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Innovation requires risk, and risk requires leadership

The price of doing nothing is steep, and playing it safe is anything but. The only way to create a culture of innovation is from the top down.

There’s an old saying, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” Over the years, inertia has changed the meaning of that phrase from “It’s safe to buy quality” to “Nobody ever got fired for avoiding risk.”

So, while a given person may be rewarded for avoiding risks, the company itself can take severe hits for the same thing. And an individual may be rewarded for successfully taking risks, a company’s stock may tank on the basis of an unsuccessful or even just longer term risk potential.

How can we advise companies to take chances—and back their people when they do so—but distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable risk?



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Delighting Customers with Data

At the end of each year, Spotify packages and presents data to its users with a marketing campaign called Spotify Wrapped. The data that Spotify gathers from its users are given back to its users in such a way that the users themselves have proven enthusiastic users of that data. This includes not just who your favorite musician or group is, but also indicates what percentile rank you fall into. For instance, you may prove to be not just a top Taylor Swift fan, but rather a “top 1% fan.” This information is sent to users in a graphically attractive package designed to share on social media. 

Delight as a marketing and data strategy may seem counterintuitive, given how much hard numbers have been the coin of the realm, but several companies have proven its utility.



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Google Careers

I planned and wrote the content that explained Google’s employee culture and its employment process. It united the passion of the company and its employees for design, information, and access with the structure and instructions of the hiring program.



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How to Combat Cognitive Bias

Cognitive bias is a bit of a loaded term. It can be a problem for companies striving to become more data-driven, although many cognitive biases are the flip side of an often useful thought process.

A cognitive bias is what Oliver Sibony, author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!1 and professor at HEC Paris, calls a heuristic gone bad.



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How to prepare your business for AI

AI experts at Hewlett Packard Enterprise share insights about where artificial intelligence is headed and how to apply the technology in the business world.

Taming data is one of humankind’s biggest challenges, and it has exceeded our ability to efficiently use reasoning or intuition to make sense of patterns within big data. 

“The data flood is becoming a universal problem,” says Dr. Eng Lim Goh, vice president and chief technical officer, HPC and AI, for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “But with artificial intelligence, a wild guess becomes an intelligent guess.”

If you’re considering AI for a key part of your IT infrastructure, pause here. A few of HPE’s AI experts share their thoughts on where AI is headed, how it can transform a business, and the steps to get started.



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