need to practice associational thinking and more frequently engage in questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. That will likely only happen if you can somehow cultivate the courage to innovate.
FIGURE 1-1
The innovator’s DNA model for generating innovative ideas
As innovators actively engage in their discovery skills over a lifetime, they build discovery habits, and they become defined by them. They grow increasingly confident in their ability to discover what’s next, and they believe deeply that generating creative insights is their job. It is not something to delegate to someone else. As A. G. Lafley declared, “innovation is the central job of every leader—business unit managers, functional leaders, and the CEO.”9
The Innovator’s DNA
We’ve just told you that the ability to be innovative is not based primarily on genetics. At the same time, we’re using the DNA metaphor to describe the inner workings of innovators, which suggests that it is. Bear with us for a moment. (And welcome to the world of innovation, where the ability to synthesize two seemingly opposing ideas is the type of associating that produces novel insights.) Recent developments in the field of gene therapy show that it is possible to modify and strengthen your physical DNA, for example, to help ward off diseases.10 Likewise, it is metaphorically possible to strengthen your personal innovator’s DNA. Let us provide an illustration.
Imagine that you have an identical twin, endowed with the same brains and natural talents that you have. You’re both given one week to come up with a creative new business idea. During that week, you come up with ideas alone, just thinking in your room. By contrast, your twin (1) talks with ten people—including an engineer, a musician, a stay-at-home dad, and a designer—about the venture; (2) visits three innovative start-ups to observe what they do; (3) samples five “new to the market” products and takes them apart; (4) shows a prototype he’s built to five people, and (5) asks “What if I tried this?” and “What would make this not work?” at least ten times each day during these networking, observing, and experimenting activities. Who do you bet will come up with the more innovative (and usable) idea? My guess is that you’d bet on your twin, and not because he has better natural (genetic) creative abilities. Of course, the anchor weight of genetics is still there, but it is not the dominant predictor. People can learn to more capably come up with innovative solutions to problems by acting in the way that your twin did.
Discovery Skill Strengths Differ for Disruptive Innovators
To understand that innovative entrepreneurs develop and use different skills, look at figure 1-2. It shows the percentile rank scores on each of the five discovery skills for four well-known founders and innovators: Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Michael Dell (Dell), Michael Lazaridis (Research In Motion), and Scott Cook (Intuit). The percentile rank indicates the percentage of over five thousand executives and innovators in our database who scored lower on that particular skill. A particular skill is measured by the frequency and intensity with which these individuals engage in activities that compose the skill.
FIGURE 1-2
High-profile innovators’ discovery skills profile
As you can see, the pattern for each innovative entrepreneur is different. For example, Omidyar is much more likely to acquire his ideas through questioning (ninety-fifty percentile) and observing (eighty-seventh percentile), Dell through experimenting (ninetieth percentile) and networking (ninety-eighth percentile), Cook through observing (eighty-eighth percentile) and questioning (eighty-third percentile), and Lazaridis through questioning (ninety-sixth percentile) and networking (ninety-eighth percentile). The point is that each of these innovative entrepreneurs did not score high on all five of the discovery skills. They each combined the discovery skills uniquely to forge new insights. Just as each person’s physical DNA is unique, an innovator’s DNA comprises a unique combination of skills and behaviors.
As figure 1-2 shows, innovative entrepreneurs rarely display across-the-board strength in observing, experimenting, and networking, and actually don’t need to. All of the high-profile innovative entrepreneurs in our study scored above the seventieth percentile in associating and questioning. The innovators seemed to hold these two discovery skills more universally. But the innovators we studied didn’t need world-class strength in the other behaviors. It certainly helped if they excelled at one of the four skills and were strong in at least two. If you hope to be a better innovator, you will need to figure out which of these skills you can improve and which can be distinguishing skills to help you generate innovative ideas.
I’m Not Steve Jobs . . . Is This Relevant?
OK, so you’re not Steve Jobs. Or Jeff Bezos. Or any other famous business innovator. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from these innovators. You can get better at innovating, even if most of your innovations are somewhat incremental in nature. We’ve seen it happen, and we’ve seen that it can make a difference. We’ve seen a pharmaceutical executive practice a questioning technique (see chapter 3) each day to identify key strategic issues facing his division. After three months, his boss told him that he’d become the most effective strategic thinker on his team. Within six months, he was promoted to a corporate strategic planning job. “I just improved my ability to ask questions,” he told us. We’ve seen MBA students in our classes use the observing, networking, and experimenting techniques to generate entrepreneurial business ideas. One got the idea for launching a company that uses bacteria to eat pollution from networking with someone he met at a neighborhood barbeque. Another observed that the best English speakers in Brazil were people who watched American movies and television. So he launched a company that sells software that helps people learn English by watching movies. Many innovative ideas may seem small, such as a new process for effectively screening job recruits or a better way to build customer loyalty, but they are valuable new ideas nonetheless. And if you come up with enough of them, they will definitely help you advance in your career. The point is this: you don’t have to be Steve Jobs to generate innovative ideas for your business.
Delivery Skills: Why Most Senior Executives Don’t Think Different
We’ve spent the past eight years interviewing scores of senior executives—mostly at large companies—asking them to describe the most novel and valuable strategic insights that they had generated during their careers. Somewhat surprisingly, we found that top executives rarely mentioned an innovative business idea that they had personally generated. They were extremely intelligent and talented individuals who were accomplished at delivering results, but they didn’t have much direct, personal experience with generating innovative business ideas.
In contrast to innovators who seek to fundamentally change existing business models, products, or processes, most senior executives work hard to efficiently deliver the next thing that should be done given the existing business model. That is, they work inside the box. They shine at converting a vision or goal into the specific tasks to achieve the defined goal. They organize work and conscientiously execute logical, detailed, data-driven plans of action. In short, most executives excel at execution, including the following four delivery skills: analyzing, planning, detail-oriented implementing, and disciplined executing. (We’ll say more about these skills later in the chapter and in chapter 8, but for now we need only note that they are critical for delivering results and translating
