Geoffrey West

Scale with Geoffrey West Part 3

Our guest’s research centres on a quest to find unifying principles and patterns connecting everything, from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and businesses.
 Questions he poses include: 
Why do organisms and ecosystems scale with size in a remarkably universal and systematic fashion?

Is there a maximum size of cities? Of animals and plants? What about companies?

 Can scale show us how to create a more sustainable future?

By applying the rigour of physics to questions of biology, He found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we each need. He then made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability to cities and to the business world. These investigations have led to powerful insights into the elemental natural laws that bind us together in profound ways, and how all complex systems are dancing to the same simple tune, however diverse and unrelated they may seem.

It is a great pleasure to welcome back the author of “Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies” Geoffrey West

Rishad Tobaccowala

Rishad Tobaccowala – Restoring the Soul of Business

In “Restoring the Soul of Business”, Rishad Tobaccowala helps us discover how to extract meaning from data and see poetry in the plumbing. This book recognizes that while our world is increasingly filled with digital, silicon-based, computing objects, it is populated by people who remain analogue, carbon-based, feeling creatures.

Shameen Prashantham

Gorillas Can Dance Part 4 with Shameen Prashantham

Today’s book is about one way in which large corporations can be entrepreneurial: by partnering with external startups. Specifically, it is about key principles and practices that have been distilled from the entrepreneurial actions of managers who helped their corporations engage with startups. To be clear, as our audience knows well by now, opening an innovation lab here and organizing a hackathon there won’t make an Impactful difference. This is about substantive programmatic interventions that could ultimately underpin a more fundamental change of the organization as a whole becoming more entrepreneurial. This book tackles corporate-startup partnering in three parts. The Why, The How and The Where. In part one, our guest gave an overview of his over 15 years of research, which involved over 400 interviews with corporate managers, startup entrepreneurs, and other individuals involved in corporate-startup partnering and in part 1, he introduced some of the key players who placed the way to the Microsoft gorilla learning to dance with startups and … vice versa. We welcome back the author of “Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and Other Corporations on Partnering with Startups” Shameen Prashantham. In Part 1 we focussed on an overview of startup partnering. Part 2 zoomed into the Why to partner in the first place and the asymmetries that exist between startup and Gorilla. Part 3 was all about the How! The finale is about the Where and the bigger Why. More about this book and Shameen: https://www.gorillascandance.com

Positive SSL