Cover: Small Business Taxes 2020: Your Complete Guide to a Better Bottom Line, by Barbara Weltman
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INNOVATION

GOING BEYOND THE BUZZWORD
TO CONTINUOUSLY DRIVE GROWTH,
IMPROVE THE BOTTOM LINE,
AND ENACT CHANGE

 

 

Wiley Logo

To my son Matthew.
I hope you’ll always be as fearless and innovative as you are today.
I love you with all my heart.

Acknowledgments

Many people helped make Fearless Innovation a reality. I could never have made it on my own this far without the support of my mentors and “co-conspirators” who pushed me to accomplish more than I have ever imagined.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked for truly unique leaders, such as Gerald T. Halpin, Chris Thompson, Paul Stark, Ronald Acra, Hina Patel, Brent Wahl, Venkat Narayanan, David Ward, and Gene Hall. I want to thank all of them for supporting my aspirations, and helping me discover and develop my true potential. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Maciej Kranz for encouraging me to pursue what’s possible, including writing this book.

When it comes to changing culture, most of my work would be impossible without the courage, leadership, and perseverance of Mathilde Durvy, who partnered with me to take employee innovation programs to new levels and to then establish them as the best in the industry. I am also fortunate to be surrounded by fearless trailblazers who always inspire me to change the status quo. I am indebted to Jenn Loftin, who always proved that innovation can indeed blossom when supported by the right structure, discipline, and governance. My special gratitude goes to Anna Gnatyuk and Jenny Agustin for believing in me and joining me on this innovation adventure. I am lucky to have amazing friends and co-workers who have supported me through my journey-thank you Olga Beregovaya, Lindy Bartell, Miroslav Sarbaev, John Parello, Michael Maltese, Wayne Cuervo, Andrey Kozlov, Gulia Trombini, Marc Musgrove, Simon Gladin, Masha Finkelstein, Dave Maslana, Chris Melching, Mikhail Pakhomov, Roman Kostin, Alex Hills, Irina Kosinovsky, Zhenya Kurts, Flora Freitas, Tatyana Rudchenko, Yuri Naumov, Guillaume De Saint Marc, Marina Velednitsky, Tom Kneen, Elena Ropaeva, Nick Chrissos, Yelena Denisova, Peter Shearman, Vadim Stepanchenko, Boris Fomitchev, Oseas Ramirez Assad and Cayla Young.

Wendy Khentigan and Marla Flores Reves deserve special recognition for helping me focus on what’s important in my life, which made writing this book much more joyful and rewarding.

Finally, none of this would have possible without the help of my family, most importantly my wife, Maria, and my son, Matthew. Words cannot express how much I appreciate Maria’s and Matthew’s encouragement, understanding, support, and pure unconditional love. I am also grateful to my parents, Yuri and Tamara, and my sister, Julia, who has always inspired me to seek change and adventure over safety and comfort.

The task of turning this book into reality is shared by so many people, which includes tremendous support from Mark Nelson, Mat Miller, and Zachary Schisgal, Vicki Adang, Amy Handy, Jocelyn Kwiatkowski, and Jenny Douglas. Scott Kirsner, cofounder and editor of Innovation Leader magazine, graciously provided invaluable guidance and archival resources that were essential in researching this book.

And last, but not least, I am grateful to Zach Gajewski, the most amazing editor in the world, who spent countless hours with me bringing this book to life.

Introduction: From Buzzword to Reality

Innovation is a horrible word.

The term has become so buzzy, it seems to have lost all practical meaning. Ask a hundred people to define it and you’ll receive just as many different answers. And, you know what? All of these answers might be right—or they might be wrong.

This is, in part, due to the fact that discussions about the topic are everywhere today. If you actually google “What is innovation?” you will receive nearly half a million results, and according to Google Trends, the number of search requests for news related to “innovation” tripled between 2014 and 2019.1 Not a day goes by without another dozen articles, blog posts, or think pieces on the concept, highlighting how we all need to be more innovative and showcasing the latest process and methodology that should be immediately adopted. We read, listen, and try to keep up, looking for clarity and some type of real-world application of what is seen as a squishy subject with no end.

