Innovation In Crisis Quotes

Grow with discipline. Balance intuition with rigor. Innovate around the core. Don't embrace the status quo. Find new ways to see. Never expect a silver bullet. Get your hands dirty. Listen with empathy and overcommunicate with transparency. Tell your story, refusing to let others define you. Use authentic experiences to inspire. Stick to your values, they are your foundation. Hold people accountable, but give them the tools to succeed. Make the tough choices; it's how you execute that counts. Be decisive in times of crisis. Be nimble. Find truth in trials and lessons in mistakes. Be responsible for what you see, hear, and do. Believe.

The cow is facing its own existential crisis, as industrial cattle farming is being disrupted by alt proteins and plant-based milks that offer alternatives.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.’ – Steve Jobs

In the past decade, we have transitioned from an innovation economy to an exploitation economy. Innovation is dangerous and unpredictable. It changes market dynamics and creates opportunities for nimble new players to steal share from established players.

The final neoliberal fallback is geoengineering, which derives from the core neoliberal doctrine that entrepreneurs, unleashed to exploit acts of creative destruction, will eventually innovate market solutions to address dire economic problems. This is the whiz-bang futuristic science fiction side of neoliberalism, which appeals to male adolescents and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs almost as much as do the novels of Ayn Rand.

Times of crisis and chaos present us with the opportunity to do the best work of our lives. People use words that they pull from the depths of their spirits. People paint with strokes that they summon from their souls. People sing notes that come from the cosmos. People innovate. We must keep doing that.

It is one thing when prices drift downward over time due to innovation, scalability or other efficiencies. This might be considered “good” deflation and is familiar to any contemporary consumer who has seen prices of computers or wide-screen TVs fall year after year. It is another matter when prices are forced down by unnecessary monetary contraction, credit constraints, deleveraging, business failures, bankruptcies and mass unemployment. This may be considered “bad” deflation. This bad deflation was exactly what was required in order to return the most important currencies to their prewar parity with gold.

Simply thinking creatively is not the same as being innovative, and only those who risk breaking out of their comfort zone by putting thought into action will discover the profusion of opportunity that exists.

Sir Winston Churchill rightly said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” How we work has changed forever. How we make medicines for patients is changing, and for the better. We are pushing barriers, testing conventional wisdom and the “way things have always been done.” We are adopting digital technologies and sharing data in ways never imagined to this crisis. We are finding new ways to innovate, with increased speed and efficiency.

As Minsky argued, stability destabilizes. This is an aspect of what George Soros, the successful speculator and innovative economic thinker, calls ‘reflexivity’: the way human beings think determines the reality in which they live.

private school teachers tend to have fewer credentials and to cling to traditional teaching styles, such as lecturing while students sit in rows and take notes. Public school teachers, by contrast, are much more likely to be certified, to hold higher degrees, and to embrace research-based innovations in curriculum and pedagogy

If one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.

In his 1923 review of James Joyce Ulysses, T. S. Eliot focused on one of his generation's recurrent anxieties--the idea that art might be impossible in the twentieth century. The reasons that art seemed impossible are many and complex, but they were all related to the collapse of ways of knowing that had served the Western mind at least since the Renaissance and that had received canonical formulation in the seventeenth century in the science of Newton and the philosophy of Descartes. In both science and philosophy, the crisis was essentially epistemological; that is, it was related to radical uncertainty about how we know what we know about the real world. This crisis, disorienting even to specialists, was at once a cause of despair and an incentive for innovation in the arts.

In 1907 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company faced a crisis. The patents of its founder, Alexander Graham Bell, had expired, and it seemed in danger of losing its near-monopoly on phone services. Its board summoned back a retired president, Theodore Vail, who decided to reinvigorate the company by committing to a bold goal: building a system that could connect a call between New York and San Francisco. The challenge required combining feats of engineering with leaps of pure science. Making use of vacuum tubes and other new technologies, AT&T built repeaters and amplifying devices that accomplished the task in January 1915. On the historic first transcontinental call, in addition to Vail and President Woodrow Wilson, was Bell himself, who echoed his famous words from thirty-nine years earlier, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” This time his former assistant Thomas Watson, who was in San Francisco, replied, “It would take me a week.”1

To understand the fundamental benefits of an immigrant population, imagine that you could divide the population of any country into two groups: one consisting on the average of the youngest, healthiest, boldest, most risk-tolerant, most hard-working, ambitious, and innovative people; the other consisting of everybody else. Transplant the first group to another country, and leave the second group in their country of origin. That selective transplanting approximates the decision to emigrate and its successful accomplishment.

This is the same problem that established companies experience. Their past successes were built on a finely tuned engine of growth. If that engine runs its course and growth slows or stops, there can be a crisis if the company does not have new startups incubating within its ranks that can provide new sources of growth. Companies of any size can suffer from this perpetual affliction. They need to manage a portfolio of activities, simultaneously tuning their engine of growth and developing new sources of growth for when that engine inevitably runs its course.

Marx saw how the successful struggle for a shorter working day caused a crisis for capital. These political economists do not: they see absolute surplus value as a reified abstract concept. Marx saw how that struggle forced the development of productivity-raising innovations which raised the organic composition of capital. He thus saw relative surplus value as a strategic capitalist response. These political economists do not: they see only competition between capitalists. Marx saw how workers' wage struggles could help precipitate capitalist crises. These political economists see only abstract "laws of motion.

possibility is that the crisis happened partly because the economic models of the mainstream rendered that outcome ostensibly so unlikely in theory that they ended up making it far more likely in practice. The insouciance encouraged by the rational-expectations and efficient-market hypotheses made regulators and investors careless. As Minsky argued, stability destabilizes. This is an aspect of what George Soros, the successful speculator and innovative economic thinker, calls ‘reflexivity’: the way human beings think determines the reality in which they live.5 Naive economics helps cause unstable economies. Meanwhile,

Being a brash entrepreneur, Roberts responded to the crisis by deciding to launch a whole new business. He had always been fascinated by computers, and he assumed that other hobbyists felt the same. His goal, he enthused to a friend, was building a computer for the masses that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood once and for all. After studying the instruction set for the Intel 8080, Roberts concluded that MITS could make a do-it-yourself kit for a rudimentary computer that would be so cheap, under $400, that every enthusiast would buy it. “We thought he was off the deep end,” a colleague later confessed.112 Ed Roberts (1941–2010).

