Innovating Innovation. David Morey
innovation. These produce revenues. All other functions are costs.” Two things are true about this dictum:
1. It was true when he wrote it in his 1954 classic The Practice of Management.
2. It is even more urgently true today.
No business long endures, let alone prospers, by embracing any strategy that must be executed “at all costs.” Drucker knew this, of course. That is why he called for innovation and marketing. In fact, he put marketing before innovation. This is because one of his greatest management innovations was to put marketing in the driver’s seat precisely when it came to innovation.
Today, Drucker’s legacy is evident as our most successful companies leverage marketing to shape technological innovation to create revenue. If a business is led well, marketing drives innovation not at all costs, but at the right cost, and innovation will, in turn, leverage marketing not at all costs, but at the right cost.
We can’t all be Henry Ford, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. From all appearances, Ford, Gates, and Jobs created something out of nothing. Well, we can’t create something out of nothing.
That’s right. And, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, neither did Ford, Gates, or Jobs.
Which brings me to Thomas Alva Edison. This book will unpack the way of thinking Edison brought to the 1,093 US patents issued in his name—an American record until 2015. I argue that Edison’s true genius was not only his legendary perseverance, but also his way of thinking and his process of invention.
In fact, it is common knowledge that Edison himself denied the sovereign power of genius. The only Edison quotation anyone ever repeats is: “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” So, I argue that Edison found ways to punch above his weight when it came to genius—both in terms of work ethic and in the way he thought about innovation and breakthrough.
From 1978 to 1986, actor Chris Robinson portrayed Dr. Rick Webber on the soap opera General Hospital. In 1984, Webber also appeared in a commercial for Vicks Formula 44 cough syrup. His pitch for the product began, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Suppose, then, that Edison was not a genius, but only acted like one on demand and consistently enough to secure 1,093 patents between 1868 and 1931, the year he died: an average of seventeen inventions each year for sixty-three years. Based on those numbers, I am abundantly justified in proclaiming almost no one more prolifically innovative than Thomas Edison. Moreover, the scope of his innovation goes far beyond the numbers. Edison innovated a technology that created new, previously unimagined markets and a new reality in the human environment.
Chapter 1 of this book asks you to “Stop Being a Punchline.” It is about the business necessity of innovation, on the one hand, and, on the other, everything that is wrong with innovation today. Chapter 2 asks you to do what Edison did when he decided—yes, when he decided—to create his most iconic invention, the incandescent electric light. He decided to “subdivide light.” That was his phrase, and I know it sounds impossible, but he did exactly that. What is more, not only can you do it too, you can also lead others in doing it. (Spoiler alert: It’s a combination of innovation and marketing, marketing and innovation.)
You can think of the rest of this book as a set of variations on the theory and practice of subdividing light, using marketing to drive innovation and innovation to create new markets.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are about creating and leading the teams, working conditions, organizational structures, market platforms, and a culture of market-made and market-making innovation. Most of all, they are about creating a disruptive periphery, the organizational margins in which real innovation takes place.
Chapter 6 is about using the consumer to help you innovate the benefits that create a future you can own.
Chapter 7 begins with the example of Christopher Columbus to point you in the right wrong direction, so that you can do what Steve Jobs asked all his employees and his customers to do: Think different.
Being a business leader today is like clinging to your 8-track player. Hey, we have changed centuries, and chapter 8 is about being a change leader, so that you and your organization can own the future by getting there first.
Warren Buffett has told the insanely wealthy how to become even more powerful by giving away all their money. Chapter 9 will tell you how to become more powerful by giving away all your authority (to the right people).
In chapter 10, again, we apply the lessons of Agile software development to absolutely everything, and in chapter 11 we move from the short term to the long by exploiting a revisionist Theory of Evolution called Punctuated Equilibrium.
These eleven chapters are a battlefield guide to thinking like a genius even if you are not a genius. They are a doable and actionable set of steps for innovating innovation.
In this journey, we draw on some of history’s great innovators as well as on my work, interviews, and studies with such people as Bob Iger, Chairman and CEO, the Walt Disney Company; Fran Tarkenton, founder, GoSmallBiz; Mike Milken, founder, The Milken Institute; Eugene Burger, the World’s Top Close-Up Magician; John McLaughlin, Former Acting Director, CIA; David Copperfield, Las Vegas magician and headliner; Jerry Wind, The Lauder Professor Emeritus, The Wharton School; Scott Miller, Chairman and CEO, Core Strategy Group; Elon Musk, Chairman, SpaceX and CEO, Tesla Motors; Tim Cook, CEO, Apple; Bruce Springsteen, Rock Legend; and Mark Cuban, owner, The Dallas Mavericks—along with my company’s extensive consulting work with some of today’s most successful leaders of innovation, including Steve Jobs, Corazon Aquino, Bill Gates, Kim Dae Jung, Alex Gorsky, Rupert Murdoch, Mike Milken, Don Keough, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Sergio Zyman, David Bonderman, Pete Peterson, Phil Knight, Mike Roberts, Roberto Goizueta, Ray Smith, and many more.
Innovation isn’t new, but it needs to be innovated. Today’s markets not only demand this; in fact, they will show you how—if you let them. In these pages, I guide you through my real-world “Innovating Innovation” framework, which has been tested and proved across the battlefields of business.
CHAPTER ONE
Stop Being a Punchline
As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.
—Loser of multiple US elections
Six feet, four inches tall, gangly, but hunched now over his desk as he pens eighty-six meticulously written pages in fulfillment of his duties spelled out in Article II, section 3, of the Constitution of the United States of America. Nine hundred twenty-seven days before, he wrested his own party’s nomination from three better-known and more privileged rivals—William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates—and began to change one of the great losing streaks in American politics. Depending on how you count, he had lost three or five or, some even argue, as many eight elections before rising to the highest office in the land.
One friend later observes the author’s “whole soul” seems consumed in the writing of the words contained in his eighty-six-page document. In this era, the author’s message will be hand-delivered and read aloud not by him but by the Secretary of the Senate. Only in the next century will the US president’s State of the Union Address become a spectacle in which the American world leader stands before his nation via radio and then television, hoping not merely to report but to inspire.
The message of December 1, 1862 follows a crushing defeat of the author’s own party in the mid-term elections, new and escalating cabinet power struggles, political unrest, and the horrors of Antietam, the bloodiest battle up to that point in the American Civil War.
Thirty days later, the author will sign one of the most famous edicts in the history of any nation: The Emancipation Proclamation. But the context for that signature to come must now be established with his own thinking, his own message, and with his own words, which include a long and fact-laden report on the progress of the war and the nation’s governance, words that contain some of history’s most famous statements and, in 1942, will inspire composer Aaron Copland to borrow excerpts in his evocative Lincoln Portrait. Here is a small part of what the author wrote: “The dogmas of the