able to take a story originally intended for the newspaper and get it onto the Web site and the television stations. In addition, all members of the company's management committee were expected to hold weekly communications meetings within their units as well as workshops focused on the changes employees had to make in their own jobs. As Curley now puts it, "When change is at a revolutionary level, you can't be aggressive enough in confronting the issues."* * *

The forces of inertia in companies are strong. The legions of once successful firms that have fallen on hard times or gone out of business underscore how hard it is to break out of a rut, especially a comfortable, profitable rut. The findings of our research should therefore be heartening to executives. Not only can an established company renew itself through the creation of breakthrough products and processes, but it can do so without destroying or even hampering its traditional business. Building an ambidextrous organization is by no means easy, but the structure itself, combining organizational separation with senior team integration, is not difficult to understand. Given the executive will to make it happen, any company can become ambidextrous.

A version of this article appeared in the April 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Reprint: R0404D Corporate executives must constantly look backward, attending to the products and processes of the past, while also gazing forward, preparing for the innovations that will define the future. This mental balancing act is one of the toughest of all managerial challenges-it requires executives to explore new opportunities even as they work diligently to exploit existing capabilities-and it's no surprise that few companies do it well.

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