People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the problems of my community. I know what they’re looking for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist. A good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the plight of the working class, once told me, “The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things. They’ll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.

Sonnet of Cryptocurrency The reason people are nuts about cryptocurrency, Is that they hear the magic phrase regulation-free. But what they forget to take into account, Is that it also means the user alone bears liability. The purpose behind a centralized system, Is not exploitation but to provide trust and stability. Anything that is decentralized on the other hand, Is a breeding ground for fraud and volatility. Not every fancy innovation is gonna benefit society, Innovation without accountability is only delusion. Cryptocurrency can be a great boon to banking, If it merges with the centralized financial institution. Intoxication of tech is yet another fundamentalism. Algorithm without humanity is digital barbarism.

To understand the fundamental benefits of an immigrant population, imagine that you could divide the population into two groups: one consisting on the average of the youngest, healthiest, boldest, most risk-tolerant, most hard-working, ambitious, and innovative people; the other consisting of everyone else. Transplant the first group to another country, and leave the second group in their country of origin. That selective transplanting approximates the decision to emigrate and its successful accomplishment. Hence it comes as no surprise that more than one-third of American Nobel Prize winners are foreign-born, and over half are either immigrants themselves or else the children of immigrants. That's because Nobel Prize-winning research demands those same qualities of boldness, risk-tolerance, hard work, ambition, and innovativeness.

Schnall’s strong reaction to the failed replication of her own work provoked a mixed reaction from the psychological community. While many psychologists were bewildered by her response, a number of prominent US psychologists voiced support for her position. Dan Gilbert from Harvard University likened Schnall’s battle to the plight of Rosa Parks, and he referred to some psychologists who conducted or supported replications as “bullies,” “replication police,” “second stringers,” McCarthyists, and “god’s chosen soldiers in a great jihad.” Others accused the so-called replicators of being “Nazis,” “fascists,” and “mafia.” Rather than viewing replication as an intrinsic part of best scientific practice, Gilbert and his supporters framed it as a threat to the reputation of the (presumably brilliant) researchers who publish irreproducible findings, stifling their creativity and innovation

Leadership begins with the courage to believe in a better future and the commitment to make it happen." "A leader inspires not by words alone, but by living the values they wish to see in others." "True leaders don’t just create followers; they cultivate more leaders." "Effective leadership is about creating an environment where people feel safe to express themselves and innovate." "Leadership is not a title but a series of actions rooted in accountability and trust." "A great leader balances strength with humility, authority with empathy." "Leaders see beyond obstacles; they envision possibilities and guide others towards them." "Leadership is knowing when to take the lead and when to step back, allowing others to shine." "In moments of crisis, true leaders rise with resilience, guiding their teams through uncertainty." "The essence of leadership is empowering others to discover their own potential and purpose.

...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name. If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.

one of the most powerful use cases of blockchain technology was to inscribe immutable and transparent information that could never be wiped from the face of digital history and that was free for all to see. Satoshi’s choice first to employ this functionality by inscribing a note about bank bailouts made it clear he was keen on never letting us forget the failings of the 2008 financial crisis.

Such risk aversion breeds its own failure. So deeply rooted is gentrification that Richard Florida has now modified his widely acclaimed thesis about the rise of the creative classes. Cities are becoming too successful for their own good. Until recently, he believed they would be the engine rooms of the new economy, embracing the diversity necessary to attract talent. That has certainly happened. Gay pride parades seem to get larger every year. A thousand multicultural flowers are blooming. Yet in squeezing out income diversity, the new urban economies are also shutting off the scope for serendipity. The West’s global cities are like tropical islands surrounded by oceans of resentment. Florida’s latest book is called The New Urban Crisis. Rather than being shaped by those who live there full-time, the characters of our biggest cities are increasingly driven by the global super-rich as a place to park their money. Many of the creative classes are being edged out. Urban downtowns have turned into ‘deadened trophy districts’. New York’s once-bohemian SoHo is now better known for its high-end boutiques than its artists’ studios. SoHo could nowadays be found in any big city in the world. ‘Superstar cities and tech hubs will become so expensive that they will turn into gilded and gated communities,’ Florida predicts.51 ‘Their innovative and creative sparks will eventually fade.’ Karl Marx was wrong: it is the rich who are losing their nation, not the proletariat. The gap between global cities and their national anchors is already a metaphor for our times. By contrast, the rise of the robot economy has only half lodged itself in our expectations. It is easy to dismiss some of Silicon Valley’s wilder talk as the stuff of science-fiction movies. But the gap between sci-fi and reality is closing.

Having spent the better part of my life for the past several decades trying to learn from experts on the climate crisis and working with technology and policy innovators to develop solutions for the unprecedented challenge humanity faces, I have never been more hopeful. At this point in the fight to solve the climate crisis, there are only three questions remaining: Must we change? Can we change? Will we change? In the pages that follow, you will find the best available evidence supporting the overwhelming conclusion that the answer to the first two of these three questions is a resounding “Yes.” I am convinced that the answer to the third question—“Will we change?”—is also “Yes,” but that conclusion, unlike the answer to the first two questions, is in the nature of a prediction. And in order for that prediction to come true, there must be a continued strengthening of the global consensus embodied in the Paris Agreement of December 2015, in which virtually every nation on Earth agreed to take concerted action to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero as early in the second half of this century as possible.

The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a crisis created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it’s a hypothesis that has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory aside conglomerates that were supposed to model chic green lifestyles who have long since moved on to the next fad; at the green products that were shunted to the back of the supermarket shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists who were supposed to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the fraud-infested, boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed miserably to lower emissions; at the natural gas sector that was supposed to be our bridge to renewables but ended up devouring much of their market instead. And most of all, at the parade of billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender.

