(May 10, 2024) warns—fasten your seatbelts! This new book on innovation is contrarian, very readable, and a bit mind-blowing!
to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies).
Scrappy, Messy, Cheap, and Weird!SPOILER ALERT! In the short conclusion to his new book, Elliott Parker, a startup expert, describes his consultation with a company in India that was
losing $1 million per day! His analysis and presentation to the CEO involved—
wait for it—the unique business cards used by the firm’s chief competitor! Must-read chapter: “Conclusion: Change Is Hard, But Not Changing Is Much Harder.” This book will change the way you think and work:
Elliott Parker has harsh words for most companies, including the dozens of Fortune 500 companies he’s worked with over the last 25 years.
“I have concluded that most of the tools large organizations rely on to innovate do not produce the change they seek and need.” He should know. He worked with Clayton Christensen, author of
The Innovator's Dilemma.INNOVATION THEATER! The author, founder and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, writes, “Innovation efforts pursued inside corporations
too often look like theater—people acting busy doing
something so executives can explain to the board and investors that innovation is definitely, without a doubt, a top priority. But when reviewed after the fact, most of the effort produces little impact.”
Parker warns that “…this type of investment in
innovation theater is actually value destructive, not neutral in its effect: organizations would be better off doing nothing (or actively accepting and managing their decline) instead of pretending to innovate—instead of engaging in an illusion of innovation.”
Here’s the kicker. The author wants “…our scaled institutions—our businesses, governments, universities, and churches—to be more effective at solving big problems.”
His playbook is creative and contrarian: • “This book explains why innovation naturally emerges from deliberate inefficiency.” (
You read that right.)
• It’s now easier for small teams and individuals to “disrupt the status quo.”
•
“In actuality, creativity results from collisions, from taking an idea from one context and applying it to another.”
NEW LEXICON. Much like the book,
In Search of Excellence, this also introduces a new business lexicon and I’m predicting that
The Illusion of Innovation will pick up the slack. Here’s the new lexicon for 2024:
• Scrappy, messier, frequent misses
•
“It is that messiness, that purposeful error making, that creates resilience.”• Corporate hospice workers
• “In people and in companies, growth results from actively seeking surprises, not from predictability!”
• Novelty and serendipity
• Treasure hunters and patient capital
•
Weird! (mentioned frequently—and my favorite!)
The takeaway in Chapter 9, “Selecting Shots,” will be challenging for most—but critical:
“Run more experiments: fast, cheap, and weird.” (Fascinating: what happened when the NBA adopted the three-point line in the 1978-1979 season—a metaphor for innovation.)
VETOCRACY. The author’s poke-in-the-ribs notes the term, “vetocracy,” coined by a political scientist. It describes
“an environment in which many more people are empowered to say no than to say yes.” To combat this tendency for organizations to play it safe and avoid risk, Parker’s how-to book urges companies to embolden individuals (or a small team of “changemakers”) to go off the grid and innovate.
He quotes advertising pioneer
David Ogilvy, who once quipped, paraphrasing
G.K. Chesterton:
“Committees can criticize, but they cannot create.
‘Search the parks in all your cities,
you’ll find no statutes of committees.’”
TEASERS! Would an outside consultant give your organization high marks for innovation? Are you still funding
sacred cows and dead horses? My opinion: this could be the book-of-the-year that your senior team members must read.
Some teasers: • The extraordinary account of the innovator that—amazingly—was given authority to launch the Federal Witness Protection Program.
•
“The most dreaded sentence a corporate innovator can hear may be, ‘Show me your revenue and profit projections for next year.’ This is an impossible request of anyone building something new, when there are more assumptions than known facts.”
•
Wow! In the chapter, “The Power of Small Teams,” the author notes that Instagram had just 13 employees, servicing as many as 30 million customers, when it was sold to Facebook for $1 billion!
• Parker argues that most corporations are not positioned to create something new within the organization.
“A corporation trying to act like a startup is like a high school marching band trying to play improvisational jazz: it may sound like a fun idea, but the result is chaos.”INNOVATING WITH AI. After reading the author’s musical metaphor (above), I couldn’t resist. My son,
Jason (founder of a new startup), introduced me to
Udio, the new AI site for generating music. So my prompt was: “a marching band song about inspiring innovation, yet with an improvisational jazz feel.” In about three minutes, Udio produced two half-minute songs:
•
Innovator’s March •
Innovation MarchNot Grammy-quality yet, but hilariously fun!
TOO MUCH EFFICIENCY! “…too much efficiency inevitably leads to failure in the long run.” Example: It took San Francisco 27 years (1995-2022) to build a two-mile bus lane on Van Ness Avenue at a cost of $300 million or about $110,000 per meter. “In contrast, all 1,700 miles of the Alaska Highway connecting eastern British Columbia to Fairbanks, Alaska, were constructed in 234 days in 1942” at a cost of about $1,000 per meter in 2023 dollars.
