Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition E-Book

Stephen M. Shapiro

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 222

Beschreibung

Well-intentioned leaders, in their attempts to boost innovation, are inadvertently destroying it.

What if almost everything you know about creating a culture of innovation is wrong? What if the way you are measuring innovation is choking it? What if your market research is asking all of the wrong questions?

It’s time to innovate the way you innovate.

Innovation isn’t just about generating occasional new ideas; it’s about staying consistently one step ahead of the competition.

Best Practices Are Stupid offers 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. They include:

Hire people you don’t like: Bring in the right mix of people to unleash your team’s full potential.

Asking for ideas is a bad idea: Define challenges more clearly. If you ask better questions, you will get better answers.

Don’t think outside the box; find a better box: Instead of giving your employees a blank slate, provide them with well-defined parameters that will increase their creative output.

Stop glorifying failure: Looking at innovation as a series of experiments allows you to redefine and minimize failure.

This compact book shows that non-stop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack.

Leseprobe

BEST PRACTICES ARE STUPID

40 WAYS TO OUT-INNOVATE THE COMPETITION

STEPHEN M. SHAPIRO

www.amplifypublishing.com

Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition

©2011 and 2023 Stephen M. Shapiro. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, or photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the author.

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

www.StephenShapiro.com

ISBN-13: 979-8-89138-050-9

12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all the individuals and companies I've worked with over the years.

Your stories, struggles, and insights have been my greatest teachers.

CONTENTS

Preface to Updated Edition

Introduction

Overview

Innovate The Way You Innovate

1. Not Survival of the Fittest – Survival of the Adaptable

2. How Can You Avoid Becoming a One-Hit Wonder?

3. Asking for Ideas Is a Bad Idea

4. Don't Think Outside the Box; Find a Better Box

5. Expertise Is the Enemy of Innovation

Process

Challenge-Centered Innovation

6. The Difference Between a Pipeline and a Sewer is what Flows Through It

7. The Goldilocks Principle

8. There Is No Such Thing as a “Know-It-All”

9. What Did Edison Get Wrong About Innovation?

10. What Do Cisco, LG Electronics, and GE Have in Common with American Idol?

11. To Compete or Not Compete: That is the Question

12. Be Sure to Avoid Mobsourcing

Strategy

Innovation Strategy And Customers

13. Lessons from Indiana Jones

14. Your Market Research Sucks

15. Be the Aspirin for Your Customers’ Pains

16. Innovate Where You Differentiate

17. Ever Notice How “One Size Fits All” Never Really Fits All?

18. Best Practices Are (Sometimes) Stupid

19. Simplification is the Best Innovation

Measures

Innovation Measures And Motivation

20. Motivate Like Maslow

21. You Get What You Measure, But Will You Get What You Want?

22. The Performance Paradox

23. Time Pressure Kills Creativity

24. Stop Glorifying Failure

25. Stop Loving Your Ideas

People

Organization, Leadership, And Culture

26. Hire People You Don't Like

27. Why the Pyramids Are One of the Seven Wonders

28. The “Top-Down” Philosophy Should be Left to Convertibles

29. Use the Reality TV Show Model

30. Get Your Knowledge Workers Doing Knowledge Work

Creativity

Techniques For Stimulating Creative Thinking

31. Encourage Employees to Get On Their Soapbox

32. The Power of Positive Constraints

33. Someone Else Has Already Solved Your Problem

34. Adapt Your Product to a Different Environment

35. Don’t put the “No” in InNOvation

36. How Can You Make the Impossible Possible?

37. Stand in Someone Else’s Shoes

38. Innovation is Child’s Play

39. Sometimes It’s Logical to be Illogical

40. Predict What the Competition Will Do Next

Culture

Scaling Innovation

How We Created a 20,000-Person Innovation Practice at Accenture in Nine Months

Continue the Journey

About the Author

PREFACE TO UPDATED EDITION

WHAT I DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO INCLUDE IN THE ORIGINAL BOOK

On May 4, 2011, we were only days away from going to press with my fifth book, yet it still did not have a title. I provided nearly one hundred different ideas, and the publisher rejected them all. They had a title they wanted to use, but I didn’t like it. I was told they would run with theirs if I could not find a title they liked better. The clock was ticking.

