This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman. Tom is a crazy man (in a good way). He is a corporate rebel. He has a very similar background like me (strategy consulting,writing) but he is angrier an d more rebellious. Their ideas shaped new management thinking for more than two decades. Peters is not a philosopher like Peter Drucker or Charles Handy. He doesn’t have any all-embracing theories of the world of organizations or any 5 steps formula for change. What he does well is he gets under the skin of organizations. When asked what has been the single biggest change in business over 25 years, Peters replied: “The obvious answer is the Internet …….we survived much the same thing when we went from the speed of the train to the speed of sound with the telegraph. Perhaps the biggest implication of the Internet is that it has caused the half-life of old, giant companies to go way down.” He is right.
Peters’ advice to executives is Strive for strangeness”: Creating a portfolio of the weird and encouraging "freaks" to flourish inside the company will help ensure the steady stream of innovative ideas necessary to survive in an hyper-competitive international business environment. Where do you find the “weird’ and the “freaks”? More importantly how do you make them productive? Innovation happens when an organization, through outside help, brings in varied ideas, sees the same old things in new ways, and see new patterns otherwise unnoticed. Wear different hats, stand in different places, play different music and play with different things.
A few months back we came up with the idea of producing a book for just about that. Weird ideas, great ideas, powerful ideas, silly ideas and world-changing ideas. Organizations that want to develop a capacity for continuous, game-changing innovation need to teach its people how to dream up, conceptualize, define and manage their ideas.
Four months later we will be finally seeing our books next week. So many people spent time on it and it is not without pain. The final product is beautiful 200 paged color coffee table book. It is fun, interllectually deep and crazy. The book is divided into 3 parts. All three are almost independent and can be read in parallel, switching from one to the next. The first part provides some readings on innovation written from both economic, cultural and anthropological perspectives. The second part is a photographic journey of our first 12 months. The third part shows a selection of our innovations as illustrated concepts. You may think that some of these ideas are whacky, namely that the lines between demand chain and supply chain are blurred, that customers’ experiences become the marketing, that jobs are avenues of self-expression and that users un-design your products. Here's a first peek.
