Ackoff Center Weblog

Permanent Innovation

The Ackoff Center is pleased to announce that Senior Practice Scholar Langdon Morris has just completed a new book entitled "Permanent Innovation."

This book is the second major output from his work with our "Creating Breakthrough Business Models" research circle, following on Langdon's highly regarded white paper, "Business Model Warfare."
Langdon notes that the goal of the book was to write an overview of both the strategic and human dimensions of innovation, and the business processes needed to support them. The book should be useful for everyone from top management through all parts of the organization who are concerned with innovation performance of their firms.

You can download the book for free at the book's web site. It's also available for purchase.

Check it out at  www.permanentinnovation.com and www.permanentinnovation.com/blog/ 

Systems Approach to Program and Project Management Seminar

This week-long seminar offers a distinctive "Systems Approach" to Program and Project Management, with Russell Ackoff among the 4 seminar leaders.  This course differs from the conventional courses on project and program management (PPM) in that, whereas they work from the inside out, this course works from the outside in. It takes a systemic rather than an analytic approach to the process. Rather than work on aspects of PPM taken separately and then trying to synthesize them into an overall approach to the process, this course starts with the effect of the organizational context within which PPM takes place. It shows that without changes in this context, PPM is severely handicapped. The problem then, for those who cannot control the organizational context of PPM, but can control such management itself, is how can they approximate the types of context changes required to make PPM effective? In this seminar, the aim is to show how to achieve these results.

Download in2inseminarconnectingtheartscienceofppm.pdf