“Shut off your devices!” I had reached my boiling point. My 10-year-old son was blithely staring at his phone, while simultaneously playing on his Xbox and listening to the TV running in the background. It was the electronic trifecta. “Read a book. Go outside. Kick a soccer ball. Do something else.” When my fit of parental rage finally passed, I asked “why do you immediately default to turning on a device?” His reply: “It’s the easiest thing to do.”
When we are bored, we tend to choose the path of least resistance. As human beings, we are wired to seek…
Dan Seewald · Feb 10, 2021 · 5 min read
“The difficulty [in creating novel ideas] lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”
- John Maynard Keynes
Now, more than ever, large organizations are trying to keep pace with nimble market disruptors. There is no longer an implicit guarantee that what got you to the top will keep you there. According to a study of corporate turnover in the S&P 500, the average tenure of a company in the S&P during the 1960’s was 33 years. Today, that number has declined by 60%…
In December 2019, Zoom, the virtual collaboration platform, was averaging 10 million participants per day. In April 2020, they surged by 30x to 300 Million participants per day. And that is just on Zoom! Add in their competitors — Blue jeans, Webex, Skype, Facetime — and you can safely estimate that more than half a billion people were in a virtual meeting today. Covid-19 has accelerated the era of the remote workplace. And with it, it has altered the way millions of professionals, who rely on in-person engagement, operate. Do not get me wrong: peer-to-peer promotion and sales will still…
2006 was supposed to be the year of the “Bird Flu”. Similar to Covid, there was a sudden explosion of cases popping up all across Asia. Public health experts and infectious disease specialists were desperately worried. The evidence suggested that this virus had jumped, or mutated, across species. And because our immune systems were naive to this virus, large swaths of the population would be susceptible to this virus. Images from the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 were routinely flashed on screen on popular talk shows and evening news programs. As we all know, the Bird Flu, or H5N1 pandemic…
Covid-19 launched one of the largest, unintended corporate pilot programs of the past century: the ‘Work-from-Home’ experiment. “Work-from-home” has long been synonymous with slacking off. Older, corporate insiders scoffed at the mention of it. Work-from-Home has been saddled with the belief that employees cannot be nearly as productive when out of the office, as compared to when they come to the office. But with the advancement of technology and telecommunications, remote working no longer bears the scarlet letter of perceived laxity. Even before the pandemic, a research study found that working remotely yielded greater productivity and lowered costs. Now, we…
The tragic events on Memorial Day in Minneapolis have ignited long-festering feelings of anger, frustration, and marginalization across the nation. Protests were inevitable. But senseless acts of criminality have stolen the headlines and undermined the purpose of the protests. And worse yet, they undermine the opportunity to achieve real and lasting change. Nevertheless, substantive change is still very much possible. And a helpful blueprint exists.
A decade ago, a doctoral researcher, Erica Chenoweth, studied more than a 100 years’ worth of data to validate her hypothesis that social and political change is most likely to happen through violent campaigns. But…
- Co-Authored by Daniel Seewald and Shery Seewald, M.S. Ed, M.S. CCC-SLP
The first significant pandemic in over a one hundred years is straining every facet of our daily lives. Perhaps most prominently affected, aside from healthcare, is our education system. According to several experts, we can expect to see nearly 57 million students directly affected. With school closures ushered in hurriedly, few school districts had sufficient preparation time. And although many school systems were already dabbling in distance learning strategies prior to the outbreak, the majority of school systems have been sent scrambling to cobble together a comprehensive plan. …
With the corona virus pandemic battering all aspects of our personal and professional lives, who can sleep at a time like this? But aside from washing our hands, perhaps one of the easiest and most important tools we have at our disposal is to get a good night’s rest. After all, getting a good night’s sleep boosts our natural immunity. In fact, one groundbreaking study found that “those who slept less than six hours a night were four times more likely to develop a cold than those who got seven hours or more.” Sleep matters. Yet the importance of sleep…
Toilet paper is wiped clean. Purell hand sanitizers have gone up 500% in price, if you can find it at all. Canned goods are disappearing off store shelves. Have people gone crazy? There answer is: No. Irrational yes, but not crazy. In fact, most people are practicing an age-old habit of stockpiling when there is rising uncertainty and the threat of scarcity. Shame, criticism and public humiliation may seem like a great way to deter these behaviors, but these measures aren’t very effective in the long-run.
Here’s why: Self-preservation is a hard-wired human instinct and it happens in the most…
I have an unusual vantage on our current pandemic. In 2006, I worked in an unlikely role for the Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer, Roche. I was responsible for strategy and planning for corporate pandemic preparedness. At that time, the world was deeply anxious about a different pandemic, the Avian Flu (or so-called, Bird Flu) pandemic. Roche was the producer of the most sought-after pharmacological countermeasure, Tamiflu, that governments, corporations and consumers alike were aggressively trying to stockpile. And during that time, I regularly heard the refrain, “It’s not a question of if, but when” from most of the experts about the…
Daniel Seewald
Dan is the Founder of Deliberate Innovation, led Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer and is a contributing writer for multiple journals on Innovation & Creativity.
