Problem Solver

It was 2001, and an earthquake had just hit Gujarat, a state in western India. Thousands of people died and nearly 400,000 homes were destroyed. So...

The bread slicing machine was invented 15 years before sliced bread became popular. Sliced bread didn’t catch on because Otto Rohwedder, the guy who invented the...

After having a faulty Medtronic catheter thrown at him by an angry surgeon, then CEO Bill George began investigating why he hadn’t known about quality problems...

On January 30, 2002, The United States Government Accounting Office (GAO) released a report entitled NASA: Better Mechanisms for Sharing Lessons Learned. Motivated by the costly...

A toothpaste factory had a problem: Due to the way the production line was set up, sometimes empty boxes were shipped without the tube inside. People...

In The Heart of Change, John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen reproduce a story (‘Gloves on the Boardroom Table’) told by Jon Stegner, most probably the CEO...

In 1991, a first-year PhD student named Amy Edmondson began visiting hospital wards, intending to show that good teamwork and good medicine went hand in hand....

In 1990, Jerry Sternin was sent by Save the Children to fight severe malnutrition in rural communities of Vietnam. The Vietnamese foreign minister, having seen many...

Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former chief body-guard was captured and put in a Yemini prison post 9/11. All attempts to get Abu Jandal to reveal...

“Insecure managers create complexity. Real leaders don’t clutter,” Welch wrote in his autobiography. In Welch’s bestselling book, Jack: Straight from the Gut, he wrote that clutter and jargon...