One way to give labor more power is to make it easier to organize workers by passing labor law reform bills—the perennial campaign promises of Democratic candidates that go perennially unfulfilled. Another is to direct large-scale government investments into key national sectors—clean energy, manufacturing, education, and caregiving—to create jobs, stimulate innovation, and raise the pay and status of workers. And a third is to form new institutions for worker power that are better suited to a postindustrial economy, as Michael Lind argues in The New Class War: labor representation on corporate boards, collective bargaining by sector rather than company, and wage boards that set minimum terms for low-wage industries like fast food.

Our institutions, if they choose to, can learn a lot from the grounded, service-oriented kind of harm reduction embodied in the work being done right now by the people in this book and by so many like them. But, their work is simply not sustainable. Individuals, no matter how inspiring or selfless cannot solve a systemic problem without sustained institutional, governmental support that replicates their heroic innovations.

there’s any silver lining to the crisis, it’s that it will permanently lead to a shift in thinking about what responsible business entails – from splitting the pie by spending money to growing the pie by innovatively using what’s in our hand.

when solar and wind are so cheap. But I believe it is critical to fund them, if only to determine whether the science can work at scale. When Bell Labs first demonstrated the solar cell in the 1950s, it was deemed technically brilliant but financially impractical—at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million to power a house. By their nature, innovations may seem impossible at first—even the ones

But I believe it is critical to fund them, if only to determine whether the science can work at scale. When Bell Labs first demonstrated the solar cell in the 1950s, it was deemed technically brilliant but financially impractical—at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million to power a house. By their nature, innovations may seem impossible at first—even the ones that wind up changing the world.

The intricate brain networks described above evolved over millions of years in environments where interactions were always rich, face-to-face encounters, and social groups were small and tribal. The past two decades, by contrast, are characterized by the rapid spread of digital communication tools—my name for apps, services, or sites that enable people to interact through digital networks—which have pushed people’s social networks to be much larger and much less local, while encouraging interactions through short, text-based messages and approval clicks that are orders of magnitude less information laden than what we have evolved to expect. Perhaps predictably, this clash of old neural systems with modern innovations has caused problems. Much in the same way that the “innovation” of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.

China’s crude oil imports now average more than thirteen million barrels a day. That’s up from just five hundred thousand in 1997 and substantially more than the U.S oil purchases from abroad, which have leveled off at six million barrels a day, mostly from Canada and Mexico. U.S. crude oil imports were offset on a trade basis by exports of about three million barrels a day of U.S. domestically produced crude oil to Asia and Europe prior to the COVID crisis.

Over the past fifty years, we have introduced innovation after innovation that has overlooked, depleted, and destroyed our microbiomes. It’s no coincidence that in the same time frame there has simultaneously been a stark increase in major diseases, from obesity to the current mental health crisis to the autoimmune epidemic that I treat in my clinics every day.

The European princes create among themselves a jus publicum Europaeum, a secular legal order under which they recognize each other's rights and interests, within Europe (the proviso here is crucial). Beyond the line, in the extra-European world, Europeans engage in large-scale appropriations of land, respecting neither the rights of the locals nor each other's rights, but within Europe a different modus vivendi is possible. In the extra-European world appalling atrocities occur which would not happen, or at least ought not to happen, in Europe.5

A superficial reading of Schmitt, focusing on his subtitle, might take the concept of the jus publicum Europaeum (hereafter JPE) to be synonymous with the notion of international law (Völkerrecht), but for Schmitt the two notions are completely different, indeed opposed to one another. Schmitt objects to the notion of international law for two, interconnected, reasons. First, international law lacks the spatial aspect which is central to the JPE; it purports to offer a universal account of international order, blurring the crucial distinction between the European and the non-European worlds. But second, and more important, international law is, for Schmitt, a progressive, liberal project which is subject to the same critique as he delivers against liberalism in general, namely that it undermines the political and acts as a cover for special interests.

It is equally easy to see how Schmitt associates this notion of international law with the United States – but it is worth noting that for Schmitt, unlike Carr and other realists, the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson is not central to this critique, or rather is simply a continuation of early American policies. The key date here is not 1919 but 1823, the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine which symbolizes the emergence of a new kind of imperial rule. The Monroe Doctrine purports to warn off European powers from attempting to take new territories in the Americas, but actually involves an assertion of American power over the rest of the Western hemisphere. This is a new kind of Empire, a hegemony under which the US dominates usually without actually formally ruling; the US often intervenes in the affairs of the lesser American powers, and sometimes does so militarily, but always in the name of progressive values and in the putative interests of the locals – this is a form of rule that is both more effective than traditional empire because it does not involve the usual administrative costs, but also more hypocritical, because it denies its own nature, pretending to exercise power only in the interests of others.

The League of Nations Covenant (which specifically endorses the Monroe Doctrine) represents the global extension of this hegemony. The US did not join the League, but American economic power underwrote the peace settlement and, eventually, in the Second World War, US military power was brought to bear to bring down the jus publicum Europaeum and replace it with 'international law', liberal internationalism and, incipiently, the notion of humanitarian intervention in support of the liberal, universalist, positions that the new order had set in place. On Schmitt's account, the two world wars were fought to bring this about – and the barbarism of modern warfare is to be explained by the undermining of the limits established in the old European order. In effect, the notion of a Just War has been reborn albeit without much of its theological underpinnings. The humanized warfare of the JPE with its recognition of the notion of a 'just enemy' is replaced by the older notion that the enemy is evil and to be destroyed – in fact, is no longer an 'enemy' within Schmitt's particular usage of the term but a 'foe' who can, and should, be annihilated. Schmitt

The 'Amboyna Massacre' of 1623 is perhaps the most famous illustration of this point. The Dutch and English East India companies were then competing for the spice trade of the East Indies; neither was satisfied with the division of the spoils set out in a trade treaty between the United Provinces and England of 1619, and in retaliation for an English attack on the Dutch 'Factory' on Jakarta, the Dutch at Amboyna on the Molucca Islands turned on the English Factory there – the ten English factors (i.e. traders) who survived the initial attack, and their nine Japanese assistants, were subsequently tortured to death. 6

As between European rulers within Europe, war became 'bracketed' – rationalized and humanized. Rather than a divine punishment, war became an act of state. Whereas in the medieval order the enemy must necessarily be seen as unjust (the alternative being that one was, oneself, unjust – clearly an intolerable prospect), the new humanitarian approach to war involved the possibility of the recognition of the other as a justus hostis, an enemy but a legitimate enemy, not someone who deserves to be annihilated, but someone in whom one can recognize oneself, always a good basis for a degree of restraint. This, for Schmitt, is the great achievement of the age, and the ultimate justification for – glory of, even – the sovereign state. [An]

Averting the looming (pick your favorite term) catastrophe, time bomb, crisis, or emergency, requires us to hew to their worldview, one in which we humans are the problem and the Earth is the object to be saved. The biggest and most influential environmental groups routinely preach a message of doom. They regularly claim, for instance, that technology is dangerous (their opposition to nuclear and GMOs are obvious examples of this mindset) and that industrial development must be stopped in order to the save the planet. However, the painful paradox is that they are aiming to stop many of the innovations that are helping to improve the environment and raise the living standards of millions of people. They are also promoting energy policies that would be ruinous for the environment they say they want to protect.

