out. The equation was presented in fragments.
The absence of context left one thing both companies had in abundance: self-centered arrogance—a belief that top executives knew better than anyone else or any kind of market analysis. In the end, it was upon this commodity that most of the key internal decisions were made. Ford, for instance, failed to factor in a market and economy clearly changing during the months leading up to Edsel’s release. Rather than adjust to the market, Ford released the car exactly as planned in the context of a different time, a different economy, and a different marketplace. More than three decades later, The Coca-Cola Company Chairman Roberto Goizueta faced a hostile press conference at which he announced the arrival of New Coke. Here, for the first time, the company’s leader learned that media and consumers were uniting in their outrage at having something iconic taken from them without so much as an if-you-please.
In both cases, corporate arrogance was as hard to shed as a poker tell. It polluted any sense of the marketplace and descended on corporate vision like an old-school London fog. Arrogance, not the consumer, permeated all aspects of developing and marketing the Edsel and New Coke.
In addition, part of understanding and defining context involves the strategic principle that everything communicates. Even the smallest detail of marketing or innovation communicates loudly and profoundly. A single contradiction between promise and reality, once noticed by consumers, can undo hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing. In the case of Edsel, glaring assembly line errors, consumer confusion between the horn button and gear shift, misdirected turn signals, early and chronic oil leaks, sticking hoods, trunks that failed to open, buttons that needed a hammer to push them, and a pre-production average repair cost of $10,000 per car communicated more loudly and profoundly than any Edsel advertisement.
The lesson: At minimum, test, recognize, and understand the larger context into which your product, service, brand, or company competes. Better yet, develop and drive a strategy to control the dialogue and help define this larger context—and remember that everything communicates.
Lesson Six: Always Think Anew
Edsel was a failure of imagination, a failure to think anew, to “think different.” If Ford’s intention had been to build another run-of-the-mill car, well, they certainly knew how to do that, and it might have cost the company a lot less money and grief. Instead, they faked innovation, and their Edsel ended up an eternal punchline.
Edsel’s demise was all about the way Ford framed marketing and innovation. The roots of the car’s failure grew from how people initially thought about the Edsel, how they imagined it, went about inventing it, refining it, marketing it, and ultimately failing with it. From the beginning, company executives and Edsel designers failed to understand that the 1950s was a decade in which everyone made their case based on newness. Therefore, these executives and designers were obliged to think anew and act anew. But they did no such thing.
Nevertheless, the Ford organization did learn from the Edsel episode. The failure of the Edsel helped produce Ford’s legendary Mustang. Open your browser and click on some pictures of Mustangs through the fifty-four years of the car’s production history. Compare the look of the Mustang to the Edsel, which limped across the earthly sphere for a mere three years. In both the Mustang and the Edsel, everything communicates. It is just that they speak entirely different languages.
One very important lesson Ford learned from the Edsel Apocalypse is that it was not all bad. Many new automobile features were introduced on the Edsel, and Ford did not throw all of them out with the car. By 1962, such features as self-adjusting brakes and the self-lubricating chassis became technical synergies throughout the Ford line. Add to this the hard-learned lessons born of Edsel’s catastrophic quality control problems. These led the company not to tinker and tweak, but rather to reorganize all manufacturing under a single organization, thereby shifting the corporate culture to a focus on solving technical problems and human mistakes before they happen.
Of course, today, a cadre of collectors covets the car. Go shop for one of the fewer than 100 top-condition Edsels on the road at this writing. As of 2018, this icon of the failure of marketing and innovation, this Mt. Everest of lemons, which cost far too much at $2,500–$3,800 in 1958, can today be secured for your own garage from a trade collector for something over $100,000.
The lesson: Successful marketing and innovation demands three prerequisites: challenging assumptions, disrupting the status quo, and thinking anew.
Innovation Is Broken
Like the Edsel, innovation is broken today. It is in crisis. Innovation needs wide-angle, wholesale innovation. The problem is common these days. Attempts at innovation look backward. They react in an age when intelligent, proactive anticipation has never been a more critical advantage. To be sure, there is no shortage of books and articles and blogs on innovation. But you can safely ignore all that fail to focus ahead of where we are today. Innovation must foreshadow tomorrow.
So, we argue here for an anti-Edsel approach, relentlessly forward-focused and substantive. Not that looking ahead requires ignorance of the present or the past. What was once the future is now the present. That we live in this former future suggests that we live largely among products of successful innovation. Much as the Renaissance rejected aspects of its recent past (the Middle Ages), it recovered the innovation of its more distant past, that of Classical Europe.
Today, we can discover some proven ways to innovate and invent. These methods are inherently disruptive—that is, forward-focused. They are approaches that instinctively move out of the center of an organization, a society, a mindset, and go about innovation at what I call the “disruptive periphery.”
That is where we will be spending most of our time in the pages that follow. We will:
• Adopt a wide and global approach to innovation
• Deploy the power of an insurgent strategic overlay
• Leverage customer- and marketing-centric views of innovation
• Borrow the pragmatic lessons from the still-emerging world of Agile software development
We will not reject the value of experience—when that experience has succeeded in outlining a future—but we will not reflexively defend any experience for its own sake. Some three decades of battle-tested global consulting and training go into the stew of the real-world strategic principles you are about to savor. I have plated it in a simple bowl of “how-to.” Ingredients include:
• Proven change-leadership strategies counterpointed with insurgent organizational approaches
• Proactive marketing and communications strategies emphasizing customer-sourced perceptions
• Practical ways to “think different,” including ongoing and new inputs, voices, questions, perspectives, passions, and experiments
• Executional steps to bring innovation and change to the pragmatic and personal level where they will take root and grow, bearing new advantages for your business
Innovation Is Fixable
Matter is neither created nor destroyed. That a thing is broken implies that it can be fixed—can be fixed, taught, and accelerated. This requires innovating innovation with new thinking, approaches, and strategies, all of which can be taught, so that innovation can be produced on demand.
We do need to face the fact that the challenge of fixing, teaching, and accelerating innovation has never been more urgent. Today, 50 percent of startups will fail in their first year, 80 percent by their fifth, and 96 percent by their tenth anniversary.
