The Innovator’s Field Guide
Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Are you ready to change the trajectory of your business and see massive improvements? Each week we’ll share strategies and practices to generate sustained results and long lasting success in your organization. Welcome to the Innovation Junkie Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, and this is Jeff Amerine. I’m glad to be back. How you doing, man?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, hi. I’m great. I’m great. Looking forward to kind of wrapping up our whole innovation episodes and talking about a few resources that I know both of us have relied on over the course of the last few years in really doing the deep dive that we’ve done on innovation as we built out our Innovation Junkies platform.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it sounds great. So and I guess we’re going to talk about some specific books. So what are you reading? I think to stay current as a leader, it’s important to kind of be a voracious consumer of information. So what do you got and what do you read?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, when it relates specifically to innovation, these books have been around for a while, but they’ve stood the test of time. Anything that’s got Clayton Christensen, either as a coauthor or as the author of the foreword or major endorser of the book, I’m pretty much going to read it. But the first one that I’m going to talk about is the Innovator’s Method. As you know, we do a lot of work and by that, by the way, this is by Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer. It’s published by Harvard Business Review Press. And as you know, we do a lot of think like a start up lean startup kinds of work in organizations that are far from having been startups, a lot of enterprise organizations and really struggled to find anything that talked about how to bring those concepts and practices into a large organization. And this actually is subtitled Bringing the Lean Startup into Your Organization. So by Nathan Furr, Jeff Dyer, highly recommend it. It really talks about the concept of what they call the Innovator’s method and and leadership in this age of uncertainty when when things are rapidly growing, the Murphy’s Law and the rapid advancement of technology and how you actually bring those simple concepts of customer discovery, agile development, Lean startup and what have you into large organizations and make them work. So I highly recommend, they’re on my list.
Jeff Amerine:
And Jeff, would you say that that book is a combination of a little bit of inspiration and really kind of a cookbook, a true methodology that you can practically implement?
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, I think it is. It’s got some inspiration kind of sprinkled throughout. But yeah, it kind of is a cookbook. You know, it talks about, you know, bringing together in fact, it was the inspiration to the Innovation Leadership Blueprint that we have covered in in our recent episodes of of of the podcast, because I’d never even with this book, which had a lot of great information, I didn’t find an end to end process. You know, we had a lot of good tools but didn’t find a real end in process. And they’ve got a process for bringing innovation into larger organizations and they actually tie it back to some of the tools that we’ve seen and that we’ve talked about the tools of customer discovery, the tools of the lean canvas and agile methodologies and what have you.
But while they had a process, they didn’t really tie the activity from in the end. And that led to the creation of our Innovation Leadership Blueprint. But this book was the inspiration for that. Absolutely. How about you? What do you got?
Jeff Amerine:
Well, well, the one that I’ll show you here is and it’s an oldie but goodie. This is a translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. And it’s more than a thousand years old, probably well, well older than a thousand years. So the thing that I like about it, having reread translation–
Jeff Standridge:
Is that a first edition?
Jeff Amerine:
It’s a first edition–I mean, this one is actually on parchment paper and you know, and it’s written in the precursor to Mandarin. But somehow I beat my way through it.
Jeff Standridge:
I thought you mighta got it hot off the press.
Jeff Amerine:
You know, the white hair, You know, I rode up with the other cossacks and Genghis Khan, and we took an initial edition of it. But getting, you know, kind of getting to that, that’s been sort of a you know, it’s a people business that we’re in, in innovation. And what he talks about is some really interesting concepts about how to manage and lead your troops, your team, how to prepare for battle. And innovation can be a battle both internal and external. He says some pretty interesting things that seem intuitive at this point. He’s like, always attack downhill with the sun at your back if you can think about it. Right? So how you would make that an analogy to innovation is innovation can be a struggle. Don’t add in things that are going to make it more difficult. So if you’re always trying to do things uphill, maybe against the corporate culture or without corporate sponsorship or senior leadership support, then it’s kind of like attacking into the sun and uphill. And so it’s I think the thing I like about the Art of War is it’s very simple concepts. War 1-2000 years ago was still a people oriented process.
And if you understand some of those things and apply them to your team and to the competition and how you think about innovation, it can be really practical. It’s philosophical. But believe it or not, each one of the chapters in the book has like 25 things that you should consider, whether it’s the terrain, whether it’s maneuvering, whether it’s the enemy, that sort of thing. He also makes some interesting points about the key of war is not to decimate the enemy and destroy their cities. It’s to win the war without having to fight. And so sometimes in innovation we take on massive complications and we avoid doing things that could be simpler and straightforward, that would achieve the same effect. And so I think it’s a good read, good philosophical reading, some good practical notions as well.
Jeff Standridge:
You know, and talk about that winning the war without having to having to fight. You know, that’s one of the reasons you do customer discovery. It’s one of the reasons you identify your early adopters. It’s one of the reasons you make sure you’ve got the right team in place with the right vision and the right plan, because it’s going to be a fight without those things. And if you can take those things into account on the front end, what is it that Covey said? With people, slow is fast and fast is slow.
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly. And it’s a fundamental concept of don’t do things that waste energy and resources, you know, and that’s the whole principle behind design sprints and lean canvas is do stuff in a way that you can preserve resources so that you can keep going.
