By Ben Baran, Ph.D., Agility Analytics Practice Leader In one of the early episodes of the StartUp Podcast—which features Alex Blumberg, formerly of This American Life and NPR’s Planet Money—he meets Chris Sacca, a renowned former venture capitalist and entrepreneur. Blumberg painfully bumbles through an attempt at pitching his business idea to Sacca. Believe me, […]

Have you ever looked through a pair of night goggles when it is pitch black dark? It really is quite amazing what you can see.  Things appear that are otherwise completely invisible to your unaided eyes.  These are invaluable tools for use by military forces as well as wild game hunters.  Night vision goggles work […]

By Ben Baran, Ph.D., Agility Analytics Practice Leader It was a new organization, a new unit in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and someone—in his infinite wisdom—put me in charge of it. One of my first tasks was to make some sort of sense of how to organize the 55 members of the loosely defined group […]

“Whenever I talk with leaders of companies in (all) industries …  I hear a consistent theme: Frustration that they can’t move FAST enough, given the organizations they have, to stay competitive.  They know that capabilities like SPEED and AGILITY are becoming the core of competitive advantage …”.  This is the context for why Jim Whitehurst, CEO of […]

By Ben Baran, Ph.D., Agility Analytics Practice Leader One of the courses I’ve taught to both graduate and undergraduate business students is “Managerial Skill Development.” And among other high-energy theatrics that I employ during our class meetings, I typically ask students to think about the best managers they’ve ever had and the worst managers they’ve […]