One of the things that I’ve found over the years is that innovation needs exploration. It’s a simple equation: If you don’t explore, you won’t discover, if you don’t discover you won’t invent and if you don’t invent you will be disrupted. No matter how smart or organized or successful you have been in the past, this basic rule hold true.
Of course, there are many ways to explore. You can seek out people at conferences whose focus is different than yours. You can watch TED talks and listen to podcasts. However, my favorite way to explore is to read. In my opinion, there is simply no other medium that offers the richness and depth of a good book.
That’s why every year I publish a list of books I have read and included in my articles. While I try to faithfully convey the insights I come across, there’s nothing quite like exploring for yourself. Also, not everything of value is directly quotable, so there are many books that I do not include in my articles, but you may find helpful. Here’s this year’s list. I hope you enjoy it!
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We tend to think of innovation as a single event, but the truth is that it’s an extended process of discovery, engineering and transformation. First, a scientist discovers a new phenomenon, then others figure out to use that knowledge to create a viable solution to an existing problem and finally a particular industry or field is transformed.
This process usually takes about 30 years, mostly because of the time it takes for a true transformation takes place. A revolutionary new technology needs to build up an ecosystem of suppliers, build a standard set of tools and practices and develop markets that have learned to make productive use out of it.
It appears that genomics is hitting that point now. Although the cost to sequence a genome has been falling at a rate that far exceeds Moore’s law, for some time now, we’ve seen little effect in the marketplace. That’s beginning to change though. As we move beyond just reading genomes, to being able to actually write them, the genomics revolution is upon us.
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I study innovators for a living. Every year, I interview dozens of men and women who’ve achieved remarkable things. For my own part, I publish about a hundred articles a year and my second book, Cascades, will come out this spring. While my achievements pale in comparison to many of those I interview, many believe my work to be original.
The most destructive myth about creativity is that there are innate traits that allow some people to be creative, while others, who lack these, cannot. The truth is that in decades of research on creativity, nobody has been able to identify any such traits. In my experience, great innovators come in all shapes and sizes.
Still, despite the diversity of original innovators themselves, there are some common principles in how they approach their work and these are things that anyone can apply. That doesn’t mean everyone can be world famous, but the evidence clearly shows that anyone can be creative and, even if it’s not a major breakthrough, make some contribution to the world.
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Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates called General Stanley McChrystal “perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I had ever met.” Commanding troops in Iraq and later in Afghanistan, he built an unparalleled reputation for both getting results and earning unusual respect and loyalty from those who served under him.
Yet when he sat down to write his memoir, My Share of the Task, he began to realize that his role was not as central as he had once thought. “Successes credited to a decision I made felt less impressive once I recognized the myriad factors and players who often had far more to do with the result than I had,” he would later write.
In his new book, Leaders: Myth and Reality, McChrystal tells the stories of 13 leaders, ranging from Harriet Tubman and Robert E. Lee to Einstein and Coco Chanel to lift the veil on what makes a successful leader. What he finds is that success doesn’t come from any specific trait or action, but by forging a sense of connection between the leader and the led.
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Every once in a while I get a comment from an audience member after a keynote speech or from someone who read my book, Mapping Innovation, about why so few women are included. Embarrassed, I try to explain that, as in many male dominated fields, women are woefully underrepresented in science and technology.
This has nothing to do with innate ability. In fact, you don’t have to look far to find women at the very apex of innovation, such as Jennifer Doudna, who pioneered CRISPR or Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who recently received the Breakthrough Prize for her discovery of pulsars. In earlier days, women like Grace Hopper and Marie Curie made outsized impacts.
The preponderance of evidence shows that women can vastly improve innovation efforts, but are often shunted aside. In fact, throughout history, men have taken credit for discoveries that were actually achieved by women. So, while giving women a larger role in innovation would be just and fair, even more importantly it would improve performance.
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A decade ago, many still questioned the relevance of digital technology. While Internet penetration was already significant, e-commerce made up less than 4% of retail sales. Mobile and cloud computing were just getting started and artificial intelligence was still more science fiction than reality.
Yet today, all of those things are not only viable technologies, but increasingly key to effectively competing in the marketplace. Unfortunately, implementing these new technologies can be a thorny process. In fact, research by McKinsey found that fewer than one third of digital transformation efforts succeed.
For the most part, these failures have less to do with technology and more to do with managing the cultural and organizational challenges that a technological shift creates. It’s relatively easy to find a vendor that can implement a system for you, but much harder to prepare your organization to adapt to new technology. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:
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When I speak at conferences, I’ve noticed that people are increasingly asking me about the unintended consequences of technological advance. As our technology becomes almost unimaginably powerful, there is growing apprehension and fear that we will be unable to control what we create.
This, of course, isn’t anything new. When trains first appeared, many worried that human bodies would melt at the high speeds. In ancient Greece, Plato argued that the invention of writing would destroy conversation. None of these things ever came to pass, of course, but clearly technology has changed the world for good and bad.
The truth is that we can’t fully control technology any more than we can fully control nature or each other. The emergence of significant new technologies unleash forces we can’t hope to understand at the outset and struggle to deal with long after. Yet the most significant issues are most likely to be social in nature and those are the ones we desperately need to focus on.
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One of the most rewarding things about writing my book Mapping Innovation was talking to the innovators themselves. All of them were prominent (one recently won the Nobel Prize), but I found them to be the among the kindest and most generous people you can imagine, nothing like the difficult and mercurial stereotype.
At first, this may seem counterintuitive, because any significant innovation takes ambition, drive and persistence. Yet a study at the design firm IDEO sheds some light. It found that great innovators are essentially knowledge brokers who place themselves at the center of information networks. To do that, you need to build trust.
A recent report from Accenture Strategy analyzing over 7000 firms found this effect to be even more widespread than I had thought. When evaluating competitive agility, it found trust “disproportionately impacts revenue and EBITDA.” The truth is that to compete effectively you need to build deep bonds of trust throughout a complex ecosystem of stakeholders.
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Earlier this year, I published an article about no-code software platforms, which was very well received. Before long, however, I began to get angry — and sometimes downright nasty — comments from software engineers who were horrified by the notion that you can produce software without actually understanding the code behind it.
Of course, no-code platforms don’t obviate the need for software engineers, but rather automate basic tasks so that amateurs can design applications by themselves. These platforms are, necessarily, limited but can increase productivity dramatically and help line managers customize technology to fit the task at hand.
Similarly, when FORTRAN, the first real computer language, was invented, many who wrote machine code objected, much like the software engineers did to my article. Yet Fortran didn’t destroy computer programming, but democratized and expanded it. The truth is that value never disappears. It just shifts to another place and that’s what we need to learn to focus on.
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When Barry Libenson first arrived at Experian as Global CIO in 2015, he knew that the job would be a challenge. As one of the world’s largest data companies, with leading positions in the credit, automotive and healthcare markets, the CIO’s role is especially crucial for driving the business.
So he devoted his first few months at the firm to looking around, talking to people and taking the measure of the place. “I especially wanted to see what our customers had on their roadmap for the next 12-24 months,” he told me and everywhere he went he heard the same thing. They wanted access to real-time data.
If Experian was a startup, that would have been a relatively simple task, but the decades-old company relies on the legacy systems it has built to maintain an extremely high level of reliability and security. So Libenson embarked on a journey to transform Experian’s digital infrastructure and, in the process, transformed its business as well.
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