At the eleventh hour, on a phone call with them, I suggested the title, Best Practices Are Stupid. The line went quiet. And then I heard, “Ok, we’ll go with that.”

There’s a problem with choosing a title at the last minute. The title should have a solid link to the book’s theme. Although tip 18 is “Best Practices Are (Sometimes) Stupid,” that was only one small slice of the book, and it focused more on when to use best practices – not why they are a bad idea.

Given the last-minute change, I could only make minor edits to the introduction to reflect the new title.

Therefore, I added this brief preface for this edition, sharing the three reasons best practices are stupid. Although some of this is referenced in the introduction, I felt it would be good to include all of it here in one place.

#1: Innovation is Not Replication

If you are trying to differentiate your organization and using a best practice, you’ll be playing a game of catch-up.

By the time you implement someone else’s best practice, they're on to the next one. You can’t differentiate your organization by replicating what someone else is doing.

Unless you strive to compete primarily on price, being a copycat is rarely a solid strategy.

#2: Context Matters

We often believe we can take a practice from one organization and bring it to another. But culture, resources, competitive position, industry, and other contextual factors matter.

It seems as though everyone wants to be like Amazon or Apple. But let's face it; you most likely don’t have their reach, scale, or financial position. Therefore, replicating a practice from an organization like that makes no sense for most companies.

Is your organization hierarchical or flat? Does your culture encourage risk-taking, or is it risk-averse? Are you centralized or decentralized? All of these determine if practices may apply to your organization.

Your business differentiator impacts which practices make sense for your organization. Your geography, business strategy, management approach, organization structure, industry, and more will affect which practices might be useful.

The bottom line: context and culture matter.

#3: Lack of Causation

While speaking at a conference several years ago, I tried an experiment. I told the audience that I had discovered the five best practices that nearly all successful people have in common. I printed these practices on a sheet of paper and invited ten successful people from the audience to join me on stage.

I asked each of these individuals how many of these practices they used in their personal life or business. It turns out that all five practices were used by all ten of these successful entrepreneurs.

The audience gasped. They were on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear the keys to the kingdom. I then read off the five practices:

Read your email (at least) once a daySmile (at least) once a dayBrush your teeth (nearly) every dayShower (at least) twice a weekWear clothes to work

Although the successful entrepreneurs all laughed, the audience was disappointed.

But it made an important point. Any time you hear about a best practice, make sure you consider if it was the true cause of success rather than a coincidence or correlation.

The Undersampling of Failure

For my experiment, I found ten successful people knowing they would have used these silly practices. But had I taken the time to look, I would certainly have found people in the audience who used those exact practices yet weren’t nearly as successful.

This is called the “undersampling of failure” (a.k.a. Survivorship Bias). We tend to focus on the winners and successes, but we don’t take time to track down the times when advice or a best practice didn’t work.

Companies that were successful in implementing a particular practice are at conferences talking about their experiences. They write books about their approaches. But what about the hundreds or thousands of companies that did exactly the same practice and failed? We don’t hear about them. They’re not being invited to speak at conferences or to write books.

We focus on those who did well, but we don’t spend time investigating the people who tried that same practice and weren’t successful. Why can a practice have both successes and failures? To answer this, we need to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence.

Causation, Correlation, and Coincidence

Causation means that the given practice was the actual cause of a company’s success. If they didn’t apply this practice, they would not have achieved the results they did.

But in many cases, the relationship between a practice and success is not causation but rather correlation or coincidence.

Coincidence means there is no relationship. The silly practices I shared had little or no relationship to someone’s success. Of course, if you never brush your teeth, never smile, and never read your email, it might prevent you from being successful. But doing these things will certainly not create success.

Correlation is best explained with a simple example.

Let’s assume that the following statement is true: “Individuals with greater wealth are happier.”

Most people reading this will jump to the conclusion that money makes people happy. In doing so, they assume that money is the cause of happiness. If we make money, we become happy.

But research shows that this is not the case. Money does not cause happiness; happiness creates wealth. The happier someone is, the more they are eager to work and the more people want to work with them.

Wealth and happiness are correlated. But money doesn’t cause happiness; happiness causes wealth. The wrong causation leads people to chase wealth in the belief that they’ll be happy, and they’re never happy.

Understanding the distinction between causation, correlation, and coincidence is critical for innovation. If you’re going to apply a supposed best practice, you had better understand that the work that you’re doing and the money you’re investing will cause the success you want.

