Adrian Cho's Blog

2018 is almost a wrap. I’ve just been working on a 2019 calendar of some of my favourite 2018 nature and wildlife photos. It’s at the printers now and will be printed on beautiful coated stock with each page of the calendar 8.5 x 11″ in size. Next week I’ll be snowshoeing through Algonquin Park for a couple of days to look for wildlife in the winter scenery. I’ll then be leading the Ottawa Jazz Orchestra in our second season concert on December 15 and then heading to San Diego for about a week....

Over time, the iPad has become the primary computing device that I interact with. I’ve found myself spending a greater proportion of screen time on an iPad vs a Mac or any other device. I recently purchased the new, second-generation iPad Pro 12.9 and it’s insanely good. This post is about why it’s so good and how it has changed the way I work.

The new 12.9 is better than the old 10.5 and 12.9 together

Until I got the new iPad Pro 12.9 I actually had two iPads. I had the first generation...

How do you win at something? In most activities there is a goal to reach and success is defined by the attainment of that goal. But who defines these goals? Individuals in large organizations seldom have the luxury of setting their goals in isolation. They must define them based on the goals of their teams which in turn are defined by the goals of the organization. Is meeting goals “winning?” In sports, you win by defeating other competitors or beating your own record. In the arts, you win by d...

Agility is the ability to move quickly, an essential capability when one must respond to change. Organizational agility is difficult, especially for large organizations, but it begins with agile individuals and teams. Put together teams of talented people who can react promptly to change and improvise solutions, and you’ll enable an agile organization that can respond readily to challenges.

People First

While their domains may seem poles apart, the best military teams and artistic ensembles know...

Innovation is the process of creating new ideas and applying them to a specific situation. Many people confuse creativity with innovation. Creativity, the process of creating new ideas, is a subset of innovation. Necessity is not necessarily the mother of creativity for one can be creative simply for its own sake. Innovation, on the other hand, is usually undertaken to solve a specific problem.

Enabling Innovation with Collaboration

Most innovation is collaborative, despite the myth of the lone ...

Collaboration is the act of working together. The ability to collaborate with others is one of the most important skills a person can possess. No matter how inventive, creative, or productive you might be, as one person alone, you can achieve only so much.

The skills of collaboration are not unique to humans. Think about a pack of wolves hunting a moose, a colony of beavers building and maintaining a dam, or a group of humpback whales trapping fish in an amazing, innovative bubble net. Collabora...

What is the one thing that can truly enable individuals and teams to collaborate and innovate with agility?

All too often people look for salvation in the latest tools and technology or in overly-specific processes and best practices. All of these things will make a difference but they are useless without a culture that promotes the right principles. Those in the software industry should be well versed in this concept as it is captured in the first declaration of the Manifesto for Agile Software...

A recentblog postbyKellogg School of Management professor, Marty Lariviere,highlights the transition that GE Appliances is making to “insource” manufacturing from China to the U.S. Discussion of insourcing strategies is plentiful nowadays and there are those who believe it will not work.Apple recently announced a moveto insource some elements of Mac manufacturing. What’s different is that [...]

Since the passing of Steve Jobs the world has been reading a lot about how he was a total jerk. By all accounts he wasn't just like this at Apple but also acted like an asshole in his personal life too, berating nurses, doctors, waitresses and anyone else who was unfortunate enough to raise his [...]

This is the tenth and final post in a series about common problems that can lead teams to fail or otherwise limit their success. The previous post in this series was 9) Frustrate with friction. In this series we've discussed many ways in which organisations kill productivity and passion: excessive bureaucracy, suppressing individuality, expecting that people [...]