Today, 63 percent of companies are hiring chief innovation officers, and more than 90 percent of companies are implementing new tech to support innovation processes.2 Sure, that’s great, but there’s a problem here: despite the obvious growth of demand for “innovation,” we remain utterly confused about the concept. In the meantime, most leaders believe that dropping the word into a shareholder letter from time to time or mentioning it at a quarterly employee all-hands meeting is enough to prove that they’re on top of the trend. Let me let you in on a little secret: they’re not.

Many of these organizations relegate innovation to one very special team somewhere in the “hip” part of the office, featuring free snacks and “edgy” motivational posters, and they think they’ve done their job—innovation is enabled; time to celebrate! It’s understandable. With so much information out there on the topic, it’s hard to know where to start, let alone with what goal and for what purpose, even for the “practitioners” themselves. Leaders are enthusiastic about encouraging everyone to be innovative, yet vague about what this means in practical terms. In return, employees have little interest in something that their bosses don’t know what to do with or can’t even describe.

But why does this matter? If “innovation” is such a buzzword, what’s the point? And why in the hell are you reading another book on the topic? Why not stick to business as usual and just ask marketing and PR to make your company appear more innovative? Innovation is an amorphous concept anyhow, the business jargon du jour, the latest flavor of the month. In short, a bunch of bullshit. Right?

Well, I’m here to tell you that though innovation can be confusing, misunderstood, and even pull-your-hair-out frustrating at times (just take a look at my author photo), it is, in fact, far from bullshit. Throughout the centuries, it has been at the core of human aspirations and essential to the world’s most successful companies, organizations, cities, and countries. Innovation is the only proven path to business growth and societal impact, whether measured in money or happiness. It’s not a “nice-to-have”—it’s a necessity.

If leaders refuse innovation, then it disappears in the cracks, left without clear purpose, unmeasured and unaccountable. Even if they give it lip service, without action and reinforcement, it goes nowhere and actually sets organizations on a dangerous and eventually self-destructive path. But when leaders embrace innovation and welcome change, well, that’s another story.

Living with Change

I’m no stranger when it comes to dealing with change. After all, I was born in a place that no longer exists—the USSR. When I was sixteen years old, I witnessed my home country, one of the most powerful in the world at the time, collapse practically overnight, affecting nearly 300 million people and generating sudden economic and societal shifts that will continue to have an impact for generations to come.

Later in my teens, I was transplanted to the United States. Suddenly, I was exposed to shockingly different societal and economic norms than those I had been used to, and I felt a little lost, uncertain where I fit in. I longed for some type of purpose, meaningful connection, and freedom of self-expression that I couldn’t find at first. My English and overall social skills weren’t the greatest, so I invested my time in teaching myself the Linux operating system, hung out with a local hacking community of fellow weird outcasts, and became a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a groundbreaking nonprofit that was the first to understand the importance of civil liberties and personal privacy in cyberspace. These were the best choices I’ve ever made.

During the early dot-com days, I was lucky to experience the community spirit of Silicon Valley before the boom. I was warmly welcomed in California by a diverse group of free-thinking technology professionals from around the world, and I invested my days and nights in projects that came to define and shape the future of digital entertainment and the music industry.

In addition to co-founding and launching a music touring and production company, I found my tribe and worked nonstop at Liquid Audio, a startup that pioneered a new business model for the music industry, allowing consumers to purchase high-quality music content online, while ensuring artists and labels still got paid. Later, I went to the “dark side” and practically moved in to Napster’s offices, the largest and most controversial online music service of the early 2000s. They were being sued by Metallica, one of my favorite bands at the time, as well as the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA), which was worth billions of dollars, and I was there to help Napster change their technology architecture and business model while they raced against the clock to survive.