I nostri cinque peccati che scoraggiano ricerca e innovazione Dalla politica all’università, il sistema italiano continua a ostacolare l’economia della conoscenza Start-up al palo Dai laboratori al business: in Italia è ancora difficile riuscire a trasferire le scoperte teoriche nell’industria Riccardo Viale | 831 parole Da quando è stato introdotto il concetto di economia e di società della conoscenza, come importante elemento delle politiche pubbliche, si è iniziato ad analizzare l’insieme delle condizioni di contorno - le «framework condition» - in grado di stimolare o di ostacolare lo sviluppo di questo modello. La strategia di Lisbona del 2000 aveva lo scopo di rendere l’Europa l’area più competitiva a livello mondiale proprio come economia e società della conoscenza. Oggi abbiamo i risultati: in media c’è stato un arretramento, secondo la maggior parte degli indicatori, rispetto ai principali concorrenti internazionali. E l’Italia? Come si può immaginare, non ha realizzato alcun serio passo in avanti: non solo per le condizioni dirette (come finanziamento alla ricerca, numero di ricercatori e di brevetti, indici bibliometrici o rapporto università-impresa), ma per le «framework conditions». Ma più che dare dati vorrei riferirmi ad una serie di situazioni tipiche, ragionando con il modello degli incentivi dal macro al micro. Per mostrare come la dinamica sociale ed economica italiana sia intrisa di incentivi negativi. La logica del breve termine Innanzitutto, a livello di sistema politico e di governo nazionale e regionale, gli obiettivi dell’economia e della società della conoscenza sono in genere percepiti di medio e lungo termine. Di conseguenza, in un Paese che vive lo «shortermismo» della logica emergenziale, nulla è più marginale del sistema della Ricerca&Sviluppo. Questo «bias», d’altra parte, non è solo italiano, se si considera la recente scelta di Juncker di indebolire il fondo «Horizon 2020» per potenziare quello di stimolo immediato all’economia. Seconda tipologia. Le università italiane sono fuori da tutte le graduatorie internazionali. Anche le migliori, come il Politecnico di Milano e Torino o la Bocconi, sono a metà classifica. Si sa che uno degli strumenti prioritari per stimolare l’eccellenza e la diversificazione accademica è la «premialità economica» dei migliori atenei, secondo un sistema simile a quello del «Rae» britannico: lasciando da parte il problema del mediocre sistema italiano della valutazione, mentre in Gran Bretagna l’incentivo economico arriva a un terzo del finanziamento pubblico, da noi si ferma a molto meno (anche se dai tempi del ministro Moratti si vede un certo progresso). Non esiste, quindi, un sufficiente effetto incentivante di tipo meritocratico sulla produzione di conoscenza. Terza tipologia. Anni fa, in Lombardia, una multinazionale della telefonia aveva proposto un centro di ricerca avanzato. Ciò avrebbe consentito una collaborazione con i centri di ricerca già presenti nel territorio, in primis il Politecnico di Milano. Cosa successe dopo? Una lista di problemi, ostacoli ed incoerenze tipiche della pubblica amministrazione. Tutto questo era in contrasto con il programma dell’azienda, che decise di trasferire il progetto in un altro Paese. Quarta tipologia. Spesso si parla di sostenere le nuove idee per garantire la nascita di start-up ed imprese innovative. Ma quale incentivo può avere un ingegnere o un biochimico a creare una «newcom», quando è quasi impossibile trovare il «seed money» (quello per le fasi iniziali) nelle banche ed è quasi inesistente il capitale di rischio del venture capital, mentre non si ha la possibilità di valorizzare finanziariamente una start-up a livello di Borsa, dato che manca, in Italia ma anche in Europa, un analogo del Nasdaq? La crisi del fund raising Infine - quinta ed ultima (tra le molte) tipologia di disincentivi - è la capacità di «fund raising» per la ricerca dei

The new thinking about war also opened up the possibility of neutrality as a legal status; since war was no longer justified in accordance with a theological judgement based on notions of good and evil, it became possible for third parties to stand aside if their interests were not engaged. Equally, the ordinary subjects of belligerent rulers need not feel obliged to become emotionally engaged in the fray. War becomes a matter for sovereigns and their servants, civil and military; the kind of wider involvement that might be appropriate to a war between good and evil becomes strictly optional.6

Some unfortunate companies wind up following this strategy inadvertently. Because they are using vanity metrics and traditional accounting, they think they are making progress when they see their numbers growing. They falsely believe they are making their product better when in fact they are having no impact on customer behavior. The growth is all coming from an engine of growth that is working—running efficiently to bring in new customers—not from improvements driven by product development. Thus, when the growth suddenly slows, it provokes a crisis.

