Best Business Book of 2011: The Innovator’s DNA

Steve Hogan and Sean Murphy provide an overview of the Innovator’s DNA webinar series offered by the Book Club for Business Impact.

Best Business Book of 2011: The Innovator’s DNA

Or download audio directly: InnovDNAPromo120202

The Innovator’s DNA overview

Webinar Sessions covering the Discovery Skills:

1. Associating
2. Questioning
3. Observing
4. Networking
5. Experimenting

If you would like to sign up we have a short URL for you, http://dld.bz/skmurphy-bookclub.

Edited Transcript with Hyperlinks

Sean Murphy: This is Sean Murphy for the Book Club for Business Impact, talking why are covering “The Innovators DNA” by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen, in a five-part webinar series.

I think this is the best book from 2011 on innovation and entrepreneurship. It is based on interviews of more than 100 innovators, a decade of research and compliments other auto-biographical books that have come out. It is packed with insights. It presents five key discovery skills, how to assess them, how to develop them and how to apply them. These skills  are important to master for any team trying to innovate.

I think the following kinds of  people will benefit from taking part in this series.

• If you are a first time entrepreneur, this book and this webinar series will give you a model for exploring a new market.
• If you are a serial entrepreneur I think it will give you a useful perspective on your earlier efforts and may enable you to refine your approach.
• And if you are trying to get your firm to innovate it gives you a framework of key discovery skills and also allows you to understand the contrast of traditional execution skills that are more focused on detail and planning as opposed to discovery.

Steve Hogan: This is Steve Hogan. I am joining Sean on this series. I am a recovering serial entrepreneur. I got lucky earlier in life, started a couple of companies that had successful exits.  I have been working with developmentally challenged early stage tech companies and helping them find the path to profitability and growth. But my true passion is mentoring first-time entrepreneurs so that they never, ever, need a savior.

Sean: I am the CEO of SKMurphy. I have been an entrepreneur for a while. I have a consulting firm that helps technology firms and introduce new products and services. Our focus is early customers and early revenue.

Steve, what is your take on the book?

Steve: I think it is a great book for first-time entrepreneurs.  In fact I wish I had this when I was doing my first couple of companies. The key insight I took take away was that the leader’s innovative skills impact the entire team. Strong leaders with strong discovery skills can improve the entire team’s ability to innovate.

The DNA in the title refers to the DNA of the organization, not just the leaders. These are discovery skill sets not just the traits. More importantly, it is a personal self-help and skill building directory. The authors believe that everybody has these basic skill sets and offer a simple test to help you to identify your strengths.

They give you a step by step approach to cultivate those strengths and build your tool kit. It is a truly unique way of improving your own performance derived from interviews with over a hundred other entrepreneurs.

Sean: I think it is also a very good book for innovators in larger firms. It offers a model for why established firms find innovation difficult. It explains the different skills that are required at different stages in a firm’s life cycle, in particular, the discovery skills used for innovation and execution skills useful for skill and growth.

I want to stress that these webinars will be a learning experience, not a lecture experience. We have invited other innovators to share their lessons learned applying these five key discovery skills. We will offer this in an interactive format which will help you apply these skills to your situation.

Steve: Here are the skills we are going to be talking about in the five separate webinar sessions, and our take on what they involve:

1. Associating: connecting disparate facts, observations, and stories to enable combinations of seemingly unrelated ideas in a new and unique way.
2. Questioning: first understanding the world as it is, then exploring why, why not, and what if.
3. Observing: being mindful in familiar situations and appreciative in novel situations.
4. Networking is an absolute. By this they don’t mean hanging around with your buddies, it means taking serious conversation with people of diverse backgrounds, people with backgrounds different from your own, learning from their experience and learning from their expertise.
5. Experimenting: taking risks to gain new perspectives. This can either involve trying new experiences, or carefully analyzing products, processes, and ideas, or testing your ideas with prototypes. Experimenting is not done in a lab setting, it’s about submerging yourself in a truly different environment and appreciating a different perspective on life.

Sean: On page 27 they explain how these skills fit together.

There are two basic orientations an innovator brings to a new field. One is to challenge status quo and that drives questioning, observing and networking and a willingness to take risks and that drives experimenting. Tying those four skills together is associating, where you are linking at different facts to create new combinations that may either yield an innovative thought or business idea or trigger more questions and a need for more observations, more folks to talk to and more experiments to run.

Steve: These webinars are a true roundtable discussion format, not a pure lecture series. The panel is going to include first time entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs and other innovators from larger companies. We will take questions from a live audience and each session is going to focus on one particular skill and the lessons learned and applying that skill.

Sean: Let me give you the line-up:

• Associating Wed-Feb 22 / 12-1pm PST
• Questioning Wed-Mar-28 / 12-1pm PST
• Observing Wed-Apr-25 / 12-1pm PST
• Networking Wed-May-16 / 12-1pm PST
• Experimenting Wed-Jun-20 / 12-1pm PST

If you would like to sign up we have a short URL for you, http://dld.bz/skmurphy-bookclub.

Thanks for your time. Hope you are able to join us.

Some other references for the book:

• There is a website devoted to the book at http://innovatorsdna.com/
• You can purchase a 2009 Harvard Business Review article on “The Innovator’s DNA” at http://hbr.org/product/the-innovator-s-dna/an/R0912E-PDF-ENG
• Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Jul-20-2011 “Five Discovery Skills that Distinguish Great Innovators”  Note that the definitions that Steve and I offer are based on our own reading of the book and differ somewhat from how the skills are defined in this article.
• Twitter feeds for the three book authors:
  • Clayton Christensen @claychristensen
  • Jeff Dyer @Jeffrey_Dyer
  • Hal Gregersen @HalGregersen