Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition by Stephen M. Shapiro.
Creative Innovation
This book offers 40 practical tips on creating a culture of innovation in the workplace. Creative innovation – innovation meaning finding solutions for problems with success and efficiency (p 2). Shapiro writes in a way that is engaging and conversational. As I read the book, I imagined walking down a long hallway with the author who is talking me through one of his tips and advice on innovation. In this imaginative scenario, the author then leaves me with more to think about just before he steps in an elevator and on to the next conversation.
Although the book focuses on the work environment, I found the points of advice applicable to my creative process for life outside the workplace. The author divides the 40 tips into five areas, calling them components of the innovation capability (p. 5):
- Process (end-to-end process)
- Strategy (customers’ desires)
- Measures (simple to foster innovation)
- People (have the right people in the right roles)
- Creativity (ability to develop solutions)
- Technology (challenges and enables collaboration)
Creativity is just having enough dots to connect. Steve Jobs
Insights
Here are the top tips I found most helpful from the book:
- Innovation is about change – adaptability, flexibility, and agility
- Those who survive and thrive in the workplace are those who adapt (I think it is also true for life – those who thrive in life are those who adapt the most)
- Take deliberate action – know what will improve your business/your life
- Create an environment where creativity is encouraged
- Failure is a necessary part of innovation
- Failure is always an option (cornerstone of the scientific method: any result is a result – from Adam Savage, MythBusters – p. 117-121)
- Build it
- Try it
- Fix it
- Are your new ideas solving problems?
- Simplification is the best innovation
- Diversity of people improves creative innovation and problem solving
- The harmonic tension between creativity and innovation allows for different viewpoints and alternative ways to solve problems (p. 132)
- Most useful question for creativity: who else has solved the problem?
Best Practices Are Stupid
The title of the book caught my attention because I like implementing best practices that help drive improvement, and the word, “stupid,” seemed jolting. Yet, the author states that best practices may be a more stagnate term than innovation (p. 90). Creative innovation demands a more fluid and constant-changing approach to problem-solving. Innovation drives creative energy with a forward motion toward solutions.
The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we hit it. Michelangelo
Bal Simon says
I haven’t yet read the book, so maybe it doesn’t make “best practices” and “innovation” as binary as I’m understanding it here. But I don’t see best practices as contradictory with innovation. Really, I think we need both. Best practices is really shorthand for “best current practices” or “best practices at one’s current stage of development,” etc. Best practices gives you a stable point from which to proceed, against which to measure the innovation, etc. An innovation mindset keeps you from resting for too long on your current best practices as if they are set in stone. Stability in evolution and a mindset to not be stable for too long – sort of like using two legs to walk.
Denise Pyles says
Thanks Bal. Appreciate your comments. I think the author was referring to best practices that are not current, but more like a list from years past that does not include a regular refresh. I agree with you that current best practices provide a point of stability, and both stability and the innovation mindset are like using two legs to walk. Great analogy and well said. Thank you.