Innovation Garden

Simplicity, insanity, harmony (quotes)

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Albert Einstein

 

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.

Bruce Feirstein

 

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

 

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

John Kenneth Galbraith

 

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Mark Twain

 

You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note.

Doug Floyd

 

Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Albert Einstein

 

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw

 

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

 

 

 

What matters now (book by Hamel)

What matters now

Gary Hamel

 What Matters Now

Most management books suggest new approaches to business without directly assaulting the typical intended audiences. This book is different. A central theme of the book is that the technology of management, now about 100 years old, is not adequate to lead business in the 21^st century. A set of 25 essays grouped into categories related to values, innovation, adaptability, passion and ideology; the book can be read in almost any order. Business in the future will still require discipline, coordination, and strategy – but the distribution of information, authority, decision rights, and rewards will need to shift from allocation based on position towards allocation based on contribution. In fact, the world is becoming so complex that executives may not be able to make good decisions without subject matter expert engagement. In many ways, this book is a return to the empowerment movement in the early 1990s. If Hamel’s books in the past were directed at senior executives, this book is probably directed at the next generation of top management in the hope that they will embrace the changes he suggests.

 

The Medici Effect (book by Johansson)

The Medici Effect: What elephants and epidemics can teach us about innovation

Frans Johansson

The Medici Effect

Book in bullets:

• The biggest innovations are coming at the intersection between fields
• The number of intersections is growing due to demographic and technological shifts
• While the source of major innovations, the success of these innovations is very difficult to predict
• Dealing with this uncertainty is difficult for most organizations, but the usual responses to uncertainty (analysis & planning) don’t help. Instead, expect to revise plans in route.
• Innovators succeed, in part, because they learn to accept the risk of failure and choose the possibility of failure over the certainty of not trying

 

The Sixth Sense (book by van der Heijden et al.)

The Sixth Sense: Accelerating Organizational Learning with Scenarios

Kees van der Heijden, Ron Bradfield, George Burt, George Cairns, George Wright

The Sixth Sense

This 2002 book is written by a group from the University of Strathclyde Business School who have taught and consulted with organizations doing scenarios. The book is essentially about how people and organizations look at and prepare for the future. A central concept is that aspects of the future are already visible, but that people ignore the signals available. Sometimes this is an individual phenomenon, but it is often a social one. The reasons that people ignore the potential information can be traced to both social and psychological routines.

The Innovation Killer (book by Rabe)

The Innovation Killer by Cynthia Barton Rabe

 The Innovation Killer

 Book in bullets:

1. Success breeds confidence. Confidence breeds groupthink. Groupthink resists innovation. In the extreme case, ideas disappear down the black hole of “expert” rejection.
2. Groupthink effects can be undermined with zero-gravity (outsider) thinking.
3. A good “outside” thinker will have psychological distance, renaissance tendencies and related expertise relative the group and jot to be done.
4. There are many places to find outside thinking, inside and outside of your organization. People can improve their “outside” thinking capability.

The Ten Faces of Innovation (book by Kelley)

The Ten Faces of Innovation

Tom Kelley

 

Ten Faces

 This is another book from Tom Kelley, one of the leaders at IDEO. In this book, he describes 10 archetypes involved in innovation. The book starts out discussing the “devil’s advocate” and the role this archetype has in stopping innovation. The role is effective because it is completely negative, and once the tone of discussion turns negative, it may be impossible to return to balanced consideration of a proposal. To counter the devil’s advocate, there must be some alternative archetypes, and this book offers ten candidates – that fall into 3 categories: learners, organizers and builders. Kelley says that these archetypes are about “being innovation” rather than “doing innovation”. The book describes these different archetypes mostly through anecdotes, but I will summarize the basic descriptions.

 

Look at more (book by Stefanovich)

Look at More

Andy Stefanovich

 This is primarily a book about ideation, and the practical reality that getting good ideas is not quick and easy. The book has two central ideas:  Look At More Stuff, Think About It Harder (LAMSTAIH) and the 5 M’s of Mood, Mindset, Mechanisms, Measurement and Momentum.

 The book is primarily a collection of stories and examples; it is not over-concerned with explaining procedures or problem solving. In this sense, the book is dedicated to creating an attitude towards creativity more than a process.

Change by design (book by Brown)

Change by Design

Tim Brown

Change by Design

This book, written by the CEO of IDEO, describes “design thinking”. Design thinking is more than design. At one level design is about making things that work well, and can be done by one person based on their own insight, analysis and imagination. Design thinking is more integrated and holistic that this. In particular, design thinking is more human-centric than technology-centric. If design is tactical, design thinking is strategic. More than many books, this is a book of stories rather than lists. In fact, the author notes that a central theme in design thinking is the creation of a story about somebody who had a problem and how a solution for that problem that made that person’s life better. I’ve organized this summary with the stories at the front and the lists behind.

 

Spark (book by Winsor)

Spark: be more innovative through co-creation

John Winsor

 Spark

The essence of this both is the contention that innovation is not the work of an isolated individual, but the product of people working together in a suitable organization and culture. This perspective is illustrated by the following graphic, adapted from the book.

 

Whoever makes the most mistakes win (book by Farson & Keyes)

WHOEVER MAKES THE MOST MISTAKES WINS

Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes

 

Whoever-Makes-Most-Mistakes-Wins

 This book starts from the premise that is often difficult to truly distinguish success and failure. It may simply be a question of timing. Today’s success is tomorrow’s failure and the reverse. In a society sometimes obsessed with success, or with not failing, people making decisions can be paralyzed by the fear of failure.

Strategic Innovation (book by Tennant & Duarte)

Strategic Innovation: Embedding innovation as a core competency in your organization

Nancy Tennant Snyder & Deborah Duarte

 Strategic-Innovation

This book is about the experience of Whirlpool in developing a stronger innovation capability. In the following table I tried to summarize some of the major features of this process. One feature of the discussion is the explicit goal of creating a core competence – not simply a capability.

 

The organizational triangle

As part of our 1990s effort to understand how people in our research department contributed to progress, we identified a number of traits that people exhibited. While we may have started with the idea of identifying the good and the bad, we soon switched to the good and the complementary good.

For example, problem solving was good, but what was the opposite or complement? We soon decided that problem identifying was the opposite.

A second type of effort in our research group was capability-driven. Chemists sought opportunities to use their chemistry knowledge. We realized that the complement to this was needs-driven. Needs-driven people are motivated by what people need rather than what they can do.

The final dimension that we identified reflected that fact that many of our colleagues were very oriented to logical and fact-based thinking, while others were more intuitive in their approaches.

Saving Innovation (book by Dugan)

Saving Innovation 

Michael Dugan & Chadd Scott

Saving innovation

 

Ultimately, this book has a few simple messages, though their execution is anything but simple.

Most organizations face three main barriers to innovation: managers behaving badly, unrealistic expectations, and disregard of the basics. In brief, the number one barrier to employee engagement with innovation is the response of managers to new ideas. Because of the high impact direct supervisors have on people, if these individuals consistently resist or reject new ideas and the people who suggest them, there is no hope for the organization to become innovative.