Innovation @ Merage - UCI Paul Merage School of Business : Book Reviews, Leadership Style

Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don’t Seem to Matter…But Really Do.

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:53:00 GMT

By Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman, W.W. Norton (2009). While this book builds on the established notion of weak ties being valuable information sources, it also offers a handful of insights into how those weak ties work in innovation. It starts with a simple self test: a list of 22 occupations. You check off whether you’re related to someone in that field, are friends with someone, or just know them as what you might call acquaintances—someone you could talk to. Most people know people in about six or seven of the occupations—the best performer could check off 19. According to Blau and Fingerman, the more of them you know, the more likely you are to get diverse experience, ideas, and more tools for solving problems. It even works virtually. When InnoCentive posted scientific inquiries, within four years 80,000 people had signed up—and the best solutions came from diverse groups of scientists in a variety of fields. This book is eye-opening on a personal level (you’re more likely to find a new job through these consequential strangers in your network than through friends and family), and it offers a number of examples that reinforce the importance of diverse opinions in creating breakthrough ideas. I’d give it an 8.5 on the LL Innovation Meter for anyone who wants to increase your own effectiveness or that of your team.

Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science

Lynda Lawrence — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:22:00 GMT

By: Charles S. Jacobs, Portfolio, 2009.

Take everything you think you know about management and throw it out the window. According to Jacobs, the latest brain science proves that people simply don’t work the way we’ve been taught: incentives and threats don’t change behavior, lofty goals won’t change organizations, and managers would get better results if they did far less management.

Instead, he reports, our brains are hardwired to do the same things in the same ways until a major threat disrupts those habits. At that point, we don’t want to be ordered to change—we’d like to figure it out for ourselves. And we’re particularly good at responding to change via storytelling, not facts.

Comparing Patton’s failure to the success of Henry V at Agincourt, he says that people respond to leaders who can tell inspiring stories, who admit that the situation is difficult, and who empathize with their audience because they have failed themselves: think FDR, Churchill and JFK.

While it may not convince you to scuttle everything you’re doing today, it certainly may cause you to rethink your management strategies.

Good for managers, even better for those aspiring to be leaders.
I’d give it an 8.5 on the LL Innovation Meter.

Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company

Lynda Lawrence — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:30:00 GMT

By: Robert Brunner and Stewart Emory, FT Press (2009).

If you know anyone in love with an iPhone, you may understand the feelings that Brunner and Emery describe. According to them, this fierce devotion extends past the product to the company, and enables Apple to charge higher prices and be forgiven for any mistakes.

Does this apply to companies that don’t make the latest must-have gadget? Only if you concentrate on designing the customer experience as carefully as Apple has designed the entire experience of an iPhone purchase: the meticulous product design, the anticipation, the storytelling, the retail stores full of techies to answer questions, the exquisite packaging, the intuitive interface, the geniuses who do the set up, the follow-up emails, and the easy (and often free) downloading of thousands of apps you never realized you wanted.

If, and only if, you create a company that is focused on creating better-than-expected customer experiences, you can reap the benefits. That means top-down permission to play, no cutting corners, no incremental changes substituting for innovation (think Razr phones), quick prototyping, and even quicker response to the market (think GM).

While the recommendations are easier to apply to a product-focused company, they will apply to services. If you’re in charge of a small company that needs to innovate, or in charge of design and need to sell your ideas company-wide, this would be a good book to use.
I’d give it an 8.5 on the LL innovation meter—not a lot of new insight, but a persuasive argument.

The Designful Company: How to Build a Culture of Nonstop Innovation

Lynda Lawrence — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:24:00 GMT

By: Marty Neumeier: New Riders, 2009.

Despite its dreadful title, this little book is a gem. Neumeier explains why everyone should care about design (companies that win design awards have 100-200% higher returns, and must-have products are always because of good design). More important, he defines designers as everyone who makes something better, whether it’s an idea, a process or a product.

He also points out the difference between standard business thinking that measures “What is” and design thinking that posits “What could be.” Without the latter, he says, we’d all be driving the same cars and watching broadcast TV. As for getting these new ideas converted to reality, he has strong ideas about storytelling (good) and PowerPoint (bad).

Why should you care about design? Just substitute the words innovation or organizational change and you’ll see why his insights apply to just about everything you have on your to-do list for the next decade.

Definitely worth an hour of your time, I’d give it a 9.0 on the LL innovation meter. Recommended for managers, MBAs, and anyone interested in changing their organization’s status quo.

The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It

Lynda Lawrence — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:49:00 GMT

By: Joshua Ramo: Little, Brown, 2009.

While it’s not strictly a business book, this is the best book for business that I’ve reviewed this year. It is, in fact, a whole new way of facing the future of any endeavor: Ramo suggests that the only way to deal with uncertainty is to accept that you can’t possibly predict anything.

