One chilly afternoon, I drove with my mother on a narrow, winding backroad in Ireland. It was just after lunch, but the pale winter sun was already declining, casting soft shadows on the road ahead. White sheep dotted the green hills around us; ivy-enrobed trees stretched skeletal fingers to the sky.

Many leaders become discouraged when design thinking doesn’t get the results they expect. They can improve the odds of success by assessing the readiness of their organizations and preparing their teams for a different problem-solving process.

Others were running guns.

A nation’s mythologies – We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

Opinion: As McDonald’s retreat from Russia shows, branding goes well beyond the burger

Disruption is like pornography: hard to define, but you know it when you see it. A lot of companies are seeing it, everywhere. If they don’t actually see it, they know it’s coming. And that creates a gut-clenching tension: sit and wait, and you’ll be disrupted and become yesterday’s technology, consigned to the same dumpster as the typewriter and the rotary-dial phone.

Design thinking has both fans and detractors.

Opinion: Maintaining your customers' trust in your brand is critically important.

A few years ago, Unilever launched The Campaign for Real Beauty in support of its Dove Beauty Bar. The campaign highlighted an important social problem: the artificial, stylized image of beauty to which women were expected to conform. It included online videos, billboards and grassroots community events, and resonated with women everywhere.

The emergence of 'Web 2.0' tools such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter has significantly lessened the amount of control that organizations have over their messaging.

Much has changed since advertising's 1950s heyday - the Mad Men era, when you could count the number of TV channels on one hand and advertising was all about informing and persuading consumers.