December 6, 2011
Advice about surviving tough economic times isn’t only cheap these days, it’s unavoidable. By now, most resourceful entrepreneurs have probably had their fill of being told to think outside the box. The problem is: how? Fortunately, two new books, out in time for the holiday season, promote their own particular brand of outside-the-box innovation while a third, fast becoming a contemporary classic, dispenses with the box altogether.
Lessons from disruptive innovators
Of the new books, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators gets straight to the point: to think differently, you have to act differently.
In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, a professor of business strategy, Hal Gregersen, a leadership consultant, and Clayton M. Christensen, author of previous bestsellers The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, have done their research on how the biggest names in entrepreneurship got their “big ideas.” Not surprisingly, they’ve succeeded by creative thinking or creatively rethinking basic skills like networking, experimenting, observing, and even asking questions.
The Innovator’s DNA is, most of all, a primer on how to make positive associations. This includes everything from showing up at “idea conferences” like the now famous TED Talks to making sure you have a meal with someone from a different background at least once a week. “Thinking outside the box,” according to the upbeat Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen, “often requires linking the ideas in your area of knowledge with those of others who play in different boxes.”
An essential lesson: Get leaner
Upbeat is not a word you’d associate with Eric Ries’s new book The Lean Start-Up: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Ries, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and a popular business blogger (Startup Lessons Learned), has penned a bestselling guide to 21st century entrepreneurial discipline and efficiency that’s about as light-hearted as a double-dip recession. Even though we are living through an “unprecedented worldwide entrepreneurial renaissance… this opportunity is laced with peril,” Ries warns. “We’re throwing our excess capacity around with wild abandon.”
Ries sometimes relies too heavily on insider jargon to argue for the necessity of “creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” Even so, his main asset in The Lean Startup is his own experience staring down that uncertainty. His own failures, a few of which are chronicled in the book, taught him one essential lesson: get leaner.
Ries is also a firm believer in the change of direction. Small businesses, in particular, have to be able to “pivot” when they find they’re headed down the wrong path. In this century, Ries writes, “we have the capacity to build almost anything we imagine. The big question is not can it be built?; but should it be built?”
The journey of a reluctant entrepreneur
This is, coincidentally, the same kind of question Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner of Patagonia Inc., repeatedly asks himself in his book, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. “I’ve been a businessman for almost 50 years,” Chouinard says by way of an introduction. “It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or a lawyer.”
Let My People Go Surfing was first published in 2005, but Chouinard’s blend of philosophical musings on everything from product design to environmental responsibility makes this book feel brand new.
Born in Maine, the son of a Quebecois handyman, Chouinard moved to California as a child and grew up to be an expert rock climber. Patagonia had its origins in the climbing equipment Chouinard developed for himself and friends. Eventually, Patagonia expanded from selling outdoor gear to clothing, introducing rugby shirts and coloured sweatshirts to the sportswear market.
Of course, the more successful he became the more he worried. In fact, it has been Chouinard’s reluctance about being a businessman that has propelled him to introduce initiatives like “1% for the planet,” which has seen Patagonia forge an alliance of businesses dedicated to donating at least one percent of their sales to environmental causes. In the end, Let My People Go Surfing stands as an authentic blueprint for growing a business outside the box.
Books referred to in this review:
* The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen (Harvard Business Review Press, 296 pp, $29.95).
* The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries (Crown Business, 320 pp, $30.00).
* Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (Penguin Books, 258 pp, $18.50).
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