Tag Archives: Innovation

How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance

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The Sony Walkman was a great innovation, and it allowed Sony to dominate the portable music market for several years. But then along came the Apple iPod. Apple quickly took over the market from Sony even though Sony had developed an MP3 player before Apple. What happened?

Gerard Tellis, author of Unrelenting Innovation, says that Sony’s innovation was stifled by what he calls the “incumbent’s curse.” The three traits of an incumbent that can slow down innovation are:

  1. Fear to cannibalize current products.
  2. An aversion to risk.
  3. A focus on the present.

Sony was concerned about their music royalties so their MP3 player included anti-piracy software that stifled its adoption by consumers, and Apple took over the market. Tellis believes that unrelenting innovation requires that a company must work at overcoming this incumbent’s curse by reversing the traits:

  1. Be prepared to cannibalize current products.
  2. Embrace risk.
  3. Focus on the future.

Tellis developed a list of practices by which any company can become unrelentingly innovative and continue to dominate their respective markets. If you would like to hear about these practices, join us on May 29th for our Soundview Live webinar with Gerard Tellis called How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance.

Invite your colleagues and fill a conference room for just $49 for this exciting opportunity. And if you subscribe to our Online Edition of Soundview Executive Book Summaries, all webinars are free – $99 for our book summaries plus weekly webinars – not a bad deal.

Balance and Innovation

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We have another two-webinar week coming to Soundview. Next week we will be hosting James Cusumano, author of Balance, and Stephen Shapiro, author of Best Practices Are Stupid. While these two topics are not related to one another, they are both important to every executive.

Balance: The Business-Life Connection by James Cusumano

In this Soundview Live webinar, Balance: Eight Steps for Success in Any Business, James Cusumano will provide a proven template for creating a successful business, and simultaneously, long-term balance and fulfillment in your personal life. Drawing from his just-released book Balance: The Business-Life Connection, the author brings three decades of diverse experience in technology and entertainment, which include Rock Star, Corporate Executive, Entrepreneur, Filmmaker, and Holistic Hotelier. He will show how to identify and unleash the power of life purpose and passion leading to long-term personal and professional fulfillment.

Best Practices Are Stupid by Stephen Shapiro

In This Soundview Live webinar, Why Best Practices Are Stupid, Stephen Shapiro will offer forty counterintuitive yet proven strategies for boosting innovation and making it a repeatable, sustainable, and profitable process at the heart of your company’s culture. Shapiro will show that nonstop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack.

You’re invited to attend one or both of these important events. Each webinar will be entertaining in its own way, as Cusumano explains his unusual career path and Shapiro debunks business’s sacred best practices.

If you’re not a current Soundview subscriber, now is the time to join. Both events are free for subscribers, and it only takes three events to cover the full cost of a subscription. Check out the options and join us.

Book Review: Idea Agent

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by Lina M. Echeverria

by Lina M. Echeverria

The cover of innovation leadership consultant and author Lina M. Echeverría’s book Idea Agent: Leadership That Liberates Creativity and Accelerates Innovation perfectly captures the problematic way many organizations view creativity: lightning in a jar. Fortunately for executives, Echeverría removes much of the mystery and offers a better alternative to allow creativity to bloom. Idea Agent is now available in multiple digital formats as a Soundview Executive Book Summary.

Echeverría provides readers with a framework to create a culture of creativity and innovation. She calls the elements the “Seven Passions of Innovation.” The seven passions include everything from gathering diverse teams of intelligent employees to shaping a culture that provides the necessary amount of time for creativity to occur. As Echeverría writes, the seven passions, “come together to make up a living system whose energy radiates from a leader at the core, to its heart center.”

The advice Echeverría provides leaders does a good deal to harness the more difficult parts of innovation. There is an obvious connection between talented individuals, a supportive workplace and successful innovation. Idea Agent delineates the gaps between these pieces and creates a more complete picture. It also provides the business ramifications of creativity in a way that other volumes struggle to attempt. A core tenet of Echeverría’s philosophy is the deep connection between company success and a leader’s commitment to the careers of his or her employees. When a leader pushes to set equally high goals for employees and him- or herself, the results can be game-changing.

Idea Agent is an intriguing journey into the soul of innovation and leaders will find it a worthwhile guide for building better teams.

How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

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When you think of great inventions from the past, do you picture the inventor with a light bulb image over their head crying “eureka!”?  Whether it’s the automobile, light bulb, airplane or iPod, our tendency is to think of these as breakthrough concepts that came in a flash of brilliance. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Thomas Edison tried over one thousand different materials for his light bulb filament before he found one that would stay lit without burning up. And so it has been with many of the great innovations throughout history.

Peter Sims, author of Little Bets, puts it this way, “…all of them have achieved remarkable results using a surprisingly similar approach: methodically taking small, experimental steps.” He continues, “Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan a whole project out in advance, trying to foresee the final outcome, they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins that allow them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.”

Among the methods that Sims discovered as he researched these innovators:

  1. Failing quickly to learn fast.
  2. Trying imperfect ideas.
  3. Engaging in highly immersed observation.

These methods “…free their minds, opening them up to making unexpected connections and perceiving invaluable insights. These methods also unshackle them from the constraints of conventional planning, analytical thinking, and linear problem solving that our educational system overemphasizes at the expense of creativity.”

Perhaps your company has been looking for that big idea, that break-though concept. Maybe it’s time to try a different method for sparking innovation. Join Soundview and Peter Sims on April 30th to hear Sim’s full explanation of this approach and learn how it can be applied to your business. Register for our Webinar How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries and we’ll save you a seat at the table.

Differentiating Your Company Through Strategy and Talent

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Are you selling vanilla ice cream? Most likely you aren’t literally selling it, but do you sell a product that’s basically like your competitor’s – a plain, basic commodity?

Book summaries are our vanilla ice cream. Although we have distinguished our summaries from those of our competitors by the selection of titles, quality of writing, and thoroughness of the summary, some people still consider all book summaries alike. This is why we’ve gone further to separate ourselves from the competition.

We have brought together talented staff to help us provide subscribers greater access to the authors and their work through hosting weekly webinars with book authors, interviews with the authors to gain clearer insight into their lives and ideas, and launched our Executive Insights series to also provide video interviews with executives who are putting these new ideas into practice. In addition, we provide a customized library for each subscriber to search and use this content, while providing access through apps as well.

This is the basic concept behind Steve Van Remortel’s book Stop Selling Vanilla ice Cream. In order to differentiate yourself from the competition, you need the right talent and strategy to make it happen. Van Remortel goes so far as to say that “there is no difficulty any viable enterprise can confront that that cannot be surmounted by improving its strategy and optimizing its talent.”

He provides five fundamentals to help define an organization’s route from where they are today all the way to greater prosperity and effectiveness.

  1. Differentiation – deliver a competence that creates a clear differentiation for your organization.
  2. Tangible Value – don’t just say you’re the best – prove it.
  3. Talent Management – implement a talent management system that enables your organization to identify, select, develop and retain talent.
  4. Tactical Department Plans – develop and execute action plans that work “on” the business in each department of your organization.
  5. Plan Execution – institute a plan execution program to insure an organizational culture of discipline that focuses on accountability.

If you’re tired of selling vanilla ice cream and would like to work out a differentiation plan, please join us on April 23rd to hear Steve’s Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream process in detail and to ask your questions throughout the presentation. Register now for Differentiating Your Company Through Strategy and Talent.