Yikes! (
I’m tempted to write lyrics for a song about this!)
THE WRONG OBJECTIVE! Must-read: the devasting
2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., was “the direct result of dramatic institutional effectiveness directed toward what is now, in retrospect, understood to be the wrong objective—fire eradication instead of fire management. We prioritized efficiency and the illusion of near-term safety over long-term resilience, and are now paying the price.”
In California, between 1999 and 2017, land management burned, on average, 13,000 acres per year. Almost meaningless, we now know.
As of 2018, experts estimated that the state had accumulated a “fire debt” of about 20 million acres! “…it means an area the size of Maine might need to burn before California can restabilize.”
THERE’S MORE! • Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix: “Think of the standard model as clear, efficient, sanitary, sterile. Our model is messy, chaotic, and fertile. In the long term, fertile will beat sterile.”
• Even though large corporations invest millions in “innovation,” they have little, if any, results.
“The corporation as we once knew it is dying and may already be dead.” • “Experimentation, when done right, is chaotic, natural, and messy—not hierarchical, planned, or objective driven.” (Yikes! So much for SMART goals!)
• The Innovator’s Dilemma. Should you launch a new venture internally or externally? (See the chart on page 162.)
FORD v FERRARI. View this one-minute scene from the 2019 film,
Ford v Ferrari, contrasting Ford’s engineers with a smaller enterprise, Shelby American. The test driver, Ken Miles, “no fan of corporate stodginess,” tosses the engineer-installed computer in the Ford GT40—and replaces it with strips of yarn and masking tape to observe drag on the vehicle at racing speed.
(Hmmm. Sounds like “cheap” and “weird!”)SPOILER ALERT: BUSINESS CARDS! Don’t skip the 2 x 2 on page 232, “Rewards Go to Those Who Are Contrarian and Correct,” in the hopeful chapter, “The Optimists Will Win.” But you must also read the “Conclusion” chapter when Parker is helping a company “stop the bleeding” with a long-term strategy.
In his research in 12 cities in India, he meets “an impressive entrepreneur” who played “an instrumental role in building and running one of the most successful automobile manufacturers in India.”
Obsessed with keeping costs low, this entrepreneur handed Parker his business card, “which was clearly made by hand. His secretary created ‘cards’ on a sheet of paper that she printed in the office and cut with scissors. The edges and angles were imperfect, but the message was clear: this is a company that keeps costs low.”
He took the business card with him to his next meeting and said this in his presentation to the CEO and senior team: “Until you’re ready to print and cut your own business cards, you’re going to have trouble competing with this company on cost.”
(Read the rest of the story in the conclusion. You won’t believe it!)
That prompted me to ask
ChatGPT, “Give me 10 possible titles for my new business card, including humorous titles. I'm now retired, but I was previously a management consultant.” The list included:
• Chief Retirement Officer
• Ex-Management Whisperer
• Retired, Not Expired
• Boardroom to Boredom Expert
• Former Corporate Magician
• Unpaid Golf Intern
Now I just need to find my scissors and I’ll be all set.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for
The Illusion of Innovation: Escape "Efficiency" and Unleash Radical Progress, by Elliott Parker. (And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.)
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:1) Does your team experiment enough? According to Elliott Parker’s book, Pablo Picasso created a minimum of 26,075 pieces of art—which means “Picasso averaged 1 new piece of artwork every day of his life from age 20 until his death at age 91.”
2) In the chapter, “Manufacturing Serendipity,” the author suggests this: “Instead of judging possible experiments for their potential to ‘succeed,’ choose experiments based on their ability to spawn more experiments, enabling you to accumulate more knowledge over time. Novelty and learning compound.” What are we experimenting with this quarter? Is it fast, cheap, and weird?
Mastering 100 Must-Read Books
Part 14: Leadership & Management at WarBook #77 of 100: It's Your ShipFor your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by featuring Book #77 in
Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.
It's Your Ship:
Management Techniques from
the Best Damn Ship in the Navy
by D. Michael Abrashoff
Books #77 through #81 spotlight five fascinating books with military viewpoints on leadership and management. In this bestseller, Captain Abrashoff’s dominant core value jumps right out:
“It’s your ship, take responsibility for it. Don’t ask permission; do it.” • Order from
Amazon:
It's Your Ship • Listen on
Libro (6 hours, 24 minutes).
•
Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson).
Captain Abrashoff covers almost all of my 20 management buckets: lead by example, listen aggressively, communicate purpose and meaning, create a climate of trust, look for results—not salutes, take calculated risks, go beyond standard procedure and build up your people. And get this! He urges his sailors:
“If a rule doesn’t make sense, break it.”
CLICK HERE FOR BOOKS BY JOHN
MORE RESOURCES:
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