Upcoming Book

Publish Date Late 2023

Innovation Elegance: Transcending Agile with Ruthlessness and Grace

The innovation world has had a long time executing methodologies such as Waterfall and Agile, yet projects feel more difficult than they should be. Project failure rates are high. Instead of methodology for working software, you want a methodology for working teams.

Organizations have conversations about culture, but these conversations contain ambiguity. They are detached from daily realities. Organizations have slipped into cultures at the mercy of email overload and meeting gridlock. Tools exist that show clearly how to improve culture and impact the bottom line.

Businesses make casual references to themes from the Performing Arts, but there is a gold mine in rigorously embracing basic lessons from music, improv, partner dance, theater, martial arts, and even parenting!

The upcoming book, with the working title “Innovation Elegance: Transcending Agile With Ruthlessness and Grace” elaborates on all this. It’s one thing to have tools so that success is possible. It’s something else to have tools so that success is inevitable.

Your organization might not be, literally, a factory, but you care about all the same things: economics, speed, quality, waste, and more. It’s valuable to approach your innovation work like it’s a factory.

Over-relying on meetings and email in your work guarantees that the value will evaporate. Everything your organization does is worth documenting managing via the Five Verbs … Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, and Distribute.

That factory and that documentation is great and necessary, but it’s dry, sterile, unforgiving, and ruthless. Innovation craves a methodology that breeds creativity, empathy, passion, and purpose. Innovation methodology needs to learn lessons from the Performing Arts.

The Star Wars movies, Disney theme parks, and musicians like Taylor Swift are factories, churning out profitable customer experiences. Let’s learn from these artists and Build Moments That Matter for our own stakeholders.