Fast forward a decade, and I landed at Cisco, leading the company’s Co-Innovation Centers, setting strategy, and, more importantly, driving co-innovation with startups, key customers, and channel partners, as well as with cities and governments in fourteen countries. These award-winning innovation programs also provide employees, at all levels, with the opportunity to share and implement their biggest and brightest ideas. Even better, they ensure that the rest of the company actively supports these employees in these endeavors.

Besides leading the overall co-innovation strategy at Cisco in the Corporate Development and Strategy team, I’ve worked in numerous areas of the company, contributing to its success and helping to shape its approach to innovation throughout the enterprise. Starting in sales, I worked on ecosystem enablement, then moved to global marketing in an effort to streamline global operations. Among other departments, I also held positions in corporate finance, working on business transformation, and in engineering, developing new emerging technologies and business models. These experiences have provided me with a 360-degree view of how the World’s #1 Workplace operates, innovates, and succeeds.3

Having given hundreds of presentations on innovation and spoken with thousands of people about the topic, I’ve had the chance to regularly share my experiences and learn from my peers around the world. Those with less hands-on experience with the topic, however, tend to ask me the same questions over and over again: Is innovation real, or is it a load of BS? If it is real, how should we innovate? How do we overcome our fear of missing out on trends or failing? Where should we focus our attention? And wait, what’s innovation again?

When I answer these questions, I feel like I’m a part of a support group, and I am often the “innovation therapist.” Because really, that’s what most people I’ve spoken with need (no, not therapy, though some of us certainly do need that), but a clear, pragmatic guide—relaxed, jargon-free, and unpretentious—that will help them get over their confusion and start innovating with a sense of purpose.

Okay, But WTF Is Innovation?

I’m glad you asked.

Innovation isn’t a thing, it’s a mindset and attitude made of up clear principles—those discussed throughout this book—that help individuals, organizations, and societies adapt to change, survive and grow, progress and prosper. As the world continues to evolve, innovation enables our communities, businesses, and selves to evolve with it. Innovation is more art than science, but its principles can easily be put into practice.

When truly baked into a company’s culture, innovation is a constant, whether the company is working on large initiatives or small projects. Yet, keeping it alive requires focused effort—innovation is not a one-time event. It drives the survival of the fittest and, whether it is Darwinian evolution or God’s plan, it is a continuous process. The only way for a company’s business strategy to evolve, then, is by embracing innovation.

Change happens naturally; innovation doesn’t. It can’t be “checked in on” from time to time; it has to be central to any organization and understood by employees from top to bottom—nothing short of a culture of constant, conscious awareness and transformation. Otherwise, innovation will not be prioritized, meaning organizations, and their leaders, will be stuck in the present, which will quickly become the past.

Speaking of the past, innovation’s nothing new either: it has been taking place since the first humans began walking upright on two feet. What’s changed over millions of years, though—and what is always changing—is the environment we’re innovating in, and how the concept is applied. There are now more tools than ever for innovation, but there is also more pressure from consumers, citizens, shareholders, employees, leaders, and business owners to “innovate” by any means possible. Progression is the way of the world, and organizations exist only when they serve human ambitions, meeting the demands of progress.

We’ve entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a time in which we’re experiencing rapid technological, social, and cultural change. Such revolutions always shift the balance of power and create winners and losers—those businesses that can’t keep up will languish and perish. For example, in 2018 the innovation consulting firm Innosight found that between 1964 and 2016, the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 narrowed from thirty-three years to twenty-four years.4 This tenure is forecasted to continue to shrink, down to twelve years by 2027, by which time more than three-quarters of the S&P 500 will consist of new companies that we have not yet heard of.5

Still, most companies don’t seem that concerned. As the author and social commentator Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, pointed out, “Large corporations welcome innovation and individualism in the same way the dinosaurs welcomed large meteors.”6 We can toss the word around as much as we want, but unless the concept is given the attention it deserves, we, too, will end up extinct. Most leaders, particularly middle managers, feel that they have enough to worry about as it is and tend to focus on what’s in front of them at the moment. Keep the shareholders happy and the business profitable, and whoever’s next in line can worry about the future. They look at innovation as something that isn’t essential to their business or job, failing to realize that innovation is actually essential to everyone’s job. Sadly, they’re missing out on the new reality that foresight for the long-term is just as important as insight into the short-term.