Along with Schmitt, neo-Aristotelianism is critical of the search for universal legal and/or moral rules, and, again following Schmitt, neo-Aristotelians associate this tendency with the characteristic moral theories of liberalism, in particular Kantianism and utilitarianism. However, unlike Schmitt, Toulmin at least locates the origin of this tendency not with the Anglo-American thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but much earlier – in fact, just at the point where Schmitt's jus publicum Europaeum is first established, in the early seventeenth century. This is when, Toulmin argues, the moral insights of Renaissance humanism and the classical world were put aside. Under the influence of Descartes and Hobbes, along with many lesser talents, formal logic came to displace rhetoric, general principles and abstract axioms were privileged over particular cases and concrete diversity, and the establishment of rules (or 'laws') that were deemed of permanent as opposed to transitory applicability came to be seen as the task of the theorist. Toulmin suggests that at this time moral reasoning became 'theory-centered' rather than 'practically-minded

Consolidation will not get at the core problems our cities face. If we want to build resilience and find solutions to our problems, we need to embrace the chaos — the innovation along with the failure — of natural systems, and create a framework where local governments can experiment with different responses to the current crisis.

comparing yourself with others. Measure your success only against what you are capable of achieving. If you are in college, the college you attend does not define you; it is what you make of it. Nothing beats hard work with focus and passion. Stretch yourself. Be resourceful, creative, and open-minded in all sorts of situations. Plan ahead and act with purpose, but allow room to explore, experiment, and discover. Be multifaceted. Build your emotional and mental muscles in tenacity, resilience, and perseverance. Don’t be surprised if a breakthrough emerges from a well-managed crisis. Don’t be afraid to be an influential and innovative change-maker. Don’t accept the status quo if you know things must be improved and you

There’s an obvious limit to stress-induced innovation. There’s a delicate balance between helpful stress and crippling disaster. The latter prevents innovation as resources are sapped and people turn their attention from getting out of a crisis to merely surviving it.

Cheap credit often fuels asset bubbles, as seen with the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis of 2008. Similarly, cryptoasset bubbles can be created using extreme margin on some exchanges, where investors are effectively gambling with money they don’t have.

It is estimated that the financial burden of mental illness worldwide will reach $16 trillion by 2030. The World Health Organization reports that over 300 million people suffer from depression alone, making it the leading cause of disability worldwide. That projection is not only disturbing but emphasizes the need to seek disruptive, innovative approaches to psychiatric disease. Mobilehealth can help fill these needs for at least two reasons: given the number of available mental health professionals, it is virtually impossible for all those in need of those services to be cared for face-to-face, a dilemma that is especially acute in low and middle-income countries. And there is also some evidence to suggest that many patients are more willing to open up about their psychological concerns online during an anonymous consultation. 

Edison epitomized the new entrepreneur at the heart of a brand-new phase in the development of market societies: an inventor who innovated in order to create monopoly power for himself – not so much for the riches that it provided, but for its own sake; for the sheer glory and the sheer power of it all. He was an entrepreneur who inspired, in equal measure, incredible loyalty from his overworked staff and loathing from his adversaries. He was a friend of Henry Ford, who also famously played a key role in bringing machinery into the lives of ordinary people while, at the same time, turning workers into the nearest a person can come to a machine.

When Bell Labs first demonstrated the solar cell in the 1950s, it was deemed technically brilliant but financially impractical—at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million to power a house. By their nature, innovations may seem impossible at first—even the ones that wind up changing the world.

An unexpected trial or a significant crisis changes everything. Groups that were previously static, superficial, or even bored with one another go deep practically overnight. Forced to become the hands and feet of Jesus, they live out the body of Christ metaphor as a daily reality. And when they do, “my small group” quickly becomes “my family.” The beauty of this laid-back, trust-the-Holy-Spirit-to-do-exactly-what-Jesus-said-he-would-do approach is that it takes the pressure off our leadership team. We don’t have to produce elaborate schemes, structures, and processes to produce spirituality. All we have to do is provide an environment where people are connected closely enough and long enough for life to happen and for God to show up. It’s organic and simple. And it works.

The United States will deal with it as it always does, with its citizens going through a decade of intense political rage at each other, accompanied by an economic crisis and a social one: the old against the young, and the problem of innovation leading to instability. Finally, the political process will create a solution, with a failing president who worships the old cycle, followed by one who will claim credit for presiding over the new cycle and its solutions.

When you solve problems for your team instead of with your team, you teach them to stop thinking. Take time to slow down just enough, even during times of crisis, to bring others along and help them rise to the occasion. Don’t be a hero, be a hero farmer.

In the year before Joanna’s protest at its Manila office, Shell paid out more money to its shareholders than any other company in the world: $20 billion, comfortably beating second-placed Apple. Its chief executive Ben van Beurden earned over $62,000 a day. Such fantastic rewards were possible only because the full costs of Shell’s products were being shouldered by others, who would continue to bear them − along with people yet unborn − far into the future.

... capitalism encourages risk-taking and optimism, which in turn leads to innovation that transforms both production and society itself... However, innovation and growth generate a milieu of pervasive uncertainty: since the process of innovation itself transforms the future, there is no capacity for a rational anticipation of it.

We might want to consider instead the new opportunities and affinities that are opened up through coming together to fight the environmental crisis. Ecological justice groups like Extinction Rebellion are calling for citizens’ assemblies—innovative institutions that can allow people, communities, even entire countries, to make important decisions in ways that may be more just and fairer than party politics. Similar to jury service, members are randomly selected from across the country. The process is designed to ensure that assemblies reflect the population in regard to characteristics like gender, age, ethnicity, education level, and geography. Assembly members hear from experts and those most affected by an issue. Members then come together in small groups with professional facilitators and together work through their differences and draft and vote on recommendations.69

Technological innovations and uneven rates of absorbing them matter, as do demographics, leadership, culture, policies, and fortune. The result of these and other factors was a first half of the twentieth century that was unprecedented in its disorder, and a second half characterized by considerable order, however different in its origins and however unexpected.

The possibility of a seamless network of electrified robo-taxis, self-driving delivery vehicles, and public transit linked to smartphone applications might seem like science fiction, but the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in 2020 gave a flavor of what is to come. In China’s pandemic epicenter of Wuhan, unmanned, autonomous electric vehicles, monitored remotely from a computer screen in a different location, were used to deliver hospital supplies, to disinfect isolation areas, and to deliver meals to quarantined people.

This has been referred to as the doux commerce thesis: that commerce could in certain circumstances become a force for peace since trade relied upon toleration, generating soft-power linkages capable of preventing conflict.24 The possibility of peace between Britain and France was Hume’s positive response to what he identified as the most shocking innovation in modern politics: the linkage between war and trade.25 This linkage was the greatest threat to enlightenment as Hume defined it.

