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The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation | 
| Authors: A.g. Lafley, Ram Charan
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
Buy New: $13.75
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 1109
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0307381730
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4092
EAN: 9780307381736
ASIN: 0307381730
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
How you can increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job.
Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; significantly improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. How? A. G. Lafley and his leadership team have integrated innovation into everything P&G does and created new customers and new markets.
Through eye-opening stories A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan show how P&G and companies such as Honeywell, Nokia, LEGO, GE, HP, and DuPont have become game-changers. Their inspiring lessons can help you learn how to:
• Make consumers and customers the boss, not the CEO or the management team
• Innovate to grow a mature business
• Develop higher growth, higher margin businesses
• Create new customers and new markets
• Revitalize a business model
• Reach outside your own business and tap into the abundant brainpower and creativity of the world
• Integrate innovation into the mainstream of your managerial decision making
• Manage risk
• Become a leader of innovation
We live in a world of unprecedented change, increasing global competitiveness, and the very real threat of commoditization. Innovation in this world is the best way to win—arguably the only way to really win. Innovation is not a separate, discrete activity but the job of everyone in a leadership position and the integral, central driving force for any business that wants to grow organically and succeed on a sustained basis.
This is a game-changing book that helps you redefine your leadership and improve your management game.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 OK but not the cure for everything May 14, 2008
I purchased the audio CDs to listen to in the car. It's a four or five CD set. I stopped after the second CD as it got very repetitve.
Most of it is Business 101. Get close to the customer, enable your org to innovate, leverage the existing brand when innovating.....that's about it. The rest of the book is a good run down on Proctor and Gamble. If you want to learn a lot about consumer marketing and branding then there is some good stuff in it.
 A new mindset and management process for driving sustainable organic growth May 12, 2008
Innovative thinking is required to change the rules of a well-established "game" as well as to change how to play that game. In the business world, change initiatives are certain to encounter all manner of barriers, many of them the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." Winners are those organizations whose innovative thinkers who come up with breakthrough ideas, not only about products and services but also in terms of how those products and services are designed, produced, marketed, and distributed. A.G, Lafley and Ram Charan call them "game-changers." In this book, they focus on P&G (of which Lafley now serves as chairman & CEO as well as on DuPont, GE, Honeywell, Lego Group, SAMSUNG, Target, and 3M. These and other "game-changers" demonstrate how to "drive revenue and profit growth with innovation."
This is a seamless collaboration, with Lafley's "voice" generally dominant and Charan's perspectives suggesting the broader implications and applications of lessons to be learned from P&G. (The same is true of Execution that Charan co-authored with Larry Bossidy, former CEO of AlliedSignal/Honeywell.) Together, Lafley and Charan explain
How and why innovation at P&G changed its game (Lafley)
The significance of P&G's transformation (Charan)
Why the customer is (almost always) the foundation of successful innovation
How goals and strategies help to achieve game-changing innovation
How to revitalize core strengths with innovation
How to build "enabling structures"
How to generate innovative ideas and then get them to market
The risks of innovation and how to manage them
Why innovation is a team sport
What is needed to lead innovation and growth
How Jeff Immelt "made innovation a way of life" at GE
According to Lafley, his thoughts about "the fundamentals" of driving profitable growth with innovation developed over a period of many years prior to being appointed CEO by P&G's board, at a time when it as stock had fallen by 50% and it had lost more than $50-billion in market capitalization. However, "the reality is their sequencing and actually execution evolved by `muddling through.'" The development of his ideas required a process of experimentation and discovery and the same is true of anyone who attempts to apply any of those ideas. A few "simple but powerful things" enabled Lafley and his associates to "turn this ship around":
1. "We put the consumer at the center of everything we do...Our goal at P&G is to delight our consumers at two `moments of truth': first, when they buy a product, and second, when they use it. To achieve this, we live with our consumer and see the world and opportunities for new-product initiatives through their eyes."
2. "We opened up...Innovation is all about connections so we got everyone we can involved: P&Gers past and present; consumers and customers; suppliers; a wide range of `connect and develop' partners; even competitors."
3. "We made sustainable organic growth a priority [rather than acquired growth]. Innovation enables expansion into new categories, allows us to reframe businesses mature and transform them into platforms for profitable growth."
4. "We organized around innovation to drive sustained organic growth...By running a disciplined development, qualification, and commercialization process, we have proved we can manage a large portfolio of innovations in various stages of development."
5. "We began thinking about innovation in new ways...We started from the premise that it is possible to run an innovation program in much the same way we run a factory. There are inputs; these go through a series of transformative processes, creating out puts...[Also] we broadened the way we thought about innovation to include not just products, technologies, and services, but also business models, supply chains, and conceptual and cost innovations."
Of special interest to me is the material presented in Part Two, Making Innovation Happen, as Lafley and Charan provide tools for creating organization structures that develop the ability to seek outside ideas and then channel them effectively inside the operations of the organization. They also describe in detail the practical framework for operational innovation - from generating ideas to going to marketing. "This process can help you bust the silos of the organization and make the flow of ideas seamless." At least that's the objective, although my own extensive experience with innovation initiatives suggests that the process of experimentation and discovery is seldom "seamless." On the contrary, it works best when it is continuous, unrestricted, free-flowing, inclusive, often confrontational, and almost always messy.
