The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving...

The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity ... | Thomas Kelley, Jonathan Littman | I couldn't put it down

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The Ten Faces of I...

	The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity ... Thomas Kelley, Jonathan Littman Doubleday Business, 2005 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 39 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation reveals the strategies IDEO, the world-famous design firm, uses to foster innovative thinking throughout an organization and overcome the naysayers who stifle creativity.

The role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation.

Drawing on nearly 20 years of experience managing IDEO, Kelley identifies ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist?the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation.

Filled with engaging stories of how companies like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Cargill and Samsung have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.

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Best read without memory or desire

Wilfred Bion, one of the great psychoanalysts of the last fifty years said that the purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire. By that he meant that when when you listen with memory you're trying to plug someone into an old agenda; when you listen with desire you're trying to plug them into a new agenda. But in neither case are you listening to their agenda.

For some reason that I am not sure of I found myself reading Tom Kelley's wonderful book without memory or desire, but feeling open to everything he was saying.

It may be that I felt Kelley in this book was talking "with" me rather than "at", "over" or even "to" me. I could easily visualize and more often than not feel, what he was talking about.

If you can open up you mind as you read this book, you will learn and experience much of the feeling of what it's like to innovate.

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I couldn't put it down

I'm a big believer in collaboration. No one is an island and should stand or think alone. Tom Kelley explains in simple terms the personas necessary to operate in an IDEO way. I believe the IDEO way is very similar to my background working in the film business.

When working on films, you show up on the set and each department, without much communication, goes to work weaving in and out of other departments for the benefit of the end product. When you work with good people it becomes an effortless task to do your job and do it well. At the end of the day you feel good about yourself, your peers and the result of you efforts.

IDEO seems to posess a similar structure, though many would argue that structure doesn't exist in a creative atmosphere. In many creative fields, structure and guidelines are open to interpetation. The truly creative will understand when to break the rules and when to bend them. As Kelley says, it's about listening and asking the right questions to get the best result for each situation. There are several places in the book that reiterate the same question in a better way to find out the "right" answer.

I'm also a big fan of "T" people. I find them more interesting to talk with and more willing to listen to your point of view. IDEO comes across as a great community where people work together as opposed to a a place where one holds down a job. Kelley makes it seem like fun is had by everyone all the time and, while we all know this isn't necessarily always true, you can bet that the environment is one of pride and confidence knowing that you're able to do the best you can and be supported by management.

Read the book and see which persona you are as well as your other team members and decide how you can be a better team. I'd like to see a poster (hint, hint) of the 10 faces with a short definition posted in every office and work area.

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Good Lessons, Good Reading

Having successfully written a good book - The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm- how do you cover essentially the same subject again just four years later? Tom Kelley manages to do it by taking a different approach in The Ten Faces of Innovation.

The author and his colleagues in IDEO suggest that there are ten personality types that can help create innovation. They don't all have to work together to create an innovative culture, but Kelley suggests that the more you have in a company, the easier it is to put the Devil's Advocate in place who is always looking to find fault with concept or product. Personalities that drive innovation include The Anthropologist. He quotes Marcel Proust - "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes," and as with other concepts rehashes some of the thinking from his 2001 book where he wrote `Innovation begins with an Eye.' I don't reference this as a criticism, because I believe successful Innovation is a cultural process. The more you can reinforce that culture, the more successful you are likely to be.

Other personalities he cites include, The Experimenter, The Collaborator, The Director and The Experience Architect. In writing about the Cross-Pollinator, he cites work done with P&G, reinforcing some of the comments on collaboration and cross-pollination which P&G CEO A.G. Lafley makes in his excellent book The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation.

Kelley provides a number of interesting examples as to how innovation changed companies or organizations. My favorite one - because if its mind-blowing simplicity - is how paint company First Dutch Boy redesigned their paint can by making it cube shaped and providing a screw-off cap. Innovation can be mind-bogglingly simple if we just look at things in a different way.

Given that he is writing about a company he works for and believes strongly in, there is bound to be a level of self promotion in the book. Who cares? It is a good read, it provides plenty of commonsense thinking and is seriously good reading if you are serious about Innovation

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Good book for already initiated

This Book is good for people who already have initiated his knowledge on Innovation. Not an ideal book for initiaters.

Any Business Can Innovate

Innovation is one of the buzz words that has appeared in the business community a lot in the past many years. Every company wants to be an innovator, but many people mistakenly believe that innovation is the art of creating better products (think iPod, for example). But there are many more ways to innovate. In this book Kelly describes the ten ways businesses and individuals improve our lives through innovation, from designing better products to improving customers' waiting time for a particular service. Some businesses thrive when faced with challenges while others improve their bottom line by paying particular attention to clients, but each action is innovation and it has enriched our lives. This book focuses largely on the practices and experiences of IDEO, a global design consulting firm and the author's employer, but there are other valuable examples included in the book as well. All in all, this is an interesting book, if not an innovative book on the concept of innovation.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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