Every crisis is an opportunity to reinvent, innovate, rebuild and to bounce back harder & stronger. We will be alright

But there’s nothing complicated about how this dynamic can generate a regular long-term cycle of action and reaction, of innovation and compensation.

A new spirit had taken hold of Eastern Europe by 1900. It might be most easily characterized as a violent disjuncture between the heart and the head. Materially, things had never been better. Europe was nearing the end of almost a half-century of (barely) interrupted peace. Most adults had never heard a shot fired in anger. That same half-century witnessed an unprecedented burst of economic growth and technical innovation. When steamships were dropping passengers off at Dereszewicze, citizens of Budapest were already riding the city's first underground metro line, which had opened in 1896. Cities, for the first time, were illuminated at night, something Eastern Europe took an unexpected lead in: Lviv was the first city to use modern kerosene lamps, and Timişoara, in present-day Romania, was the first city in Europe to be lilt by electricity. Railways now crisscrossed the continent, reaching even Janina's home in the forgotten Lithuanian hamlet of Bieniakonie. Grain from Ukraine flooded the American market, while wood from the remotest forests of Lithuania could be shipped all the way to Liverpool and beyond. Buoyed by these new connections, landowners grew suddenly and unexpectedly rich. . . . But however prosperous things might have seemed, spiritually there was a feeling of mounting crisis. Everywhere people put their trust in progress and scientific discovery, to the detriment of older faiths. In politics, nationalism still held sway -- indeed its influence had never been greater -- but in the arts, its primacy had begun to wane. The great national bards were still being celebrated, ut more as icons of struggle than as writers to be read. Young people especially craved something new.

L'Occidente, e al suo interno l'Italia, saprà sopravvivere anche a questo lungo inverno se attingerà alle qualità del suo modello, non se ammirerà chi lo odia. Il lungo inverno può preludere a una stagione di creatività, in cui troveremo risposte innovative ai nostri problemi energetici ed economici

In recent years, regulation failed to keep pace with rapid innovations in the markets

The system hasn’t kept pace with financial innovation and needs to be fixed so that we have the capacity and the authority to respond to constantly evolving global capital markets.

Much in the same way that the “innovation” of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.

By 1929 GM had delivered its millionth refrigerator, by 1932 (even though the country was in the middle of the century’s greatest economic recession) the total was up to 2.25 million units, and then, despite the continued economic crisis followed by World War II (with industrial mobilization for military production), the share of US households owning a refrigerator rose from just 10 percent in 1930 to nearly 60 percent in 1945 and to 90 percent in 1952.

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08 represented the greatest financial downswing of my lifetime, and consequently it presents the best opportunity to observe, reflect and learn. The scene was set for its occurrence by a number of developments. Here’s a partial list: Government policies supported an expansion of home ownership—which by definition meant the inclusion of people who historically couldn’t afford to buy homes—at a time when home prices were soaring; The Fed pushed interest rates down, causing the demand for higher-yielding instruments such as structured/levered mortgage securities to increase; There was a rising trend among banks to make mortgage loans, package them and sell them onward (as opposed to retaining them); Decisions to lend, structure, assign credit ratings and invest were made on the basis of unquestioning extrapolation of low historic mortgage default rates; The above four points resulted in an increased eagerness to extend mortgage loans, with an accompanying decline in lending standards; Novel and untested mortgage backed securities were developed that promised high returns with low risk, something that has great appeal in non-skeptical times; Protective laws and regulations were relaxed, such as the Glass-Steagall Act (which prohibited the creation of financial conglomerates), the uptick rule (which prevented traders who had bet against stocks from forcing them down through non-stop short selling), and the rules that limited banks’ leverage, permitting it to nearly triple; Finally, the media ran articles stating that risk had been eliminated by the combination of: the adroit Fed, which could be counted on to inject stimulus whenever economic sluggishness developed, confidence that the excess liquidity flowing to China for its exports and to oil producers would never fail to be recycled back into our markets, buoying asset prices, and the new Wall Street innovations, which “sliced and diced” risk so finely, spread it so widely and placed it with those best suited to bear it.

Although there had been a growing familiarization and awareness programs by nutrition experts on the importance of eating well; this crisis has tipped good intentions into actual actions for most people. In turn, there has been a great boost in the food sector.

The global financial crisis was caused by excesses of the liberal system of regulations and the belief that a completely free market will allow enormous innovation and allocate capital to the most profitable enterprises with the highest returns. Once the Federal Reserve Chairman decided it was not necessary to regulate derivatives and supervise them, the fuse was lit. Once you find that you can mash up a lot of good and bad assets in one bundle and pass on your risk all around Europe and other parts of the world, you have started something like a Ponzi scheme which must come to an end sometime…The business of a person in a financial institution is to make the biggest profit for himself, so just condemning the bankers and the profit takers does not make sense. You have allowed these rules, and they work within these rules.

When disruptive change appears on the horizon, managers need to assemble the capabilities to confront the change before it has affected the mainstream business. In other words, they need an organization that is geared toward the new challenge before the old one, whose processes are tuned to the existing business model, has reached a crisis that demands fundamental change.

The only major cycle pointing up is the 500-year cycle, and that’s why I don’t see the deep economic and financial crisis ahead as the end of the world as we know it, as some of my bearish colleagues would have us believe. It’s criminal that the president and his men and women (and, in fact, all world leaders and their “support staff” and their economists) can’t see what’s right in front of their faces! The worst years for these Four Fundamentals will be between late 2017 and early 2020. Period! There will be aftershocks into at least late 2022, before three of my four cycles turn back up again together. The demographic cycle turns up around 2023. The Geopolitical Cycle and the Boom/Bust Cycle turn up again after early 2020. Only the Innovation Cycle continues to move sideways until 2032–33.

