Those familiar with my book reviews, interviews, and commentaries already know that I have several favorite quotations that I use whenever appropruate. Here are two. In 1963, Peter Drucker observed that “there is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Many years later, Michael Porter suggested that “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. ” These are directly relevant to the material that Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson present in their book, Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates (Harvvard Business Review Press, 2008),, as they respond brilliantly to questions such as these:

 

• How to create the preconditions for innovation?
• How to establish a foundation of “novel strategic insights”?
• How to generate a “torrent” of new opportunities for innovative thinking?
• How to ask the right questions at the right time?
• How to construct an “innovation architecture”?
• How to select, schedule, manage, and leverage investments in innovation?
• What does “driving to innovation” involve?
• When doing so, how to balance supply and demand?
• How to build a “systematic innovation capability”?
• How to sustain innovation?

These are terrific questions because they are immensely difficult to answer correctly. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Form a core team of people who have thick hides, sharp minds,  insatiable curiosity about what works (and what doesn’t), and tend to use first-person plural pronouns almost exclusively.

2. Formulate a list of questions such as those that Skarzynski and Gibson address in their book (at least seven, no more than ten) and set them in proper order. Be prepared to add, delete, revise, re-order, etc.

3. With both good will and tenacity, challenge all assumptions and premises. Meanwhile, keep in mind that just as the only “dumb” question is the one not asked, the only “dumb” idea is the one not shared.

4. Keep good notes and, if possible, display them so they can be seen by everyone.

Whoever leads the group should read Innovation to the Core.

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Peter Skarzynski is CEO and a Founding Director of Strategos. For over 20 years, Peter has helped senior managers set strategic direction, capture new growth opportunities and make their organizations more innovative. His experience cuts across industries and includes retail, consumer products, publishing, financial services, healthcare and technology companies. His primary focus has been to help client organizations renew their core business through competence leverage and break-through business concept innovation.

Skarzynski is widely published on the topic of innovation and has written for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, CEO Magazine and The Drucker Foundation. He is a frequent corporate and conference speaker. holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing and a BA (with Honors) in Policy Studies and Economics from the University of Chicago.

Although Innovation to the Core is acclaimed as the first to describe how large organizations can build and sustain a company-wide innovation capability, I think almost all of their insights and recommendations can be of substantial to any organization, whatever its size and nature may be.