Category Archives: book riffs
Your Customer Isn’t “Everyone” – Seven Innovation Thoughts Triggered by Peter Drucker
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Of all the management writers I’ve read, Peter Drucker probably generates more interesting quotes per page than anyone. Tom Peters and Joseph Schumpeter come close too. Here are six thoughts triggered by reading his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century: And yet very few institutions know anything about the noncustomers—very few of them even […]
You Are Responsible for Getting Your Ideas to Spread
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How to Take Advantage of Surprises
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If the budget that you’re managing blows out one month and you’ve spent 200% of your allocated funds, what happens? In most organisations, a negative surprise like this leads to painful forensic investigations. To improve efficiency, it is important to stamp out negative surprises like this. Conversely, what happens if one of your revenue areas […]
Why Innovation is Less Risky Than You Think
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One of the most common excuses I run across for not innovating is risk aversion. Organisations don’t innovate because they’re risk averse, or so they say. But is innovation really so risky? Yes, a new idea might not work. But in many cases, not innovating is even riskier. Here is how Peter Drucker puts it […]
Evidence-Based Innovation Management
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Yesterday I made the case for evidence-based management in general. Today I’d like to talk about what this means for managing innovation. The case in favour of evidence-based management is made in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Managementby Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton. They talk about a few innovation examples, […]
The Case for Evidence-Based Management
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How can we be better managers? I just finished reading Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Managementby Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton. It is a must-read book, and they have one simple recommendation for managing more effectively: make better use of the evidence that shows us how to be better managers. […]
Don’t Be First to Market, Be First to Scale
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Often when people have an idea for a great new product or service, they rush to be first to market with it. We keep hearing about first-mover advantage and how you need it. The only problem with first-move advantage is that it doesn’t seem to exist. The academic research on the topic shows that there […]
Two Problems Caused by the Innovation Diffusion Curve
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The economist Rudi Dornbusch succinctly describes the way that ideas spread: Things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you thought they could. It’s the innovation S-Curve in words, this is what that looks like graphically: And the problem is that the value for X is larger […]
So Where Do Good Ideas Come From?
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I ran across an outstanding post today by John Battelle reviewing Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.by Steven Johnson. It’s one of my favourite books from the last couple of years, and Battelle does a great job of highlighting the key points in it. He also reminded me of a table […]
Replace Fear of the Unknown With Curiousity
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The Shift Index 2011 is out now, and as with the previous two editions, it is a must-read. I am always skeptical of “everything is different now” type arguments, but in this series of reports, John Hagel, John Seeley Brown and a number of other contributors have done a fantastic job of documenting exactly what […]
Innovation Problem: New Ideas Spread Slowly
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There’s a big problem with innovation: ideas spread much more slowly than we expect them to. Ideas follow an S-Curve as they spread that looks like this: They pick up steam very slowly, until they either die off or hit a tipping point and take off. The slow build-up is the time I’ve indicated as […]
