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Alex Lowy's new book, No Problem is now available. The NO PROBLEM credo is simple: all problems are solvable – those that aren’t are decisions or dilemmas. Once you understand this and know what to do about it, you too will say NO PROBLEM and mean it!Don Tapscott says, "Alex Lowy is a master problem solver, and when you read this book you'll understand why. NO PROBLEM unpacks the mystery of how problems differ, and illustrates how people unwittingly get in their own way. Do yourself a favor and read it now."
Don Tapscott, Chief Executive, New Paradigm and co-author of Wikinomics:
How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.
Download a free chapter.
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Posted by: admin on Thursday, June 21, 2007 - 09:00 AM |
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 There is a parable retold every year at the Passover table in Jewish homes around the world about freedom from slavery. It begins with the youngest child in the family asking “Why is this night different from all other nights?". The answer in the text is directed to four different types of children: the wise one, the simple one, the wicked one, and the one who is yet too young to understand. Each of these children will interpret the telling differently, and it is recommended that the story be told with this in mind. In essence, the suggestion is to consider how the story will be heard and to deliver the message with this thought.
In No Problem I identify three distinct and unique outlooks that are applied to challenging moments, whether of a serious or not so serious consequence, and whether involving business or personal affairs. Like the four children around the Passover table, each of the three outlooks receives and processes information about a situation differently.
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Posted by: admin on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 - 08:17 AM |
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by Alex Lowy
Perhaps the single most important lesson in the book is that not all problems are problems. Sounds confusing at first, but stay with me.
Challenging issues differ depending on two factors – complexity and uncertainty. Complexity is about the level of interdependency between forces in a situation. Uncertainty describes the extent to which you can predict influences and outcomes.
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Posted by: admin on Wednesday, April 04, 2007 - 11:22 AM |
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Ever wonder what it would take to be a better problem solver than you are? It's not a bad question, and if you can raise your level bit by bit over time, what a payoff!
In the book No Problem, I come at this from a number of angles. In this first post, I'll describe the four crucial ways great problem solvers differ. In the next one I'll introduce the three-level Problem Solving Hierarchy that distinguishes between the major kinds of issues we typically face. After that, I'll start applying the ideas to situations we all face in the real world.
Sure, it's a pretty wide open topic, but the best problem solvers (and this could mean you) exhibit these tendencies and skills:
 * Flexibility They take situations as they come, not all in the same way. They don't prejudge and they don't have an answer ready before a challenge is known. Beware the person who claims to have a method that works for everything. Flexibility needs to be earned through practice and experience, not acquired or even learned in the conventional way.
* Resourcefulness They have lots of methods, examples, friends, and experiences to draw on. The richer you're kit bag, the more proficiencies you have, the better the results are likely to be.
* Confidence They carry a positive, resilient, optimistic attitude. Shimon Perez, Israel's elder statesman has described his outlook as choosing to be an optimist, saying "We all die the same way, but we have the choice to live as otimists or pessimists". So do we all.
* Proactivity They are ready to act on what needs doing, and have the courage and initiative to make a difference when it matters.
Check it out: we are all somewhere between high and low on the four core attributes, and we are all capable of improving if we want to do so. This is not magic; you earn it through your actions and the choices you make.
Alex
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Posted by: admin on Friday, March 23, 2007 - 03:00 PM |
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Imagine for a minute that I open the world's biggest restaurant and I serve great food at prices so reasonable that people can't figure out how I do it.
But my secret is simple. I steal food. In fact, everything I serve in my restaurant is stolen, often by the diners themselves. They steal food from grocery stores and bring it to my restaurant where my chefs cook it up for them.
Now, if a grocery store complains that I'm cooking stolen food, I'm glad to return the food to them. But I don't go around looking for stolen food. It's not my job to police the customers who bring their own food to the restaurant.
Eventually, my restaurant gets so popular that it is bought by the world's richest restaurant chain. They make me a billionaire. This enrages the grocery stores who are victimized by my customers. So I start cutting deals with the grocery stores. Let me know that you've been robbed, and I'll crack down on anyone suspected of robbing you. But the grocery store also has to agree to sell their food at a significant discount for my customers. And, because I have so many customers, most of the grocery stores want to work with me.
