Not since Tom Peters wrote "In Search of Excellence" in 1983 has a book this good been written about how to achieve success in American business. In between, has been a succession of OTHER books containing one or two very basic ideas written in a creative way to fill up a book, written for a dumbed down audience, that could have been summarized in a sentence or two. THIS book breaks that mold and finally brings forward information about companies, most of whom are absolutely minting money, who achieved success through innovation, and what it takes to get there. And, like In search of Excellence, it's written in an intelligent style, yet one that anyone can understand.
The companies that had been successful since Tom Peters wrote his groundbreaking book understand what it takes to foster innovation and go about achieving it in a profitable manner. Among the many companies the authoro looks at, Pixar is investigated, as is Google, a seemingly one-hit wonder, that, in fact, had to bring many innovative concepts to the market before it was unable to unlock the billions in value it has today. Not only did Google have to solve a search problem, and keep people from gaming their system, they had to come up with a system to allow advertisers to take advantage of the search results (Google's Ad Sense System) and they also had to build an unparalleled computer network to gather, organize and bring back those amazingly accurate search results from among the vast internet in a blink of an eye (Google's so called "cloud computing system").
The understanding of the innovative processes led Pixar, Google and many others to continue to innovate to achieve their amazing financial success where other companies, ever driven to achieve quick results that could be flipped to another company for a quick, but tiny, profit, would have given up long before that process was complete. Both of those two companies were unsuccessful for more than 5 years before they finally unlocked the value they had been working towards.
This book pulls apart and analyzes the innovation techniques of companies large and small, both the successes and the failures, and what it took to learn from those failures, and even why failures are an important part of the innovative process. The author is probably the only person in America who could have written such a book because she has started and sold a number of companies, and has driven the process of innovation at other companies, and she knows just about every successful innovator in the technology industry for the last 30 years.
Not only are the successes analyzed, but so are the failures. Quicken had a string of failures in addition to their successes, and the author identifies what caused the difference between the successes and failures.
This book is not only a must read for engineering managers at every company, but also the business and finance people who can frequently lead them in the wrong direction by demanding the wrong results at inappropriate times, or failing to support a process that can take much longer than anyone expects.
Additionally, any politician and policy maker will want to understand this process. There hasn't been another Pixar or Google started in the last ten years. Why is that and what have the incentives done to the process of innovation in the country? All of that gets answered in this one book.
The book is the opposite of most other business books: instead of one or two very basic ideas spread out over the whole book and repeated endlessly, there are 5 ideas on every page, each supported before the author moves on. Where the other books are largely a waste of time for an intelligent person, this book is packed FULL of great ideas.
Only once in a generation do you get to have access to this much information in this short of a read. This is that book. What Tom Peters did a generation ago has now been duplicated by a book that dives into innovation the way Tom Peters picked apart the process of achieving excellence so many years ago. There was only one person who could have written it so well.
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