Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition [Hardcover]

Stephen M. Shapiro (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 29, 2011

What if almost everything you know about creating a culture of innovation is wrong? What if the way you are measuring innovation is choking it? What if your market research is asking all of the wrong questions?

It's time to innovate the way you innovate.

Stephen Shapiro is one of America's foremost innovation advisrrs, whose methods have helped organizations like Staples, GE, Telefónica, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and USAA. He teaches his clients that innovation isn't just about generating occasional new ideas; it's about staying consistently one step ahead of the competition.

• Hire people you don't like. Bring in the right mix of people to unleash your team's full potential.
• Asking for ideas is a bad idea. Define challenges more clearly. If you ask better questions, you will get better answers.
• Don't think outside the box; find a better box. Instead of giving your employees a blank slate, provide them with well-defined parameters that will increase their creative output.
• Failure is always an option. Looking at innovation as a series of experiments allows you to redefine failure and learn from your results.

Shapiro shows that nonstop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stephen M. Shapiro is an expert on innovation, a popular speaker, and the author of Personality Poker. He previously led a twenty- thousand-person process and innovation practice during a fifteen-year tenure at Accenture. His work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Investor's Business Daily, Entrepreneur Magazine, and The New York Times. Visit stephenshapiro.com.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover; 1 edition (September 29, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591843855
• ISBN-13: 978-1591843856
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 7.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #71,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #82 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Creativity & Genius
  • #83 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Management Science
  • #96 in Books > Business & Investing > Organizational Behavior > Organizational Learning

More About the Author

Stephen Shapiro is one of the foremost authorities on innovation culture, collaboration, and open innovation.
During the past twenty years, his message to hundreds of thousands of people in forty countries around the world has remained the same: Innovation only occurs when organizations bring together divergent points of view in an efficient manner.

Over the years, Stephen Shapiro has shared his innovative philosophy in books such as 24/7 Innovation and The Little Book of BIG Innovation Ideas. He has also trained more than 20,000 consultants in innovation during his 15 year tenure with Accenture. His latest creation Personality Poker, has been used by more than 25,000 people around the world to create high-performing innovation teams.

In addition to being an advisor, speaker, and author on innovation, he serves as the Chief Innovation Evangelist for InnoCentive, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of open innovation.

His work has been featured in Newsweek, Investor's Business Daily, Entrepreneur Magazine, O- The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and other prestigious publications. His clients include Staples, GE, BP, Johnson & Johnson, Fidelity Investments, Pearson Education, Nestlé, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A really smart book about moving beyond the less intelligent ordinary idea September 29, 2011

By Mark P. McDonald TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Best Practices are Stupid is the subject of one of Steve Shapiro's innovation tips and the title for this book. Rather than ridicule current approaches to innovation, Shapiro takes a comprehensive and compelling look at the next set of things companies need to do to innovate.

Shapiro points out that innovation is a well-worn subject and that in many cases those tried and true beliefs about innovation are neither innovative nor effective. In response Shapiro offers 40 tips some of which confirm but many of which breath new life into innovation thinking and practice.

The book is recommended to individuals and teams who are looking to initiative innovation programs, particularly for the first time, as it gives fresh thinking to the field. Experienced innovators or students of innovation will find much of the first part of the book familiar and may tend to discount is value. That would be a mistake as Shapiro effectively bridges the best parts of current innovation practices with new ideas to create new results.

The book presents each of the 40 tips in short and focused descriptions, many with examples that make them easier to understand and deploy. In addition, Shapiro makes use of illustrations when it matters to help people see the ideas clearly. This gives the book both an intellectual feel as its stimulates your thinking as well as an actionable and practical side needed to create value from innovation.

Among the better tips I found in the book include:

* Don't think outside the box; find a better box
* The performance paradox
* Hire people you do not like
* Why pyramids are one of the seven wonders

Other tips are more familiar but provide a comprehensive view of the issues and practices associated with innovation. The combination creates a new set of `proven' practices that give people a leg up on getting new results from their innovation projects.

Read the whole book, which may sound silly but the information in the introduction, overview and appendices is valuable not filler.

The book is recommended for teams starting innovation projects where these new ideas can have the greatest impact. Experienced teams will tend to view many of these tips as `old ground' and need to be encouraged to think differently about innovation and how to employ it in your organization.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Your new innovation bible September 29, 2011

By Alexander Kjerulf

Format:Hardcover

Innovation is a term that gets thrown around a lot but it also seems like there is very little new in this area. You keep hearing the same old advice, the same brainstorming exercises, the same admonitions to just open that suggestion box and get everybody in the workplace to contribute their ideas.

In other words, it seems like the field of innovation is somewhat lacking in innovation.

Well, today an excellent new book comes out to change all that. It's called Best Practices are Stupid - 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition by Stephen Shapiro and it will challenge everything you think you know about innovation.

I was blown away by all the great advice in the book. It outlines clearly what any workplace - big or small, private or public - needs to do to become more innovative.

The book is easy to read and the advice is clearly outlined and accessible. It has 40 chapters each of which challenges one of our preconceived notions about innovation.

Here are some of my favorite examples from the book:
Hire people you don't like. Because the people you like the least are the people you need the most.

Asking for ideas is a bad idea. Define challenges more clearly. If you ask better questions, you will get better answers.

The performance paradox. When organizations hyper focus on their goals, they are less likely to achieve those goals.

Expertise is the enemy of innovation. The more you know about a particular topic, the more difficult it is for you to think about it in a different way.

Basically, this book should be your new innovation bible. Read more about the book and buy it here.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Even Novelists Get the Blues October 6, 2011

By Malcolm Berry

Format:Hardcover

As a struggling novelist, I was surprised to have a read of Shapiro's book from the fiction writer's point of view - and gain insight into my craft. Among the 40 tips provided, several helped to invigorate my constant exploration of plot, character development and language.

One would think it's a long reach to compare Stephen King and Stephen Shapiro. In King's recent interview in The Atlantic, he suggests NOT writing down ideas because, "If you can't remember it, it was a terrible idea!" That is an interesting demonstration of Shapiro's theme of innovating your way of innovating - an organic aspect of the creative process which Shapiro lays out nicely. Other themes of the book, particularly in the "Creative" section, lubricate rusty parts of the creative intelligence. It's simply a matter of distilling corporate innovation into various layers of the craft of writing fiction.

In his book Pathway to Liberty, The great innovator Thomas Willhite, founder of PSI, brought "Change your Thinking" into the contemporary corporate model. In Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition, Stephen Shapiro has both amplified and fine-tuned the concept, even for us right-brain types who would rather get lost than have to follow directions to get there.