Jeff Standridge:
Don’t do stupid stuff. That’s the title of a new book, an innovation book by the Jeffs.
Jeff Amerine:
Don’t do stupid stuff that’ll get you killed.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, that’s right. No doubt. Very good. Very good. Well, you know, my second one second book is, again, another classic written by Harvard Business Review Press, and it’s called The Innovator’s DNA. And again, Jeff Dyer, who is a coauthor of the book that I spoke about a few moments ago, Hal Gregerson and Clayton Christensen. And I said a few moments ago of how revered Clayton Christensen is in the world of innovation. But the really I think the thing I like about this book is it says, okay, innovation starts with you. You know, are you the next Steve Jobs, for instance? You know, do you have the elements of innovator DNA that has been identified among some of the most prolific innovators out there? For instance, the discovery skills of associating or being able to find associations out there in the data or patterns or what have you, the skill of questioning. And, you know, we use that skill in customer discovery every single day, asking the right questions and having a very solid methodology for that, having the skill of observing. It’s that skill of observing that enables you to ask the follow-on questions that you may not have asked had you not been highly observant. It’s those the skill of observation that also allows you to make those associations and see those patterns. The skill of networking, recognizing that you don’t have all the answers, you’re never going to have all the answers, and that there are other people in the innovation network where just a simple question by one of them in the network, one of those folks in the network, or a simple conversation can result in a mind shift that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, that back to talking about wage war without having to fight. Right. If you’re connecting to your network, you can become more likely to do that. And then finally the test and learn of the skills of experimentation, recognizing that all of innovation is in fact an experiment. It’s kind of the scientific method applied to business and science and the world and what have you. So the innovators, DNA and then and then they close out with the second part where they talk about how to cultivate disruptive innovation in organizations and teams. So they start talking about the DNA of the individual. And then how do you see that actually taking place in organizations and teams, the Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, that’s a good one. And it’s actually kind of a good segway to another very practical book that’s called Sprint. And this is written by the guys at Google Ventures, Jake Knapp, John Zaretsky and Braden Coates. And the whole theory behind this is you can solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. And so if you think about it, we do challenges and sprints. We’re big fans of hackathons and that whole approach. The thing I really liked about this book is it’s not a bunch of theory they really lay out day to day. So if you can imagine a week of Monday through Friday, they lay out what to do on each one of those days.
So if somebody didn’t know anything about doing an innovation sprint, they had some problem that they really wanted to get to the point where they had some kind of minimal prototype and could test. They give you a five day plan for how to do that. Now, admittedly, some of the things that you prototype and test are not anywhere near fully fleshed out. They could be wireframes, it could be some kind of brute force, not scalable thing that you would do. But, some of the key thoughts is, on Mondays, start with the end in mind, right? What are the objectives? What are you trying to get to? You kind of mapped some of that out. There’s an interview process for asking the experts and identifying the targets.
The next day you would remix and improve and you do some sketches and drawings. Again, you’re kind of storyboarding. On Wednesday, you’re going to sign on. What are the specific targets and you storyboard those out of these some probably some really hard and candid conversations. And then on Thursday, you’re constructing some type of prototype and then on Friday you’re testing and learning so that that five day sprint is a way that even if it’s large scale problems, you can figure out how to get something that’s demonstrable to where when you take it, the people that have whatever it is, the issue or unmet need that you’re trying to solve, you’ve got something you can actually show them. And I really like the fact that they go into detail on what should occur on each of the five days, much more detail than I covered. So this one is called Sprint and it’s by Jake Knapp is the lead author, but Google Ventures guys, very smart guys.
Jeff Standridge:
I remember one aspect of that and I think I’ve got the right title, but they said, you know, you should also always have either the tie breaker or the decision maker available.
Jeff Amerine:
The decider.
Jeff Standridge:
The decider. That’s the way they use that.
Jeff Amerine:
The, you know, Bush 43, decider, which I wasn’t sure that and strategery were real words, but they used his nomenclature. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Standridge:
And so you always have the decider on point because or available because if something happens that the team gets deadlocked on something, you got to have somebody to break the tie so they can keep moving because it is in fact a sprint. It’s not something you can wallow in. And we also actually know, we have a colleague, a joint colleague who runs a large venture fund, a venture studio, rather, up in the Midwest, who used that book as the inspiration for how they launch their companies on a quarterly basis by running through that sprint process in an adapted fashion.
Got to wrap it out here. Go to make a special offer. One time. One time only. We’ll probably offer it again. If you forget and you come back three or four years later, let me know and we’ll give it to you then to the Innovator’s Field Guide: Accelerators for Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Change Agents. This is not meant to be a process book on innovation. It is meant to be a thinking book on innovation – goes great in the bathroom. Kidding. It doesn’t really.
But it’s really meant to be, it’s in short snippets, 52 chapters. You take one a week, for a year, you know, you can basically disrupt, if you will, your thought processes, your personal habits as it relates to leadership and innovation and customer management and what have you, the Innovator’s Field Guide. Send us an email at innovationjunkie.com and we’ll send you a PDF copy of the Innovators Field Guide.
Jeff Amerine:
And if they do that right away, they get some Ginsu knives with that.
Jeff Standridge:
A free set of Ginsu knives and a hair remover. This has been another episode of the Innovations Junk–, another episode of the Innovation Junkie podcast. Thank you for joining.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
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