The Innovation Blind Spot

Our innovation economy is broken. But there's good news: The ideas that will solve our problems are hiding in plain sight. While big companies in the American economy have never been more successful, entrepreneurial activity is near a 30-year low. More businesses are dying than starting every day. Investors continue to dump billions of dollars into photo-sharing apps and food-delivery services, solving problems for only a wealthy sliver of the world's population, while challenges in health, food security, and education grow more serious. In The Innovation Blind Spot, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ross Baird argues that the innovations that truly matter don't see the light of day—for reasons entirely of our own making. A handful of people in a handful of cities are deciding, behind closed doors, which entrepreneurs get a shot to succeed. And most investors are what Baird calls "two-pocket thinkers"—artificially separating their charitable work from their day job of making a profit. The resulting system creates rising income inequality, stifled entrepreneurial ambition, social distrust, and political uncertainty. Our innovation problem makes all our other problems harder to solve. In this book, Baird demonstrates how and where to find better ideas by lifting up people, places, and industries that are often overlooked. What's more, Baird ultimately outlines how to create long-term success through "one-pocket thinking"—eliminating the blind spot that separates "what we do for a living" and "what we really care about."

Javier Cercas is one of the most enjoyable and innovative novelists at work today. Well known among English-language readers as the author of Soldiers of Salamis (winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), The Anatomy of a Moment and The Impostor, Cercas is also Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Girona. In 2015, following in the footsteps of George Steiner, Mario Vargas Llosa and Umberto Eco, as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative European Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford, Cercas gave a series of five lectures on the novel today, which have since been revised and are now published in English for the first time as The Blind Spot. Starting with Don Quixote and his own experience as a writer, Cercas launches out into a consideration of the most challenging fiction of the last hundred years, from Kafka, Borges, Perec, Calvino and Kundera, to Sebald, Coetzee, Barnes, Foster Wallace and Knausgård. First, he defines and celebrates certain aspects of the novel in the twenty-first century which are also features of Cervantes' masterpiece: its essential irony and ambiguity, its total commitment to innovation, its natural, joyful and omnivorous desire to cram the whole world within its pages, and its intricate concern with fiction and reality. Then he moves on to consider the actual meaning of the novel, the uncertain and discredited role of the writer as intellectual, and the role of the reader in the creation of a form whose aim is to tell the truth by telling lies. The result is a dazzling short book which provides a new interpretation of novel from Cervantes and Melville to the present, and which will be as stimulating for readers and writers of literature in the twenty-first century as E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel or Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel were in the last.

Uncover your blind spots and reset your leadership approach for long-lasting success in any business Far too many business leaders today are using outdated practices to engage and motivate their people―and they’re failing miserably. Truly resilient, thriving organizations are those that are purpose driven and focus on more than pure profits. Purpose, or an underlying company philosophy, not only drives strategic change, but also encourages customer loyalty and employee engagement. In order to succeed, leaders must be willing to discard old ways of thinking and detrimental business habits—and recognize their blind spots. Authors Jim Haudan and Rich Berens identify the five most common leadership blind spots that hamper success: Purpose, Story, Engagement, Trust, and Truth. They take you straight into the board room of well-known leadership teams to illustrate how these blind spots play out and the impact they have on organizations. You’ll learn how to identify and overcome your own blind spots and embrace positive, forward-thinking new practices. What Are Your Blind Spots equips you with the tools needed for a personal leadership reset. You’ll discover how to increase engagement, productivity, and growth in your own organization. This is an invaluable guide for executives, managers, team leaders, and human resource professionals looking for an effective way to engage and motivate employees at every level of an organization.

Shows how leaders can access the deepest source of inspiration and vision • Includes dozens of tested exercises, practices, and real-world examples We live in a time of massive institutional failure, one that requires a new consciousness and a new collective leadership capacity. In this groundbreaking book, Otto Scharmer invites us to see the world in new ways and in so doing discover a revolutionary approach to leadership. What we pay attention to and how we pay attention is key to what we create. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren’t fully aware of and in touch with the inner place from which attention and intention originate. This is what Scharmer calls our blind spot. By moving through Scharmer’s U process, we consciously access the blind spot and learn to connect to our authentic Self—the deepest source of knowledge and inspiration—in the realm of “presencing,” a term coined by Scharmer that combines the concepts of presence and sensing. Based on ten years of research and action learning and interviews with over 150 practitioners and thought leaders, Theory U offers a rich diversity of compelling stories and examples and includes dozens of exercises and practices that allow leaders, and entire organizations, to shift awareness, connect with the best future possibility, and gain the ability to realize it.