Lafley and Charan fully realize that a different kind of leadership is needed if an organization is to develop a new mindset and management process for driving sustainable organic growth. Hence the importance of the eleven lessons to be learned from Jeff Immelt's leadership as CEO of GE. Each is examined in detail in the final chapter. I should add that these are lessons that anyone can apply at any level and in any area of her or his own organization, what its size and nature may be. For example, here's #1: "Consider how innovation could breathe new life into your existing business, segment, or product area and achieve higher goals. Become the source inspiration for others who don't see it yet. Make it part of your personal leadership agenda. Communicate it clearly and repeatedly, but don't stop at inspirational words and positive thoughts. Be prepared to make innovation happen." In other words, be ready to get some dirt under your nails.
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Henry Chesbrough's Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating And Profiting from Technology and his more recent Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape as well as two books by Thomas Kelley, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm and his more recent The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization with Jonathan Littman. Also James Champy's Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can't, John E. Ettlie's Managing Innovation, (Second Edition): New Technology, New Products, and New Services in a Global Economy, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.
 Good High Level Read May 12, 2008
Lafley and Charan do an admirable job of defining innovation, breaking it down into bite-size chunks, and supporting their suppositions with real world examples. However I was a bit dissapointed that a book on innovation didn't break any new ground, or put forth anything "innovative" on the topic at hand.
Other than the case studies, most of the theories contained in this book are a tad worn, and can be found in virtually any other book on the subject. In my book Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual: WHAT IT TAKES TO REACH THE C-SUITE AND STAY THERE I point out that following the "academic" or "best practices" approach toward innovation is simply counter-productive to creating the disruptive innovation being sought.
While this book provides basic granular principles that the uninitiated might find useful as a leaping-off point, it will do little to serve as a road map for creating a sustainable culture of innovation.
Innovation redefined May 9, 2008
Many books have been written on the topic of Innovation. The fundamental difference in this book is that it defines Innovation as those ideas converted into products and services that ultimately are accepted by the end consumers. This means that top line and bottom bottom-line impacted positively are the real measures of successful innovations. It is the consumer who ultimately decides what a successful innovation is for her.
With the rich experience of the authors coupled with case studies at leading companies (primarily from P&G) both in the developed and emerging markets, this book is a must read for all those who want to understand the successful practice of innovation for sustaining growth and profits.
The structure of the book and the sequencing of chapters are excellent. Starting with the concept of customer-centric Innovation that is game changing, the eight drivers that make it happen - Motivating Purpose and Values, Stretching Goals, Choiceful Strategies, Unique Core Strengths, Enabling Structures, Consistent & Reliable Systems, Courageous & Connected Culture and Inspiring Leadership are discussed in detail with highly relevant examples in practice. This approach then makes the book a practical guide in making Innovation an integral business process of Organizations, as opposed to the conventional view of relegating this core function to R&D. Functional silos are broken and ideas freely flow across with the end customer in mind. Innovation focuses not only on the features and functionality of products, but also the entire value chain of Design, Sourcing, Distribution and Service.
Nokia, the global leader in mobiles phones is a good example. For the Indian market, now the second largest in terms of numbers, the company created low cost handsets, with unique features that the local market demanded. The concept of distributing vegetables was copied for distributing the low cost phones across the country where over 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas.
Examples from P&G are superb, especially coming directly from none other that A.G. Lafley himself. My own personal experience in using P&G's products is a reflection customer delight. A good example is that of Hugo Boss, my favorite perfume. Only after reading the book, I realized that it is now a P&G Product, that I bought the first time a decade ago based on "pull" rather that the conventional "push" at retail outlets. Since then, I never forget to replenish the stock.
If I were to remember one concept from this book, it is the "Living It" and "Working It" practice at P&G. P&G employees work in stores to observe how the customer shops and decides to buy her products and also live with them to learn from their actual experience in putting these products into use. Only such deep understanding can result in great products like Downy Single Rinse that saves precious water in water scarce regions of the world.
There are two Moments of Truth say the authors. One is when the consumer decides to buy the product and the other is when she actually puts it to use. The winning moment which decides the winners amongst companies is when the satisfied customer comes back for more.
Most of what is said, read in isolation, might appear as commonsense. But what makes this book great is that it puts together all the pieces of the value chain that makes innovation a regular practice for creating value with the customer in the middle. Such insight is hard to ignore and even harder to replicate.
P&G as a great practitioner of leveraging global talent through open collaboration on the web is discussed in "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. This book elaborates this further while discussing "Connect and Develop" and many more avenues for successful collaboration.
I found great synergies between the practices advocated by Gary Hamel in his book "The Future of Management" and the actual practices at P&G as described in this book. Innovations are ultimately about unleashing creativity and passion of all employees in the organization, with the sole purpose of delighting the customer.
The final chapter of the book is devoted to GE's experience in innovation under the leadership of Jeffrey Immelt. I am sure that this giant will continue to bring better things to life with greater vigor!
Excellent reading.
Innovation manual based on Procter & Gamble's initiatives April 22, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book is both intriguing and highly useful. Procter & Gamble CEO A. G. Lafley and business author Ram Charan draw examples from several large, successful organizations - GE, Honeywell, Dupont - but their primary focus is Procter & Gamble (P&G). They explore how P&G changed from a staid giant to an organization driven by innovation - and radically expanded its sales and profits along the way. They are candid about P&G's organizational methods and failed innovations, and they show how willing it has become to open up and connect. getAbstract recommends this book to anyone who is interested in innovation on a corporate scale and wants to know how to make it happen.
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