 But one of the bigger grocery stores refuses my offer. They feel they have better food than their competitors and they don't want to cut prices just because I say so. So, I encourage my customers to keep stealing from them. And an army of bloggers supports me, telling each other, free food is the new paradigm.
Alert readers will notice that I'm talking about You Tube (my restaurant), Google (the restaurant chain) and Viacom (the reluctant grocer). This recent dustup in the media biz as Viacom sues Google and YouTube reminds me once again of the core dilemma of the entertainment industry: it's Consumers versus Producers.
With consumer tools for creating media and distributing it freely proliferating the walls of the media industry continue to tumble. Movie and TV studios are right to fear the impact of Google on their business and the prospects that customer-created content will disintermediate their advertising (at least to a degree).
At the same time, Viacom's case against Google also seems valid. YouTube built a billion-dollar business networking people who were stealing from Viacom, among others. Now, Google wants Viacom to cut a deal for access to the YouTube users. According to Viacom, there is an implicit threat that the users will go on stealing if Viacom doesn't strike a deal.
What was seen as harmless pranking in the Napster days--stealing content--has now gone on too long. YouTube offers lots of wonderful diversions and content.It's an open global TV agora. But it's also a TV room in the frat house where kids watch clips stolen from Letterman and the Daily Show. Viacom is right that without copyright theft, YouTube would likely have been worth very little. In that sense, YouTube merely has been a vehicle for transferring the wealth of one billionaire (Sumner Redstone of Viacom) to the pockets of the billionaires of Google. Hardly seems fair.
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Posted by: admin on Friday, January 13, 2006 - 05:58 PM |
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by Alex Lowy and Phil Hood
How would you define America's strategic options in Iraq? Increasingly trapped by its own rhetoric, the Bush administration asks us to choose between two alternatives - Victory or Defeat. You’re with us or against us – no middle ground.
In Wednesday’s Washington Post Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration, finds a middle ground, arguing for a phased withdrawal that gets most of the American troops out of Iraq in the next year. We won’t go into the merits of his argument—they partly depend on your existing point of view about the war. Brzezinski's contribution, however is an outstanding piece of what we call clear headed 2 x 2 thinking which recognizes rather than suppresses the complexity of the predicament.
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Posted by: admin on Wednesday, December 07, 2005 - 03:00 PM |
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Apple stock continues to perform well, spurred on by sales of its iPod music, and now video, player. The music player market is hot and likely to remain so until 2007, which means Apple has plenty of good quarters ahead. Even better for the company, in the past year analysts such as Steve Milunovich of Merrill Lynch have stated that sales of the iPod are going to drive increases in computer sales, as new customers become accustomed to the Apple brand for the first time. As was predicted several years ago the iPod has become a , introducing Windows users who previously would not consider a Mac to the Apple user experience.
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Posted by: admin on Wednesday, December 07, 2005 - 01:25 PM |
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by Alex Lowy and Phil Hood(originally published December, 2004)
Until the mid 1990s, the world of computers was dominated by brainy entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that understood and played by the same rules. The underlying assumption was that everyone, even the hard core techies and altruists, was motivated by profit, and that success was measured by the size and value of enterprise that could be built around your innovations.
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Posted by: admin on Tuesday, December 06, 2005 - 12:25 PM |
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by Alex Lowy and Phil Hood
Take the Archetypal Dilemmas Self-Assessment here
Organizations are faced with numerous challenges, this is a given. Knowing which ones are most crucial is an important first step to managing them effectively.
Take apart any strategic dilemma and you will find a basic struggle occurring between opposing forces; Quality vs. Speed; Time vs. Money, Risk vs. Reward. These Archetypal Dilemmas offer eight thematic groupings of common struggles. Each archetype is a response to a particular question or challenge. Answering that question is likely to take one down a particular road. For example, feeling torn between two choices is often a battle between one’s reasoning side and one’s emotions. The Head & Heart archetype outlines the essential nature of such crises. Change & Stability is an entirely different balancing act, highlighting the need for adaptive behavior in all living systems.
This Archetypal Dilemmas Self-Assessment helps you to prioritize dilemmas and focus attention on the ones most instrumental in determining the success of your business. It is a short exercise that will help you identify the most important dilemmas currently facing your firm, and suggests first steps in approaching these issues. It also contains a synopsis of the eight basic Archetypal Dilemmas presented in The Power of the 2x2 Matrix.
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All materials copyright Transcend Strategy Group 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
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