Best Practices Are Stupid on ABC News…and more
October 10, 2011
My new book, Best Practices Are Stupid, has been all over the news lately. Here’s just a small sample…
Interview on ABC News (click video above)
Review on Fortune.com - “Why your company (probably) can’t innovate”
Best Practices Are Stupid on the USA Today reading list
Best Practices Are Stupid on the CIO Magazine reading list
Interview on CBS Interactive’s BNET (click video above)
My New Mantra
September 26, 2011
Chris Martin created this cool graphic that is the mantra for my new book. As you can see, it includes the url for our soon to be launched website.
One Week Until My New Book is Available
September 22, 2011
In one week (September 29th), my new book will be available in book stores, online, and on the Kindle. It is published by Penguin’s Portfolio imprint. For those of you who are new to this blog, here’s a description…
Best Practices Are Stupid:
40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition
Well-intentioned leaders, in their attempts to boost innovation, are inadvertently destroying it.
What if everything you know about creating a culture of innovation is wrong? What if the way you are measuring innovation is choking it? What if your market research is asking all of the wrong questions?
It’s time to innovate the way you innovate.
In Best Practices Are Stupid, I offer forty counterintuitive yet proven strategies for boosting innovation and making it a repeatable, sustainable, and profitable process at the heart of your company’s culture. They include:
- Hire people you don’t like. Bring the right mix of people to unleash your team’s full potential.
- Asking for ideas is a bad idea. Define challenges more clearly. If you ask better questions, you will get better answers.
- Don’t think outside the box; find a better box. Instead of giving your employees a blank slate, provide them with well-define parameters that will increase their creative output.
- Failure is always an option. Looking at innovation as a series of experiments allows you to redefine failure and learn from your results.
I will show you that nonstop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack.
Other powerful strategies include:
- The performance paradox. When organizations hyper focus on their goals, they are less likely to achieve those goals.
- Expertise is the enemy of innovation. The more you know about a particular topic, the more difficult it is for you to think about it in a different way.
- The Goldilocks principle. Challenges can’t be too big or too small. They must be “just right” to maximize the likelihood of a workable solution.
- Learn from Indiana Jones. Real treasure can be found when you leave your office, don your fedora and bullwhip, and study customers with your own two eyes.
- Use the reality TV show model. Competitions are as much about generating buzz and stimulating interest in innovation as they are about finding specific solutions.
You can pre-order NOW on any of these sites.
Read our Change This Manifesto
October 6, 2010
Today, the good folks at ChangeThis.com published my Personality Poker manifesto. It is a quick read that will provide you some of my thoughts on why organizations struggle to become innovative…and what can be done about it.
Here’s the excerpt that Change This included on their website…
Issue 75 – 01 | Personality Poker: How to Create High-Performing Innovation Teams
By Stephen M. Shapiro Published Oct. 6, 2010 12:00 a.m.
“The desire for equality permeates everything we do and always has, as can be seen in many of our age-old philosophies. For example, we see it in the Golden Rule, which is often interpreted as ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’ However, who really cares what you want? After all, treating people as you want to be treated doesn’t address the needs and desires of others.
Buying into these doctrines, myths, and lies leads to pasteurizing, homogenizing, and sanitizing everyone in order to fit people into one mold and think the same way so they can then gather together in like-minded harmony. There’s a good reason why they call it a company culture, since organizations are, in actuality, mini-cults. Instead, we should consider living by the doctrine:
The person you like the least may be the person you need the most.”
The New Personality Poker Cards are Available!
September 14, 2010
The Personality Poker book is available in 6 weeks and 2 days.
But starting today, you can buy the new and improved Personality Poker cards from the “Change This” site. These are the guys who bring you the Change This manifestos.
For the past few years, we have been selling the cards for $200 for 6 decks with instructions. But after printing 50,000 decks of cards, our production costs have dropped significantly. Therefore we are pleased to offer the cards for:
- 5 decks plus instruction manual, quick start guide, and online streaming video for $75 -
enough for 35 people - 10 decks plus instruction manual, quick start guide, and online streaming video for $125 -
enough for 70 people
Aside from the reduced price (over 50% less), the cards have 2 major improvements.
- The cards have new words: We partnered with a psychology professor from Columbia College who did some scientific analysis.
- The cards have a new design: When you hold them in your hand you can read the words along the side. This makes playing the game even easier.
If you want to energize a meeting, supercharge your innovation team, or just have some fun, you’ll want to get your decks of Personality Poker now.
P.S. The 800 CEO READ guys, the owners of Change This, wrote a blog entry on Personality Poker
800 CEO READ
Indiebound