Sometimes, even when there is a causation, other considerations may influence their usefulness. For example, timing can also be a factor. In today’s fast-moving world, studying what someone did last year may be irrelevant to what will work today. People teaching you social media strategies may be outdated by the time you hear about them. I’ve had my own business for over twenty years. The approaches that I used in the past to drive my success would be silly in today’s environment.

And in some cases, a first-mover advantage may be the cause. The first people on social media had a better chance of making it big than those joining today. And those who hopped on the Bitcoin bandwagon early on will certainly make more money than those who decide to invest there now.

These concepts are critical for all organizations (and individuals) to understand. We love to learn from others. And we should because it can speed development times. But remember, replication is never innovation. Replicating someone else’s practices without skepticism can lead to failure.

* * *

Best Practices Are Stupid was originally published by Penguin Portfolio in 2011. 800-CEO-READ (now Porchlight), the premier distributor of business books, chose it as the best innovation and creativity book of that year. It was even the number one best-selling business book in Canada, according to The Globe and Mail.

However, ten years have passed since then.

In 2020, I published my sixth book, Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems (Amplify Publishing, 2020). At that time, my efforts shifted to the newer book, and I stopped promoting this one.

I had moved on. Or so I thought.

Although I wasn’t actively publicizing Best Practices Are Stupid, I found myself referring back to this book frequently when involved in deeper transformational work with my clients. The newer book extensively discusses one step of the innovation process: reframing. Although this is a critical step that companies often get wrong, Invisible Solutions doesn’t address all the topics needed for the broader cultural shift. But Best Practices Are Stupid does. It covers nearly every aspect of innovation, including organization models, metrics, investment strategies, open innovation, motivation strategies, and more.

Admittedly, some examples may seem outdated a decade after its publication. However, the concepts behind each story remain valid a decade later. Therefore, for this revised edition, I decided to keep the essence of the original book, only making minor edits. And instead of changing the core text, I added “author’s notes” at the end of each chapter. These provide additional thoughts not included in the original book.

In addition, I added a new chapter at the end that details the process we used to create a 20,000-person process and innovation practice at the consulting firm Accenture. We did this in only nine months. You might find this model helpful for delivering massive and rapid change within your organization.

I hope you enjoy reading this. Happy innovating.

Stephen Shapiro

[email protected]

www.stephenshapiro.com

INTRODUCTION

On April 20, 2010, the environment was dealt a horrific blow. On that day, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, spewing as much as 180 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf Coast of the United States. It took eighty-seven days to cap the gushing wellhead.

In the weeks following the explosion, scientists, movie stars, and concerned citizens tried to devise ways to slow the flow. But workable solutions were hard to find and implement, as the well was nearly a mile below the ocean’s surface. Repeated attempts failed.

In an effort to find better solutions, the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, spearheaded by BP, launched a website where anyone could submit their ideas in an online suggestion box. According to USA Today, the website received nearly 125,000 ideas; 80,000 suggestions were for plugging the leak, and 43,000 were for ways to clean up the oil.

Of these ideas, one hundred were deemed as having some merit, and a couple of dozen were tested.

On the surface, this might appear to have been a successful endeavor; BP was able to gather lots of possible ideas to help end the disaster.

For a company that stood to lose billions of dollars in cleanup costs, relief payouts, and lost sales due to bad publicity, this approach might indeed have been a good strategy.

But the resources necessary to respond to this type of disaster typically don’t exist within most organizations. Although a workable solution may have been found using this strategy, it is unclear if that was the case. Regardless, consider how many people it would take to evaluate thousands of ideas. If one person could evaluate an idea in thirty seconds (which is optimistic, especially for a technically complex issue like this) and could dedicate forty hours a week to the task, it would take over half a year to evaluate that many submissions. This would be a significant investment for any company.

With an innovation strategy like this, finding a useful idea is like finding a needle in a haystack. Or, more accurately, it is like finding a specific needle in a stack of other needles.

Unfortunately, this innovation strategy is what many well-intentioned companies use in their quest to be more innovative. They operate under the misguided belief that getting more ideas leads to better innovation. Organizations that use this approach spend too much time sorting the wheat from the chaff. And sadly, most of the ideas are chaff.

