Why play is essential for business
1,854,914 views | Martin Reeves • TED@BCG
To thrive in today's competitive economy, you need to constantly reimagine your business. So what's the secret to sustained success? Strategist Martin Reeves makes a pitch for embracing play to spark innovative business ideas -- and invites you to try out a series of imagination games that he uses to get leaders to stretch their thinking and dream up new possibilities.
To thrive in today's competitive economy, you need to constantly reimagine your business. So what's the secret to sustained success? Strategist Martin Reeves makes a pitch for embracing play to spark innovative business ideas -- and invites you to try out a series of imagination games that he uses to get leaders to stretch their thinking and dream up new possibilities.
About the speaker
Martin Reeves is chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute (BHI), BCG's think tank for new ideas in strategy and management.
Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie | Penguin, 2019 | Book
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
A very readable exploration of the surprisingly complex idea of causality, which highlights the differences between three types of thinking: correlative, causal and counterfactual.
Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan | Currency, 2021 | Book
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
This book really shaped my thinking on imagination, how it relates to analytical thinking and what managers will do when routine managerial tasks are displaced by machine learning.
Karl Friston | Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2010 | Article
"The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?"
Karl Friston is a physicist turned brain scientist. His work isn't an easy read, but his essential function of the brain being surprise minimization strongly informed our thinking on imagination. In particular, the ideas that mental model updating is driven by surprise, and the options we have as embodied brains when we encounter surprise were very powerful.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008 | Book
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
The idea that we continually rematch our evolving skills to ever higher challenges — and that we can deliberately manage ourselves to achieve this — is a powerful idea, which informed our thinking on the continuous reimagination which occurs in firms that have freed themselves from the shackles of efficiency thinking and the assumptions which underpin their past success.
Simon Levin | Basic Books, 2000 | Book
Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons
The mathematical ecologist Simon Levin writes about the fragility of natural ecosystems and other systems, and the essential characteristics of systems which are resilient and long-lived. This informed our thinking on the essential nature of resilience and corporate longevity, and the managerial interventions required to create it. By extension it also underpinned our thinking on "vitality" — the capacity for future growth.
Learn more
About TED Institute
Every year, TED works with a group of select companies and foundations to identify internal ideators, inventors, connectors, and creators. Drawing on the same rigorous regimen that has prepared speakers for the TED main stage, TED Institute works closely with each partner, overseeing curation and providing intensive one-on-one talk development to sharpen and fine tune ideas. The culmination is an event produced, recorded, and hosted by TED, generating a growing library of valuable TED Talks that can spur innovation and transform organizations.