I think the corporations if it wants to be truly responses to the changes taking place in the world is going to have to learn how to be much more porous to the world. And that is ever so difficult. We are good at boundaries and systems. We need to learn how to open those up.
Grant David McCrackenInnovation got hip. It got cool. I prefer the people who investigate the world out a brute sense of curiosity, a fundamental sense of play.
Grant David McCrackenMost change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature but the real cause of lots of resistance often is that however much a team might say that it wants to change, the old assumptions are woven, invisibly, deep within the corporate culture, and from this staging ground they act invisibly to sustain the old order. Finding the assumption out and then rooting them out is a special skill. It calls for assumption hunters, I call them.
Grant David McCrackenThe University of Chicago is an astounding place. It's Yeshiva, a priesthood. It gives you an education, but more than that it gives you a mission. Oh, and an arrogance. But being Canadian helps with that.
Grant David McCrackenThe future is going to be stranger and more various and more dynamic than anything people can imagine now. We will be extraordiarily tested. I wish us the best of luck!
Grant David McCrackenOften it takes more time to explain a task than to do it yourself, and when you do it yourself there is no data lost in transmission. We have something to learn about how communication works in these settings. Sometimes it takes a really long time to communicate the full meaning of what we want to say.
Grant David McCracken