As this book will reveal, you don’t want more ideas. You want to focus on finding solutions to pressing problems that enable your company to be more innovative. In fact, I’ll teach you why the key to innovating successfully involves innovating efficiently.

The popular press and innovation gurus often provide well-worn examples that muddy the waters on how to approach the innovation process.

Google reportedly lets its employees use 20 percent of their time to develop new ideas. “PhDs and other smarty pants agreed to hand over their brains to the search giant for four days of the week and, in return, they were given the fifth to work on any project of their fancy.” Many experts hold this up as an effective way to innovate. In actuality, this investment was designed to help Google win the “war for talent” and did little to generate new revenue streams. Despite the enormous investment, 97 percent of their revenues still come from advertising, the same way they have always made money.

3M uses a similar strategy, giving employees 15 percent of their time to explore. When discussing the 15 percent rule, someone from 3M once told me, “Which fifteen percent? I work sixty hours a week and there’s no time for my fifteen percent.” The answer appears to involve working weekends, as Les Krogh, retired senior vice president of Research and Development once said, “If 3Mers have to get something done, they’ll do it. They’ll take their 15 percent on Saturdays or Sundays, if need be.”

Admittedly, their approach has indeed produced some fantastic innovations. But will this strategy work for your organization? Both Google and 3M benefit from a highly motivated workforce that is probably more ambitious than employees in most organizations.

Is there a more efficient way for you to innovate?

Allowing employees to dedicate 15 percent to 20 percent of their time to the innovation efforts of their choosing is akin to the infinite monkey theorem: if you give an infinite amount of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, they would eventually write War and Peace. The belief is that if you give employees enough time to tinker around and develop enough harebrained ideas, they will eventually find the next big innovation (and no, I am not suggesting that your employees are monkeys).

Although this might yield new ideas, it is hardly an efficient way to innovate.

Let’s face it, the old innovation models are broken, inefficient, and fail to produce results. It’s time for you to innovate the way you innovate and apply some new thinking to your innovation process.

This book comprises fortytips designed to help you do just that. These tips are designed to help you innovate differently. Innovate more efficiently. Innovate in a more focused manner.

Some tips are intended to change the way you think about innovation. Others are designed to change how you innovate. Depending on your experience level, you may already be familiar with some tips, while others will be new concepts for even the most advanced innovation practitioners. Some tips are primarily useful at an organizational level, while others are essential for all individuals to consider.

In some cases, you may not agree with my point of view. That’s ok! The objective of each tip is to get you and your team thinking. You don’t necessarily need to take what I say at face value. Challenge each concept. Discuss them. See how they apply to your organization. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for innovation. Pick and choose the tips that will have the most significant impact.

Although the tips are organized in a logical sequence, they can be read in any order, and each stands on its own. The first series of tips introduce some of the most important concepts relating to “innovating the way you innovate,” and the remainder of the book is loosely organized around the components of the innovation capability: process, strategy, measures, people, and technology:

Process: Most innovation efforts are ineffective and unfocused. To remedy this, you will be introduced to challenge-centered innovation, an efficient process for solving your most pressing issues and opportunities.Strategy: If you don’t understand your customer’s latent desires, your innovation effort will be comparable to a wild goose chase. Armed with their actual wants and needs, you can develop a powerful innovation strategy.Measures: Your measurement systems may inadvertently be killing your innovation efforts. You can stimulate creativity and foster innovation by making simple changes to your motivation strategy.People: Innovation depends on having the right people – with divergent points of view - in the right roles. The key is to treat each individual like an owner of the business, pushing decision-making to the lowest levels of the organization.Creativity: One aspect of the people dimension is competency. With innovation, one specific competency involves the ability to develop creative solutions. Although creativity is technically part of the “people” dimension of the innovation capability, given its importance, I have dedicated a section to these techniques. These can be used in brainstorming sessions or as instructional aids for helping people be more creative.Technology: Technology is critical in finding solutions to challenges and enabling collaboration. Although this is a distinct component of the innovation capability, the world of technology is changing so rapidly. Therefore, anything written in a book would be immediately obsolete. Given this, I chose not to focus on it in this book.

I am always amazed by the high quality of people employed by companies around the world. I am even more amazed by how little most companies tap into the innovative potential of these employees. This book provides dozens of proven tips and techniques that will enable you to get the most out of your workforce.