Instead of producing a real impact, talk of innovation generates way more slogans than clear, actionable results. It also causes many leaders to enter anxiety mode. They deny the need to evolve, or they grasp at straws for a concept of innovation that either doesn’t exist or is completely irrelevant for their organizations. In response, like so many of us, they turn a blind eye to what’s right there in front of them, ignoring the current pace of change we’re experiencing and placing their attention elsewhere. We do this in our personal and professional lives all the time, getting trapped in tactical issues, tangible problems we must address immediately, without understanding the underlying purpose, the bigger picture, or even our full potential.

Fearless Innovation

It’s time to take a breath, step back, and truly begin to understand what innovation is and what it isn’t; how it can make a difference between surviving and thriving; and how it can be applied to more than just our day-to-day jobs, but also to the transformation of our businesses, our personal and professional success, and the improved conditions of our society and planet.

The principles outlined in this book aim to do just that. They’re straightforward, timely, and actionable, no matter the size of your company or organization. Whether executing innovation through leadership and strategy; measuring innovation efforts or outcomes; building cross-functional, diverse teams; working with the entire ecosystem to capture bigger opportunities; or communicating the value of innovation to employees, partners, and beyond, such principles offer a blueprint to driving growth, creating clear measurable value, and enacting change. I have little interest in brainwashing you with innovation as a theoretical concept and prefer to explore the practical whys and hows. Throughout my life I’ve learned to question conventional wisdom, challenge authority, quickly adapt to my surroundings, and shape my own future. One might say that in the process, I’ve developed a highly functioning BS meter, which comes in quite handy when innovation is concerned. So all of the advice in this book is backed by experience, and when skepticism is necessary, you’ll see plenty of it.

This material is not scripted in line with the “innovation management” gospel or theoretical “methodologies,” those marketing phrases and complicated flowcharts that sound and look good but provide little practical substance. In many ways, I consider this guide an “antimethodology” methodology, an open process to get to the heart of innovation and show the immense impact it can have in any setting; so you won’t find any flowcharts here. What we need is to see through the BS, acknowledge the reality of unending disruption, and present innovation for what it really is.

Since my early days, I’ve learned that change happens no matter what. We have an option of embracing it through innovation or resisting it through our own denial. It’s our choice, but without open minds and focus, our attempts to create some type of meaningful impact on the world—whether in our city, communities, families, or where we work—will fall short. The only way to create a truly positive, lasting effect is by embracing change, and using it to our advantage. We all know that any lasting transformation within an organization doesn’t happen quickly, as it requires a leap of faith in addition to discipline, commitment, and creativity. It won’t always be easy, but that’s not the point: innovation is a journey, and there is simply no future without it.

Notes

  1. 1  Google Trends, Search Term: Innovation, https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&gprop =news&q=innovation.
  2. 2  Forbes Coaches Council, “What Can Your Organization Do to Become More Innovative?” Forbes, July 13, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/07/13/what-can-your-organization-do-to-become-more-innovative.
  3. 3  Rola Dagher, “#1 Best Place to Work,” Cisco Canada Blog, October 4, 2019, https://gblogs.cisco.com/ca/2019/10/04/1-best-place-to-work/
  4. 4  Scott D. Anthony, S. Patrick Viguerie, Evan I. Schwartz, and John Van Landeghem, “2018 Corporate Longevity Forecast: Creative Destruction is Accelerating,” Innosight Executive Briefing, February 2018, https://www.innosight.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Innosight-Corporate-Longevity-2018.pdf
  5. 5  Ibid.
  6. 6  B.R., “An A–Z of Business Quotations: Innovation,” Economist, August 17, 2012, https://www.economist.com/schumpeter/2012/08/17/innovation.