The Innovation Handbook: Tactics for Disruptive Thinking
Jeremy Gutsche
Fast Company Press (March 2020)

“Ready to discover your big idea?” Here’s how to do that.

This volume serves as Part 2 of Jeremy Gutsche’s “Create the Future” project as well as a revised and updated edition of his award-winning Exploiting Chaos, first published in 2009.

One of Gutsche’s best new ideas was to combine in one volume two parts of a process. Flip the volume over from Create the Future after you absorb and digest its material.  You will have learned how to change how you think about change. Proceed to new challenges that will stretch you with new growth while putting white caps on your gray matter!

That is a major transformation that you can accelerate as you sink your teeth into new material that Gutsche provides. Learn how to find simplicity out of clutter and harmony out of discord while discovering opportunity amidst difficulty.

Guy Kawasaki is correct: “This book is the quintessential road map for all those who seek opportunity in times of change.” Gutsche shares fundamental, indeed invaluable lessons he’s learned that have inspired more than one million people. How? As he points out, by “taking the best parts of Exploiting Chaos and building on therm with new insights, examples, workshop questions, and tactics.”

Can you remember a prior time when the world was more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than it is today? I can’t. I also cannot recall a prior time when there were more and better opportunities to grow acorns into oak trees.

Details of the process that Gutsche examines in this book are best revealed in context, within his lively as well as eloquent narrative. However, no spoiler alert is necessary if I only briefly review some of the key knowledge transfers he completes when discussing opportunity hunting.

Here are several of Gutsche’s key points:

o Cast a wide net and cluster ideas “so that you can filter through chaos to recognize patterns of opportunity.”

o If you’re not open to new (especially controversial) ideas, don’t bother.

o Actively seek inspiration

o Develop a tool kit to evaluate ideas

o Explore four levels of opportunity: ideas, “the sweet spot,”: megatrends, and patterns of opportunity

o Awaken your inner trend hunter and intensify mindfulness.

I strongly recommend that Create the Future (Part 1) be read and then re-read before The Innovation Handbook (Part 2), the second half of this volume. I also highly recommend having a lined notebook near at hand in which to record your comments, questions, cross-references, etc. With all due respect to the value of speed, “make haste slowly.” Curiosity is best nourished by an on-going process that is sustained without self-imposed limits.

Thank you, Jeremy Gutsche, for opening up so many doors and windows. My journey continues both within and beyond the experiences that await.