Innovation is the key to long-term growth. Although many companies are enamored with utilizing best practices, as this book’s title suggests, duplicating what others are already doing relegates you to a continuous game of catch-up. Following in the footsteps of others is the fastest way to irrelevancy. Instead, create your own path. Find new and creative ways of staying ahead of the competition. An organization can only survive and thrive in today’s volatile marketplace through repeated, rapid, and efficient change.

With most innovation strategies, finding a good idea is like finding a specific needle in a stack of other needles.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: 3M is an excellent example of why context matters regarding best practices. Their 15 percent rule works for them because they have decades of experience. It’s a powerful strategy for their organization as it is part of their DNA. And their employees are eager to find the next big product innovation. Unfortunately, other companies that try to replicate this approach often waste 15 percent of their time and money on innovations that add no value. 3M’s culture and measurement systems are designed to support this concept; yours is probably not.

OVERVIEW

INNOVATE THE WAY YOU INNOVATE

Before diving into the specifics of the innovation capability, let’s review some key innovation concepts. Not everyone will share my point of view in this section. That’s expected as these tips challenge the “conventional wisdom” that dominates popular thought. However, the high failure rate of most innovation efforts tells us that these conventional approaches may not be so wise after all. Ready? Let’s get started.

1

NOT SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST – SURVIVAL OF THE ADAPTABLE

Have you heard the one about two men who are hiking through the mountains of Canada? The story goes that after stumbling upon a hungry, 600-pound grizzly bear, one of the hikers removes his backpack and hiking boots and puts on his running shoes. The other hiker looks at him and asks, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!” The first hiker responds, “I know, but I only need to outrun you!”

This story highlights the essence of innovation. Innovation is not about new products, new processes, new services, new business models, or even new ideas. It is about staying one step ahead of your competition so you are not eaten. Let’s face it; there are a lot of hungry competitors out there. And when you are trying to outpace the bear (your current competition), you must ensure you don’t run into an alligator or a tiger (your new competition).

Innovation is about change. Not a one-time change but ongoing change. It is about adaptability, flexibility, and agility.

Consider this…

When the pace of change outside your organization is greater than the pace of change within, you will be eaten and have difficulty keeping your business afloat. And as you know, the rate of change outside your organization is faster than ever.

The only way to survive is to stop treating innovation as a one-time event. Innovation must be a continuous, never-ending process. The second you rest on your laurels, you can be sure someone will catch you for breakfast.

But the story of the two hikers does not end with the first hiker saying, “I only need to outrun you.” It continues with the second hiker saying, “Go ahead and try,” and then he stands perfectly still as the first hiker takes off. The second hiker smiles because he knows bears have poor eyesight and will only chase prey that runs away. The first hiker gets eaten. The second hiker reflects on the importance of understanding the hunting habits of large carnivores–and of choosing friends wisely.

The moral of the story is that, although organizations want to speed up their innovation efforts and move quickly, running in the wrong direction can actually slow you down and burn valuable resources. Instead, take deliberate action. Know what will improve your business. Understand the marketplace and harness the energies of your organization by focusing on what is most important.

And yes, pick your friends–and colleagues–wisely. Choosing the right innovation partners is an important part of your innovation strategy.

So, what can an organization do to avoid getting eaten by the competition?

The Three Levels of Innovation

The answer to that lies in a basic understanding of the three levels of innovation.

Level 1: Innovation as an Event: This is where most companies find themselves. They conduct brainstorming sessions or hold random contests to generate new ideas. If a good idea is produced, some value is added to the organization. In some cases, the idea may even lead to tremendous value. However, a considerable amount of work generally needs to happen between idea generation and its realization.

Level 2: Innovation as a Capability: This is the next level of sophistication. The organization puts in place structures and processes to define problems, generate and evaluate solutions, and develop action plans to implement those solutions. The result is a realistic deliverable based on an organizational challenge or opportunity.

Level 3: Innovation as a System: The ultimate level involves creating an environment where innovation is embedded in everything you do. At both the event- and capability-driven levels, innovation tends to be reactionary and discrete. It is somewhat separate from the business. With embedded innovation, people not only innovate to deal with “problems or challenges” that are presented to them but with everything they do. They continuously, even radically, improve their products, processes, and organization. This creates exponential and ongoing value.

Where do you begin?