Organizational Innovation

In the ever-changing world of business, we've arrived at a point where process has trumped culture, where the race toward efficiency has made us complacent and unable to reach our potential. Stuck in the land of status quo, we've forgotten how to think. And the very structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding them back. It's time to Kill the Company. What this audiobook suggests is simple: to SIMPLIFY by getting rid of things first rather than continually building on what doesn't work; a form of spring cleaning for your organization.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

In the new edition of this fascinating book, a book that has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Slashdot.org, Lifehacker.com and in the New York Times, best-selling author Scott Berkun pulls the best lessons from the history of innovation, including the recent software and web age, to reveal powerful and surprising truths about how ideas become successful innovations - truths people can easily apply to the challenges of today.

From years of research and practical experience as a consultant, Jeff DeGraff has learned that when it comes to any innovation initiative, disharmony is crucial. We innovate when we disrupt, and we first have to disrupt each other.

Imagine a company where everyone loves to work, where employees feel not just "satisfied" but truly cared for, respected, and energized. Think of the impact this would have on recruitment, retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, and overall performance. Aron Ain, the award-winning CEO of Kronos, a global provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, believes that anything is possible when people are inspired.

Few organizations solve as many impossible problems as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and nobody knows more about leading rocket scientists to unlikely breakthroughs than Adam Steltzner. As the phase lead and development manager for EDL (entry, descent, and landing) of the Curiosity rover to Mars, Steltzner spearheaded the creation of one of engineering's wackiest kluges - the sky crane, which allowed the heaviest rover in the history of space exploration to land on Mars unscathed.

What can you learn from the world’s most successful companies? The Marvel Studios Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled a struggling comic book publisher to parlay the power of myth and storytelling to become one of history’s most successful movie studios.

Ori Brafman and management consultant Judah Pollack dramatically demonstrate how even the best and most efficient organizations - from Fortune 500 companies to today's US Army - can become more innovative by allowing a little unstructured space and "contained chaos" into their planning and decision-making. Through their consulting work, they realized that while structure and hierarchy are essential both in large corporations and small groups, too much of either can stifle creativity.

Design offers so much more than an aesthetically pleasing logo or banner, a beautification add-on after the heavy lifting. In Reimagining Design, Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving—how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity.

In The World Is Your Office, Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj Choudhury, who has been studying this phenomenon for over a decade, takes listeners inside the trailblazing companies that are going all-in on work-from-anywhere (WFA) policies. From startups and nonprofits to government agencies and large corporations, Choudhury's research shows why and how these organizations are benefiting.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there's a third team: the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there's no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art. Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations.

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? How can we tap in to, empower, and leverage the natural innovation within our organizations that is so vital to our future success? Now more than ever, companies and institutions of all types and sizes are determined to create more innovative organizations. In study after study, leaders say that fostering innovation and the need for transformational change are among their top priorities.

Gerard Tellis, a noted expert on innovation, advertising, and global markets, makes the compelling case that the culture of a firm is the crucial driver of an organization's innovativeness. In this groundbreaking book he describes the three traits and three practices necessary to create a culture of relentless innovation. Organizations must be willing to cannibalize successful products, embrace risk, and focus on the future. Organizations build these traits by providing incentives for enterprise, empowering product champions, and encouraging internal markets.

Using real-life practical experiences, serial entrepreneur and thought leader Faisal Hoque teams up with journalist Drake Baer to provide a personal and professional playbook that is part philosophy, part business, and part history. Everything Connects offers the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies and the interconnected insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Couple that with Fortune 100 corporate cross pollination for creativity and startup thinking for how to adapt with ease, and you'll quickly discover that everything connects.

"Best practices" may be widespread, but that doesn't mean they're effective. In many instances the opposite is true: Best practices can be outdated, harmful, and a hindrance to innovation. In Breaking Bad Habits, Freek Vermeulen, a strategist with a keen eye for the absurd, offers the tools to identify these practices and rid them from your organization. And, most of all, he presents a compelling case for how eliminating popular but outworn ideas, processes, and strategies can create new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Through the eyes of an inventor of new markets, Good Derivatives: A Story of Financial and Environmental Innovation tells the story of how financial innovation - a concept that is misunderstood and under attack - has been a positive force in the last four decades. If properly designed and regulated, these “good derivatives” can open vast possibilities to address a variety of global problems. Filled with provocative ideas and valuable lessons, this book will provide both an insightful interpretation of the last 40 years in capital and environmental markets.

From Bridgewater Associates to Netflix, some of North America's largest companies admit to being heavily influenced by concepts from pro sports. So what do these companies know that others don't? The answer is simple: People innovation can be a competitive advantage. Through in-depth interviews and meticulous research, Where Others Won't dives deeper than ever before into professional sports from around the world to uncover over 50 easily implementable people strategies to help you win.

Silicon Valley’s genius combined with limited corporate regulation promised a new age of technological innovation in which entrepreneurs would create companies that would in turn fuel unprecedented job growth. Yet disruptive innovation has stagnated even as the five leading tech giants, which account for approximately 25 percent of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, are expanding to unimaginable scale and power. In How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation—and How to Strike Back, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explain why this is happening and what we can do to reverse it.

Every business needs to innovate, but few know where to start. ON Innovation, gives leaders 72 simple but powerful ideas they can use to create a more innovative organization. Drawing from his experience as founder and CEO at Travelocity.com and from the 10 other start-ups where he’s worked, Jones helps listeners turn innovation from an academic exercise into an everyday skill.