We’re lost, but we’re making good time! —Yogi Berra (Location 26)
Tags: pink
If you’re like many entrepreneurs and managers, the word “progress” might not spring to mind when you’re trying to innovate. Instead you obsess about creating the perfect product with just the right combination of features and benefits to appeal to customers. Or you try to continually fine-tune your existing products so they’re more profitable or differentiated from your competitors’. You think you know just what your customers would like, but in reality, it can feel pretty hit or miss. Place enough bets and—with a bit of luck—something will work out. But that doesn’t have to be the case, not when you truly understand what causes consumers to make the choices they do. Innovation can be far more predictable—and far more profitable—but only if you think about it differently. It’s about progress, not products. (Location 33)
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In a recent McKinsey poll, 84 percent of global executives acknowledged that innovation is extremely important to their growth strategies, yet a staggering 94 percent were unsatisfied with their own innovation performance. Most people would agree that the vast majority of innovations fall far short of ambitions, a fact that has remained unchanged for decades. (Location 45)
Ever since Michael Lewis chronicled the Oakland A’s unlikely success in Moneyball (who knew on-base percentage was a better indicator of offensive success than batting averages?), organizations have been trying to find the Moneyball equivalent of customer data that will lead to innovation success. Yet few have. (Location 56)
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Innovation processes in many companies are structured and disciplined, and the talent applying them is highly skilled. There are careful stage-gates, rapid iterations, and checks and balances built into most organizations’ innovation processes. Risks are carefully calculated and mitigated. Principles like six-sigma have pervaded innovation process design so we now have precise measurements and strict requirements for new products to meet at each stage of their development. From the outside, it looks like companies have mastered an awfully precise, scientific process. But for most of them, innovation is still painfully hit or miss. And worst of all, all this activity gives the illusion of progress, without actually causing it. (Location 59)
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As Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, points out, “ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don’t light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Häagen-Dazs.” Of course, it’s no surprise that correlation isn’t the same as causality. But although most organizations know that, I don’t think they act as if there is a difference. They’re comfortable with correlation. It allows managers to sleep at night. (Location 81)
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As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do? For me, this is a neat idea. When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem. (Location 88)
Tags: pink