He begins with an analogy from physics. When you methodically add single grains of sand to a pile, there is absolutely no way to tell which grain will cause an avalanche. Then, using examples from Google to Hizb’allah, he explains that no successful organization has a vision or strategic plan that can anticipate all the changes in a global and interconnected world. The successful ones, he says, are those that constantly adapt to change.

For most businesses, that attitude is too frightening to contemplate. Strategic planning, quarterly earnings projections, and overpaid executives are not guarantees of anything. Instead, he recommends that organizations think long-term, holistically and flexibly. It’s not innovation as a growth or survival strategy—it’s innovation as an organizational structure, a product and a philosophy.

This one gets a 9.8 on the LL innovation meter. I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to be part of a viable organization in the next few decades. And if any of our nation’s political leaders have the time, it should be on their reading lists as well.

Why We Make Mistakes

Lynda Lawrence — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:56:00 GMT

By: Joseph T. Hallinan; Broadway Books, 2009

Aside from having the cleverest (and most frustrating) cover in the history of publishing, Hallinan’s new book on the neuroscience of decision-making tells us a lot about why innovation is so hard to accomplish.

For the last couple of centuries, we’ve created a dichotomy between rational and emotional decisions, and most major decisions in business are supposedly made on purely rational terms. According to Hallinan’s research, however, there’s no such thing. Patients with brain damage that didn’t let them tap their emotions, who should have been making decisions better than Spock on Star Trek, couldn’t make even the smallest choices.

Our brains are designed to select between three and five items, and when we get more variables, we automatically revert to habit or emotion. He says you can choose a potato peeler on rational terms, but a car—not so much. Imagine then, what happens in business when you have an infinite number of variables and plenty of unknowns. Bingo. You revert to habit or emotion, and since we automatically distrust things we haven’t seen before, truly breakthrough ideas are killed. Then, of course, we rationalize those decisions because, after all, it’s business and it should be rational.

I’d give it a 9.5 on the LL innovation meter, good for anyone who has to make any kind of decision about anything. And let me know what you think about that cover.

What Would Google Do?

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:07:00 GMT

By Jeff Jarvis; Collins Business, 2009

Take everything you know about business, turn it upside down, and that’s pretty much what Google is doing. If conventional wisdom suggests that people should pay for your product, Google’s is free. If you might support that weird business strategy by running ads on your front page, Google’s is absolutely pristine.

In Jarvis’s view, every business has a lot to learn from one of the few profitable companies in these turbulent times. He starts with some counterintuitive Google premises: give control away, make mistakes often, let your customers be your ads, niches are more profitable than mass markets, everything is public, get out of the way.

The last half of the book is where it gets interesting--rethinking the business models of major industries in the Google way: manufacturing, real estate, communications, airlines, insurance, education. There are some provocative ideas, and at the very least, some challenges to long-held assumptions that are worth pondering.

I’d give it an 8 on the LL innovation meter, good for anyone who makes strategic decisions or wants to start the next Google.

Lynda Lawrence is an innovation consultant with Ideaworks Consulting. She teaches Strategic Innovation and Design Management at the Merage School at UCI, and is an advisor to the Beall Center.

The Seven Slide Solution & Presentation Zen

admin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:33:00 GMT

The Seven Slide Solution: Telling Your Business Story Effectively in Seven Slides or Less.

By Paul Kelly, Silvermine Press 2005

and

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery.

By Garr Reynolds, New Riders 2008

Fact: the average management person attends 62 meetings a month.
Three a day. Figure a high percentage of those feature PowerPoint slides and darkened rooms, and you can see why 90% of us daydream, and 70% ignore the speaker and get some work done.

Yet innovation cannot happen without persuading people that change is necessary, and compelling them to act outside their comfort zones—and that’s supposed to occur in meetings.

In The Seven Slide Solution, Kelly uses the principles of storytelling to illustrate exactly how to persuade people to change in seven slides or less. By framing your story, cutting it into the seven chunks that cognitive scientists say your short-term memory can handle, and letting the audience get involved, he promises more effective (and shorter) meetings. He advocates using a single killer statistic or visual (I learned that an acre is about equal to a football field without end zones).

It’s a relatively quick read, with lots of examples, and could make selling your innovation a lot easier, no matter who you are, or who you need to persuade. I’d give this an 8.5 on the LL Innovation Meter.

Like Kelly, in Presentation Zen, Reynolds thinks that presentations are really about transferring emotions. A far more graphic book, with lots of visual examples, this one also focuses on getting the concepts right and the pictures simple. While not limiting presenters to a handful of slides, Reynolds advocates using compelling photos and simple graphics as a backdrop for—you guessed it—persuasive storytelling.
You’ll never forget his slides on obesity, fresh water or boring presentations.

If nothing else, this book should open your mind to the possibilities of life beyond the bullets. This one gets a 9.5 on the LL Innovation Meter, and I would sincerely love it if every person who makes me sit through a PowerPoint for the rest of my life would read and apply these techniques.