The Voynich Manuscript has been considered to be the world's most mysterious book. Filled with strange illustrations and an unknown language, it challenged the world's top code-crackers for nearly a century. But in just four-and-a-half months, Dr. Gordon Rugg, a renowned researcher, found evidence (which had been there all along) that the book could be a giant, glittering hoax. In Blind Spot: Why We Fail to See the Solution Right in Front of Us, Dr. Rugg shares his story and shows how his toolkit of problem-solving techniques—such as his Verifier Method—can save the day, particularly in those times when the experts on your team have all the data in front of them but are still unaccountably at an impasse. In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, Dr. Rugg, a rising star in computer science, challenges us to re-examine the way we think, and provides new tools to solve problems and crack codes in our own lives.

The Blindspot Initiative: Design Resistance and Alternative Modes of Practice documents the professional work of twenty-one design practices that are expanding their respective fields and hybridizing traditional design outputs through the intersection of other disciplines. The expansion of architectural and design practices toward the domain of robotics, material science, film, simulation, or software, redefine the skillsets required to engage with creative output that challenges the conventions of established domains. All practices curated in this volume, propose an autonomous approach towards design research, resisting the pervasive design competition model that requires free labor and speculative remuneration. The critique of such a model is present throughout this volume, rejecting the wasteful discarding of immaterial labor that is commonplace in the 'winner takes all' paradigm that currently dominates the design marketplace. The hybridization of practice has, in many cases, aided a creative business proposition, one that seeks to engage not only through its final output but also through reconsidering the means of production. By blurring the boundaries between fields, design innovation can become more aware of the systemic interdependencies that often live in our current disciplinary blind spots. The Blindspot Initiative, in its first incarnation as an exhibition in Los Angeles, was the result of a collaboration between Jason King, Biayna Bogosian, Sacha Baumann, and Jose Sanchez, to explore the space of self-financing and self-commissioning of new creative work. From the critique of competitions, The Blindspot Initiative attempts to create an alternative loop between design and resources, one in which the propagation and documentation of new knowledge developed in design research can economically sustain its production, generating a positive feedback loop between innovation and knowledge propagation. Texts by Jenny Wu, Jason Kelly Johnson, David Gerber, Mustafa El-Sayed, and Kate Davies, introduce the designers by offering alternative perspectives on the contributions of the field of robotics, software, film, product design and prototype thinking, to the practice of architecture. Each chapter presents work at the edge of the architectural discipline either coming from inside the discipline or approaching it from the outside. In purposefully attempting to expand the boundary of architectural practice, this volume aims to offer new avenues for students and young designers to expand the imagination of architecture and reject unethical practices that have become commonplace during the first years of practice.

Distracted by traditional metrics and mounting access to data, leaders are blinded to what it actually takes to create greater value for their businesses: meaningful, long-term relationships with their customers. In Blind Spot, you'll learn how exceptional organizations—from Disney to Instagram—innovate and sustain valuable, productive customer relationships. Blind Spot's lessons deliver a groundbreaking perspective shift and win-win approach for your customers, your business—and even your shareholders.

A critical examination of the history of US-Palestinian relations The United States has invested billions of dollars and countless diplomatic hours in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace and a two-state solution. Yet American attempts to broker an end to the conflict have repeatedly come up short. At the center of these failures lay two critical factors: Israeli power and Palestinian politics. While both Israelis and Palestinians undoubtedly share much of the blame, one also cannot escape the role of the United States, as the sole mediator in the process, in these repeated failures. American peacemaking efforts ultimately ran aground as a result of Washington's unwillingness to confront Israel's ever-deepening occupation or to come to grips with the realities of internal Palestinian politics. In particular, the book looks at the interplay between the U.S.-led peace process and internal Palestinian politics--namely, how a badly flawed peace process helped to weaken Palestinian leaders and institutions and how an increasingly dysfunctional Palestinian leadership, in turn, hindered prospects for a diplomatic resolution. Thus, while the peace process was not necessarily doomed to fail, Washington's management of the process, with its built-in blind spot to Israeli power and Palestinian politics, made failure far more likely than a negotiated breakthrough. Shaped by the pressures of American domestic politics and the special relationship with Israel, Washington's distinctive "blind spot" to Israeli power and Palestinian politics has deep historical roots, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate. The size of the blind spot has varied over the years and from one administration to another, but it is always present.