NPD Book Briefs

by Adam Hansen, Visions Book Editor, Ideas to Go

In an ongoing effort to meet the needs of the broad Visions readership, this edition of Book Briefs covers the two poles of the innovation realm. For the experienced innovation manager who gets involved in strategy development at the corporate, group or team level, we delve into two different ways of visualizing strategy and implementation. For the new manager, or those given a new assignment in innovation, a solid overview of various topics from the field helps you get off to a great start. For those of you in the middle, take your pick-try a quick refresher/booster shot of innovation fundamentals or start loading your strategy toolkit with some helpful ways of thinking through how strategy actually plays out when it confronts market and organizational realities.

Unstuck
by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro Portfolio, April 2004, 179 pages.

So, you have the niftiest strategy imaginable, but something’s keeping you as a company from implementing it successfully? You’re stuck. You have an amazing corporate culture, structure, processes and metrics, yet something’s just not gelling? You’re stuck. In Unstuck, Yamashita and Spataro give us a model that unifies, conceptually, and, interestingly enough, graphically.

Strategy, Structure & Process, Metrics & Rewards, People & Interaction, and Culture are unified around the axis of Purpose, and then show what might happen when any one of them or even the entire system is off-kilter. Author Yamashita’s expertise in design makes it visually appealing-clean, clear and immediately usable. A quick read, Unstuck is not the be-all, end-all for the diagnosis and treatment of corporate malaise, but is a fresh way of thinking about what might be missing, and then gives you some solid nutsy-boltsy ideas for fixing it.

Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes
by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton Harvard Business School Press, February 2004, 324 pages

In Strategy Maps, Kaplan and Norton bring their Balanced Scorecard concept into the realm of strategy, with the notion, as the publisher puts it, that "just as you can’t manage what you can’t measure, you can’t measure what you can’t describe." With dozens of specific company strategy-map examples as well as strategy maps for generic strategies (lowest total-cost provider, product leader, complete customer solutions, etc.), the authors attempt to close the gap between strategy development and implementation.

Reader reviews from Amazon.com are somewhat polarized. Here are some excerpts from them:

"Those who have not as yet read The Balanced Scorecard and/or The Strategy-Focused Organization are strong urged to do so. Brief comments about them in commentaries such as these merely indicate the nature and extent of the brilliant thinking which Kaplan and Norton provide in each .... One of the greatest benefits of strategy maps is that the process by which they are devised helps to ensure that the most appropriate destination is identified. Think of Kaplan and Norton as travel agents and cartographers, to be sure, but also as consultants whose services you can retain merely by purchasing their three books, then by absorbing and digesting the information and counsel those three books provide. For many decision-makers in all manner of organizations, Strategy Maps may well prove to be the most valuable business book they ever read."

Another reader offers this: "While the Strategy Map examples are helpful, this book is definitely not worth the money nor the time to read it. Instead I recommend reading K&N’s articles in the Harvard Business Review as you will get everything that you need-do not bother with the book. And here is why:

‘First, the book is very repetitive, and while there are many examples of the strategy maps the distinctions between them are not always very apparent so if you have seen a strategy map you have, by and large seen them all.

‘Second, I believe that K&N did not write the book, that rather it was put together by a ghost writer who borrowed just about every consulting phrase or description I have read in other books. Comments regarding things like the supply chain tend toward being so simplistic that they damage the credibility of the authors. I do not think we get an idea of what K&N think, rather than a ghost writer.

‘Third, the Strategy Map does not address key issues associated with strategy deployment and management. The treatment of Information Technology is more akin to a 1970’s view of technology than what companies are doing now. The structure, while supportive of the balance scorecard, does not provide a map on how you get from where you are to where you want to be.

" Caveat lector-let the reader beware. Peruse the reader reviews, thumb through it at the bookstore. I personally find some value in it, but I recommend some consideration before laying down the $25-35 to buy it.

Managing Creativity and Innovation (Harvard Business Essentials)
Harvard Business School Press, July 2003, 192 pages

For anyone wanting a broad overview of the more relevant topics within creativity and innovation, the Harvard Business Essentials series offers Managing Creativity and Innovation. Topics covered include the S-curve, idea generation, opportunity recognition, advancing to market, individual and group creativity, leading for innovation, and some helpful implementation tools. Managing Creativity and Innovation is a good place to start for someone just given a new assignment in innovation, for the new manager determined to keep the fire going, or for anyone who wants to get a quick survey of the field. Several tables, figures and sidebar cases give even this brief overview a little bit of meat to chew on, and with the few dozen footnotes, the editors give the innovation newbie some additional places to go without inundating him/her.

From the publisher: "Innovation is an undisputed catalyst for company growth, yet many managers across industries fail to create a climate that encourages and rewards innovation. Managing Creativity and Innovation explores the manager’s role in sparking organizational creativity and offers insight into what managers and leaders must do to increase successful innovation. Contents include:

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