we do today—at a rate and a tempo unprecedented in the history of industries and markets.… Innovation is not 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.
—From Chapter One
Foreword
Change rules today. A leader’s ability to navigate, manage, and lead change has never been more important, more powerful, and more urgently needed. Today, the leader who can best absorb, embrace, and ride ahead of the forces of change can transform markets, countries, and the world.
David Morey has written a must-read book. It is the battlefield manual for change leadership. It is the new primer for how to win.
Innovating Innovation builds on the guiding principles of Edison, Drucker, Jobs, and other breakthrough innovators and draws on David’s own work in guiding nineteen winning global presidential campaigns and advising some of the world’s top companies and business leaders. It builds on his underdog-insurgent model, developed with longtime business partner Scott Miller, and it evolves from his most recent work, Creating Business Magic, which leveraged and enhanced the strategies of magic with the principles of insurgency.
In the context of today’s remarkable change-fueled disruptive environment, innovation by legacy companies is almost invariably stalled, misfocused, or altogether absent. Typically, innovation is bureaucratized and given no more than lip service—though plenty of that. It is pursued via doomed approaches born of incumbency, anachronism, and defensive orientation. Too often, innovation doesn’t even get this far. It is never found, let alone harnessed. That is why innovation urgently needs reinvention. The concept itself needs a different, wider, more creative, more consumer-focused, and more pragmatic approach.
David argues that innovation is almost universally presented in overly narrow, technical, and backward-looking terms. It needs a new mental model, a wider scope, a broader grasp of human, perceptual, performance, marketing, creativity, and leadership factors, all of which must be unremittingly future-directed.
Innovating Innovation focuses sharply on the power of what David calls the “disruptive periphery,” which is pitted against the “bureaucratized center.” With unerring aim, David modernizes and synergizes the best of past innovation theories and practices, while adding his insurgent strategic and campaign-based model and blending in the unique creative problem-solving lessons he has honed not just as a top business and political consultant but as one of the world’s leading magicians. Innovating Innovation details a step-by-step pragmatic framework to apply every insight to what leaders and businesses do every day.
In this beautifully written book, David distills the potent discipline of disruptive insurgent marketing and creative problem solving into a hands-on primer of practical principles. They will enable you to succeed in the most opportunity-rich and threat-intensive business environment in history. It will help you win while having fun.
Yoram (Jerry) Wind
The Lauder Professor Emeritus
Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School
The University of Pennsylvania
Yoram (Jerry) Wind joined Wharton in 1967 with a doctorate from Stanford. He is the Lauder Professor Emeritus and Professor of marketing. Wind also founded the Wharton Think Tank: The SEI Center for Advanced Studies in management and ran it for three decades, co-founded The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya Israel and acts as chair of their higher academic committee. He has edited top marketing journals, published over three hundred articles, twenty-five books, and received the four major marketing awards: Buck Weaver, Parlin, Converse, and AMA/Irwin Distinguished Educator Award. Wind was one of the original Legends in Marketing, with an eight-volume anthology published by Sage in 2014. He has consulted with over one hundred companies, is a member of the executive committee of SEI, sits on the advisory boards of various companies and nonprofit organizations, and testifies in intellectual property cases. Wind is a trustee of the PMA and chairs their marketing advisory group. His current research explores marketing-driven business strategy, the Network Challenge; reinventing advertising; creativity and innovation; and challenging our mental models. He is a 2017 inductee into the Marketing Hall of Fame.
INTRODUCTION
Marketing and Innovation
This book is about making innovation happen. Today, we are surrounded by remarkable examples of innovation, and a handful of great companies are driving innovation by the exponential dimension of their business models. In this context, everyone says they want innovation. But the truth? Innovation is broken. Most business leaders and businesses struggle to find ways to crack through their own corporate politics and bureaucratic silos, to move from defense to offense, to nurture real breakthrough, to drive bold creativity in ways that add new value to everything they do.
Innovation itself needs innovation. These pages teach, coach, and guide readers across eleven concrete and pragmatic steps that unlock and drive day-to-day innovation in your business and help you take long-term competitive advantage in your marketplace.
Innovation is old. As old as creation. It is the Big Bang. Anyone who has ever made a living selling anything knows that, in marketing, only one word is more powerful than “free.” It is “new.” In today’s change-fueled environment, innovation is more essential to survival—let alone success—than ever before. Still, never have so many businesses gotten so much innovation so wrong. Everyone talks innovation, demands innovation, but—almost everywhere—it is stalled, unfocused, or totally AWOL. Given lip service, it is bureaucratized, limped after, and crawled toward via the most rutted and washed-out roads in existence—the worn ways of incumbency, anachronism, and timid defensiveness.
We need something better. It may be conveyed in three simple sentences that, together, are the thesis of this book:
Innovation needs innovation.
Innovation can be taught.
Innovation can be accelerated.
Today, innovation cries out for a different, wider, more creative, and more pragmatic approach. Innovation needs wide-eyed dedication to product benefits, not squinting recitation of product features. The approach needs a dramatic reorientation away from a stiflingly narrow, overly technical, and backward-looking focus to a wider and deeper vision—one that is resolutely human, keenly perceptual, and always performance-directed. Innovation needs a new translation into a set of future-directed terms redefining marketing and leadership.
Innovating Innovation: Leadership Tools to Make Revolutionary Change Happen for You and Your Business introduces the power of what I call the “disruptive periphery” versus the “bureaucratized center.” It offers a comprehensive and step-by-step set of tools forged by more than three decades of work with change leaders in politics and businesses worldwide. These are tools that enabled me to help pilot 19 winning global presidential campaigns, advise 10 billionaires, counsel 5 Nobel Peace Prize winners, and work with the CEOs of numerous Fortune 100 and 500 companies to help add hundreds of millions of dollars of value to these and other businesses.
Innovating Innovation synergizes what is best in classic innovation theories with an insurgent strategic model inspired by one of my first corporate clients, Apple founder Steve Jobs. This insurgent model is about change leadership, not just absorbing or embracing change but, rather, leading change by moving relentlessly to the strategic offense. Moreover, using the great inventor Thomas Edison as our model, the book shows how to lead innovation to create the