The worst crisis would be over the next several years, and it would then take decades to really pay off in a rising economic-productivity cycle again. Here’s what that four-stage trend looks like: Stage #1: From the late 1800s to 1945, the innovation stage of globalization saw Globalization Boom #1 peak in 1912. Two world wars and the Great Depression sorted out political imbalances before globalization could fully blossom again . . . and blossom it did. Stage #2: From 1946 to 2012 or so, we got the growth phase, or Globalization Boom #2. Stage #3: From 2012 into as late as 2078, we’ll get a shakeout period in globalization. Geopolitical imbalances must first be corrected before the next global boom can occur . . . and this will be a great challenge and take decades, not years. Stage #4: From around 2078 to around 2145, we’ll get the maturity boom phase with Globalization Boom #3. So, by 2140–45, the world should be nearly 90 percent urban, with peaking long-term demographic trends and middle-class living standards higher almost everywhere. This is likely to be the best the world economy will look for a long time to follow, and the next dynamic longer-term global boom from around 2078 into 2145 will rival 1945–2007. But between now and the 2070s, the global boom will be a much more mixed picture than the blockbuster period of globalization that ran from World War II to 2016.

But what’s most striking in the letter quoted above is the verb trasferire (to transfer): that need to enter the world of the ancients, the very opposite of the desire to haul them into the present age. To enter into contact with the ancients requires a transference of oneself, as clearly indicated by the Latin preposition trans: this is an effort to understand historically, to step out of one’s individual identity and approach the other. Only then can the past take on meaning and give pleasure. Mere pastism? An inability to live in the present? Not at all. In the next paragraph of this same letter, Machiavelli goes on to describe his work on The Prince, one of the most innovative texts of all time. In fact, he even intends to intervene in the present with this treatise, providing drastic solutions to the current crisis.

But the contradiction remains and the cycle repeats itself: the capital investment needed to raise productivity through innovation means constant capital grows relative to variable capital and also, therefore, the surplus value produced by variable capital. Surplus value is converted into capital faster than it is produced and so capital once again over-accumulates. And because the overall mass of capital is now even greater than before, an even greater magnitude of surplus value is required alongside an even greater devaluation of capital in order to reproduce and expand it yet further. Crisis is therefore inherent to the system, as increasing magnitudes of capital become dormant while waiting for profitable conditions to return, and cannot be put down merely to ‘greed’, hoarding or the ‘bad’ or ‘erroneous choices’ of capitalists, politicians, economists and civil servants. Private and public debt rises not because of arbitrary overspending but in order to make up for the insufficient production of surplus value.

This great strategic reversal has produced few alternatives to the ideas and ideologies that dominated the industrial age. The public rides on new technologies and platforms, but as users rather than makers: it is uninterested in leveraging technical innovation to formulate its own ideology, programs, or plans. The public opposes, but does not propose. So in the second decade of the new millennium, political arguments resemble a distorted echo of the French Revolution or Victorian England: we still quarrel in terms of left and right, conservative and liberal, even while the old landscape has been swept clean and the relevance of these venerable labels has become uncertain.

Vannevar Bush rescued a large organization, dominated by a powerful franchise, in a crisis caused by a failure to innovate: the US military.

A decent signal an industry is vulnerable is the presence of pseudo innovation—the addition of features that add no real value to the product; membership clubs that don’t deliver any real savings or convenience; movie theaters whose online ordering is more of a hassle than buying the ticket at the venue; colleges investing in luxury accommodations instead of educational resources. Those are the home remedies of a management team that knows the patient requires surgery but doesn’t want to endure real cost and pain.

Since the launch of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, tens of thousands of their comrades in the urban centers had been working tirelessly to build power stations, steel mills, and manufacturing plants for heavy machinery. As this historic effort unfolded, it would be essential for the country’s grain-producing regions to do their part—by meeting the increased demand for bread in the cities with leaps in agricultural production. But to pave the way for this ambitious effort, it was deemed necessary to exile a million kulaks—those profiteers and enemies of the common good, who also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers. The remaining peasants, who viewed newly introduced approaches to agriculture with resentment and suspicion, proved antagonistic to even the smallest efforts at innovation. Tractors, which were meant to usher in the new era by the fleet, ended up being in short supply. These challenges were compounded by uncooperative weather resulting in a collapse of agricultural output. But given the imperative of feeding the cities, the precipitous decline in the harvest was met with increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint. In 1932, the combination of these intractable forces would result in widespread hardship for the agricultural provinces of old Russia, and death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine. (While many of the young loyalists (like Nina) who joined the udarniks in the countryside would have their faith in the Party tested by what they witnessed, most of Russia, and for that matter the world, would be spared the spectacle of this man-made disaster. For just as peasants from the countryside were forbidden to enter the cities, journalists from the cities were forbidden to enter the countryside; delivery of personal mail was suspended; and the windows of passenger trains were blackened. In fact, so successful was the campaign to contain awareness of the crisis, when word leaked out that millions were starving in Ukraine, Walter Duranty, the lead correspondent for The New York Times in Russia (and one of the ringleaders in the Shalyapin Bar), would report that these rumors of famine were grossly exaggerated and had probably originated with anti-Soviet propagandists. Thus, the world would shrug. And even as the crime unfolded, Duranty would win the Pulitzer Prize.)

most discussions of George W. Bush’s foreign policy focus on the supposed innovation of a small group of neoconservative intellectuals in asserting the right to unilateral preemptive military action both to defend national security and to advance American ideals. But neither the neocons’ dire view of a crisis-ridden world that justifies the use of unilateral and brutal American military power nor their utopian vision of the same world made whole and happy by that power is new. Both have been fully in operation in Washington’s approach to Latin America for over a century. The history of the United States in Latin America is cluttered with “preemptive” interventions that even the most stalwart champions of U.S. hegemony have trouble defending.

How can we harness the wind of change for growth? How can we thrive in times of worldwide change? And more specifically, how can leaders turn a crisis into a business opportunity?

As you are pitching your idea, the croc brain of the person sitting across from you isn't 'listening' and thinking, 'Hmm, is this a good deal or not?' Its reaction to your pitch basically goes like this: 'Since this is not an emergency, how can I ignore this or spend the least amount of time possible on it?' This filtering system of the crocodile brain has a very short-sighted view of the world. Anything that is not a crisis it tries to mark as 'spam.' If you got a chance to look at the croc brain's filtering instructions, it would look something like this: 1. If it's not dangerous, ignore it 2. If it's not new and exciting, ignore it. 3. If it is new, summarize it as quickly as possible - and forget about the details. And finally there is this specific instruction: 4. Do not send anything up to the neocortex for problem solving unless you have a situation that is really unexpected and out of the ordinary. These are the basic operating policies and procedures of our brains. No wonder pitching is so difficult.

