Harvard Business Review on Breakthrough Thinking

This book has the most breakthrough thoughts per page of any book I've ever tabulated.

This is one in a series of several dozen volumes which comprise the "Harvard Business Review Paperback Series." Each offers direct, convenient, and inexpensive access to the best thinking on the given subject in articles originally published by the Harvard Business School Review. I strongly recommend all of the volumes in the series. The individual titles are listed at this Web site: www.hbsp.harvard.edu. The authors of various articles are among the world's most highly regarding experts on the given subject. Each volume has been carefully edited. Supplementary commentaries are also provided in most of the volumes, as is an "About the Contributors" section which usually includes suggestions of other sources which some readers may wish to explore. In this volume, the reader is provided with eight articles. Here is a selection of brief excerpts from the executive summaries with precede each of three: "....managers need to understand that creativity has three parts: expertise, the ability to think flexibly and imaginatively, and motivation. Managers can influence the first two, but doing so is costly and slow. It would be far more effective to increase employees' intrinsic motivation....To that end, managers have five levers to pull: the amount of challenge they give employees, the degree of freedom they grant around process, the way they design work groups, the level of encouragement they give, and the nature of the organizational support." (Introducing Teresa M. Amabile's "How to Kill Creativity") "Some innovations spring from a flash of genius [but] most result from a conscious, purposeful search for opportunities. For managers seeking innovation, engaging in disciplined work is more important than having an entrepreneurial personality....[According to Drucker, the major sources of opportunities include] unexpected occurrences, incongruities of various kinds, process needs, or changes in an industry or market,...demographic changes, changes in perception, or new knowledge." (Introducing Peter F. Drucker's "The Discipline of Innovation") "[Having studied more than 30 of the largest international corporations, Kim and Mauborgne found that]....the difference between the high growth companies and their less successful competitors was in each group's assumptions about strategy....Managers of the high-growth companies followed what [Kim and Mauborgne] call the logic of value innovation....Many companies let competitors set the parameters of of their strategic thinking; value innovators do not use rivals as benchmarks. Rather than focus on the differences among customers, value innovators look for what customers value in common. Rather than view opportunities through the lens of existing assets and capabilities, value innovators ask, What if we start anew?" (Introducing W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's "Value Innovation: The Strategic Logic of High Growth") In the other five articles, Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport explain how to spark inn

Creativity and innovation are the keys to competitive advantage in the knowledge economy and this book is a collection of eight HBR articles on how to organize for innovation. Many companies unintentionally crush employee's intrinsic motivation in pursuit of productivity, efficiency and control, but creativity requires expertise, motivation and the ability to think flexibly and imaginatively. Key factors are challenge, freedom, the design of the work group, encouragement, and organizational support but with careful planning it is possible to create an organization in which business imperatives are attended to and creativity flourishes. As innovation takes place through creative abrasion, care must be taken to prevent players with different worldviews and thinking styles having personal disputes. Managers often prefer like-thinking staff, neglecting a dynamic set of individuals whose counter culture thinking patterns are considered disruptive. A mix of right- and left-brain individuals is required to develop new approaches to the business.There are many lessons to be learned from a film unit where talented people band together for a short time; success depends on getting the right personnel, enabling them to work well together, motivating them to peak performance, leading them to create on schedule, and handling the stresses that arise. The director's job is managing the different phases in a film's production - preproduction script development etc, the production phase of shooting, camera, lighting, sound crews etc., and post production of picture and sound editing etc., all under intense budget and time pressures. Many managers in business and industry follow the film directors' approach intuitively but it is rarer for a manager to relate to different people in different ways or to the same people in different ways at different times.CoolBurst is a fictitious case study of a soft drinks company that had ruled the market but where revenues and profits had stagnated. The company's most creative employee had joined the largest competitor while many new companies were joining the competitive fray with each one coming from a different angle. The one remaining creative person, the marketing director, got a lot done but his work style of going to the movies during work hours did not fit the company culture and adversely affected others. He had warned everyone that past success was due to being in the right place at the right time and that the bubble would burst; CoolBurst had to create a new vision of the brand and innovate or evaporate. CoolBurst had to make itself a more welcoming, nurturing place for creative individuals, encourage employees to take more risks and change the culture of command, compartmentalization and control. Leadership that envisions, empowers and energizes is required. Five experts put forward their views of the best way out of the dilemma. Peter Drucker points out that opportunities for innovation can be found in unexpected occ

This collection of HBR articles on creativity, organization and 'out-of-the-box' stuff is packaged as the HBR on Breakthrough Thinking. Hence, if you are in an exploratory mood to read up various viewpoints of organizational creativity then do pick up this book. But if, you are working in an organization, and what to know what to do to take it through the whole end-to-end innovation journey then this book is only an appetizer. You'll have to catch someone else to serve you the meal.The book has articles like:How to kill creativity: The list of no-nos to avoid getting stuck in a rut.Putting your company's whole brain to work: Looking at the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) of people working together. An interesting article is "A film director's approach to managing creativity" which could have been very powerfully used. It ends up drawing lame parallels between a movie production and organizational projects and what the corporate world can learn from it.The masterpiece is as usual, The Discipline of Innovation, by Peter Drucker, as he gives insights as to why some firms can innovate. He classifies them as firms that do process innovations, or capitalising on industry or market changes. OUtside, due to demographic , perception and knowledge changes.

I have been looking for a book to help me rethink the way I work and this one was recommended by a friend. I bought it and enjoyed especially several of the essays- the one on how movie makers work and think was really good. Overall this is full of good examples of existing practice. But you need to work with the case studies to see how they might apply.