The financial crisis didn't happen because its techniques didn't work; it happened because they worked all too well. There is an element of truth to Warren Buffett's characterization of these techniques as 'financial weapons of mass destruction.' Securization, credit default swaps, and other derivative securities are the financial equivalent of Einstein's famous formula. Global financial markets contain enormous financial energy, and when detonated in an uncontrolled and irresponsible manner, you get bubbles, crashes, and years of nuclear fallout. But the analogy works both ways - it also implies that when we use these tools carefully and responsibly, we get virtually unlimited power for fueling innovation and economic growth.

We will need more of mental resilience; innovation, creative thinking and social connect to overcome and thrive post the COVID19 outbreak crisis.

The trillion-dollar question is whether tech can disperse our workforce without reducing a culture of innovation and productivity.

The opportunity for disruption in an industry can be correlated to a handful of factors—a disruptability index. The key signal is dramatic increase in price with no accompanying increase in value or innovation. This is also known as unearned margin. The poster child for this is my sector, higher education. Consider a university lecture. Whether you are 19 or 90, you likely picture the same thing. An auditorium, an older person at the front, a group of young people in the seats, lecture, notes, teaching assistants. Almost nothing has changed in forty years, or even eighty. But there has been one dramatic change—the price. College tuition has increased 1,400% in the past 40 years.1 A red flag for disruption.

but imagine for a moment that back in 1975, instead of facing a cash crisis Southwest had deep pockets filled with venture capital. Its leaders may have never discovered the innovative solution to quickly turning airplanes based on coordination and cooperation among every job function, from pilot to gate personnel. The company could easily be a footnote in aviation history, like People Express, Skybus, and scores of others. “Not enough” money was certainly the catalyst, the mother of Southwest Airlines’ first reinvention.

Subsidy dependency has been coupled with the huge upturn in the so-called ‘financialisation’ of industry, whereby a company’s funds are increasingly dedicated to repurchasing their own shares in order to boost their stock price. In 2010, for example, the US American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) asked the US government to triple state spending on clean energy to $16bn a year, at the end of a decade in which the companies comprising the council had spent $237bn on stock repurchases.477 From 2008 to 2017, 466 S&P 500 companies distributed $4 trillion to shareholders as buybacks, equal to 53% of profits, along with $3.1 trillion as dividends.This is explained away on the social democratic left as shareholder greed. But it is driven by the need to valorise capital. We did not cover it earlier, but Marx identified the increasing role of share capital as one of the main counter-tendencies.

Enter José Antonio González: socialist mayor of the small Granadan city of Jun and part-time hacker, who had brought innovation to his town’s democracy by introducing direct public participation through social networks with help from MIT researchers and the support of Twitter’s very own CEO.

Living architecture is a long way from becoming a mainstream practice. Yet the ability to mitigate climate change is of the utmost importance to every architect. In the United States we suffer from a lifestyle that absorbs too much of Earth’s resources within a rampant culture of affluenza. Searching for innovative strategies to help solve our current eco-crisis is vital to human survival. New directions in biological design are a magnificent approach to going beyond survivalist routines. Bio-design is the next step toward a resilient harmony where humankind and nature seamlessly blend.

Myth #3: Kaizen Is Slow; Innovation Is Quicker Perhaps the most dramatic example of what can happen when innovation is used and abused is Toyota, a company that calls kaizen its soul. For most of its history after World War II, Toyota exemplified quality automobile manufacturing. Consumers bought Toyotas not for the styling or prestige but for their unparalleled reliability. But by 2002, Toyota management decided it was not enough to build the highest-quality and most-profitable cars—it wanted to be the biggest car company in the world. And the company succeeded. It built factories rapidly and added enough capacity to produce three million additional automobiles in just six years. But productivity came at a high price: Suppliers could not sustain the quality for which Toyota was known, and the new factories did not have the time to build a kaizen culture. The result was over nine million recalls and some well-deserved bad publicity. Here is an internal memo written before the crisis became public: “We make so many cars in so many different places with so many people. Our greatest fear is that as we keep growing, our ability to maintain the discipline of kaizen will be lost.” —Teruo Suzuki General Manager, Human Resources In time, Toyota recognized that abandoning kaizen drove the company away from a commitment to its core principles. Since the crisis, Toyota has slowed down production, given local managers in the U.S. more responsibility for quality control, and trained new workers in the kaizen culture. Toyota has returned to focusing on quality, not quantity, as its mission, with an emphasis on correcting defects in production while they are small and easily fixed. And Toyota’s reputation for quality has been restored. The company’s story is an excellent illustration of the ways in which kaizen builds habits that can last a lifetime and helps avoid the painful consequences of steps that may, in retrospect, have been too big for the individual or the work group to swallow.

Batteries: The Key to a Renewable Future Modern civilization depends upon a constant, reliable stream of energy. However, renewables such as wind and solar are notoriously intermittent; wind depends on the whim of nature, and solar power dries up as the sun goes down. Batteries solve this problem by storing excess power generated throughout the day and supplying it in the absence of sunlight or wind. In addition, batteries respond well to high electricity demands, help lower energy costs, and ensure reliability. They are the most crucial components in any clean power future. Power storage is a much more difficult technological problem than power generation. From lithium ion to rechargeable flow, inventors and developers have experimented with many new ideas. There is not yet a magic bullet to solve our power storing needs. The good news, however, is that in the past decade, batteries have made great strides in capacity and lower prices. This is due in part to the electric vehicle industry, which relies heavily on efficient lithium ion batteries. In 2016, Tesla Inc. began manufacturing its Powerwall and Powerpack energy products at its Gigafactory, currently the world’s largest lithium ion battery factory. The goal of the plant is to drive down the cost of the company’s electric vehicle and energy storage batteries while also spurring innovation. Doing so, according to the company, will make renewable energy storage a more accessible and viable option.

Crisis has always driven innovation, but we must shift the narrative. As leaders, it’s essential to encourage your team to conduct fast, fearless experiments more often and to strive for greater efficiency every day—without waiting for the pressure of a crisis.