Customer Reviews

Find Your Next: Using the Business Genome Approach to Find Your Company’s Next Competitive Edge

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In a world where new words are constantly surfacing, my first response when I say the phrase, "Business Genome Approach" on the jacket cover was, "Here we go again." More to learn and more Ms. Kates will be asking me to pay attention to in my professional career. That's where my objections stopped.

Early in the book she says, "Genome business approach consists of components of great ideas that can be melded together to create and launch new business opportunities." Notice she did not say start a new business she talks about blending businesses. As a constant breaker of rules, she got my attention.

A business leader often is stuck in her office. She rarely goes out to talk to staff in her building, and rarely talks to leaders in other industries. Ms. Kates points out that could be a big mistake. Instead, she advocates watching, talking and collaborating with other companies to enhance products or services that you are each producing independently.

There are many examples of real companies throughout the book that illustrates the "genome approach." Once you read this book, your mind will be racing with ideas and possibilities. AND by the way, she believes you should pay close attention to your intuition.

Andrea Kates thinking and insights are easy to follow. By using cross-industry connections new innovation can be developed to drive a new business growth. You can become a new industry leader with these strategic ideas. The business genome process uncovers how many businesses share a similar "genetic" structure. By understanding your business genomic type, you can play up your strengths and change the course of your business future. Discover untapped opportunities, evolve your strategy and build your dynamic future. Kates will help you to organise chaos with her six elements of the business genome. Kate's explains her business genome classifications with six elements. With these classifications companies can organise their "dashboads" around categories, or core DNA, that reveal new opportunities for growth.

Case studies of successes in business are thoroughly covered. We see how success evolves through innovation with genomic patterns. The process is based on adaptation not predictability. The system and process uses case studies and cross reference (examples supplied) to find your next business idea.

"Find Your Next" covers: product innovation, maximising talent, capitalizing on future trends, customer impact, defining your secret sauce, optimising processes.

If you are at a crossroads, get this book and discover your next "killer app" so that you can thrive. There are many lessons to be learnt. There are patterns that make people win that are identical no matter what the organisation. Get this book. Discover new solutions. Get more impact, crack the code on innovation.

(Kates has worked with over 250 global corporations and entrepreneurs such as Hewlett-Packard, Shell, KPMG.)

Could the Business Genome approach help your company find it's next competitive edge? The answer is yes, and Andrea Kates clearly lays out the reasons why in Find Your Next. Her thesis is simple: traditional management, product development and marketing require radical change.

Follow her four-step blueprint to uncover your business's DNA, evolve your strategy and build your future:

1. Sort through your options and assess hunches

2. Match your genome to other successful business models

3. Hybridize your company by grafting new ideas with proven successes

4. Adapt and thrive by breaking old habits and starting new trends

Kates' reveals how our imagination, optimism and desire to connect are three very powerful levers for business success. It's a totally new concept and helps us prepare for the unpredictable, socially connected consumer.

The book is divided into three sections, with a lot of informative sidebars. Read the chapter text first, and then go back to the call out boxes. Otherwise, you may find it difficult to follow along.

Part 1 details the Business Genome approach. When you uncover these patterns, you create a fresh lens to look at business. Winning businesses consist of components of great ideas that can be melded together to create and launch new business opportunities. I love that finding your "secret sauce" is part of this process -- but is your brand still relevant? Part 2 lists and explains the Business Genome elements: product and service innovation, customer impact, talent / leadership / culture, process design, secret sauce and trendability. Finally, the case studies in Part 3 really tie all the elements of the book together with real world examples, including P.F. Chang's, GE's Ecomagination and GM's OnStar.

If you're a business owner, member of your executive team or an aspiring entrepreneur, then read Find Your Next. You'll learn to recognize the new realities, shift your focus to new questions, tap into evolving patterns and guide your organization toward opportunities for competitive advantage and distinction. Or simply, as Kates' asks in the Conclusion, "Which emerging forces should we be tracking right now to lead our companies toward a thriving future?"

"Find Your Next" by Andrea Kates. When I first started to read "Find Your Next", other books I read like those authored by Edward de Bono, Wikinomics, and The World is Flat came to mind so "Hey, what's new?" Then, I felt "OK, so Kates is knocking the corporate organization man for a newer integrative approach." Then I asked, "what the heck does Find Your Next mean". It's a totally new concept, but what does it have to do with the business world. As I read on, I understood that "Find Your Next" is just that, a totally new concept. That is, and this I loved, what's next is really the new business science of being prepared for the unpredictable, a whole new renaissance in the business world concept. Now we all grew up with old concepts like "if it's not broken, don't fix it" , or "precedence takes precedence" or " follow the leader" . However, in a world where the new consumer is internet interactive, diverse, and brought up with Facebook , and Google, and where the new economy is driven by innovation , knowledge, immediacy , "change" is not a dirty word. Kates brings "change" to a new level and claims that for the economy to survive it has to break out of the old habits and learn to venture into the unknown- to "stay ahead of the unpredictable". That is, like the Boy Scouts motto would have it, has to learn to "be prepared" as "there is no science of prediction". The new employee has to also be an innovator and needs to acquire the skills of "learning how to learn" over rote learning to use an example from the new models of education. Accelerated learning and creative techniques like pattern recognition, combined with a holistic and integrative view of a business is now essential to succeed in this new economy. The science of experience has to be combined with the art of instinct and acting on a hunch. Imagination is the new currency in this new world. The more imaginative company will reap the rewards. As a research scientist, learning specialist and entrepreneur myself, I especially enjoy new books that fit my needs for becoming more innovative. Author of " Being In Control : Natural Solutions for ADHD , Dyslexia, and Test Anxiety"Being in Control: Natural Techniques for Increasing Your Potential and Creativity for Success in School and " Leaving Home, Going Home, Returning Home: A Hebrew American's Sojourn in the Land of Israel".Leaving Home, Going Home, Returning Home: A Hebrew American's Sojourn in the Land of Israel

OK, full disclosure, I'm referenced in this book a couple of times. But I still feel compelled to weigh in on this fantastic book.

There seem to be two kinds of books on innovation these days. One takes a very academic, overly intellectualized, management consulting approach with endless diagrams and professed perspectives. The other pushes a highly rigid method which is rarely relevant to the reader's situation and seems impossible to apply.

"Find Your Next" is a very different kind of book. It reveals and helps us all leverage three very powerful, but often neglected or atrophied, forces in human nature and our creative capacity - our abundant imaginations, our rich ability to creatively connect seemingly dissimilar things, and our robust optimism.

Yes, there are geniuses in this world. They are rare and almost always alone. But the true innovators typically have two far more important qualities - social intelligence (the ability to see in a different way) and pattern recognition skills (the ability to synthesize, combine and associate). It turns out that creativity is fueled by these two qualities and that we ALL have the power and the engine. Find Your Next reveals these skills, adds air and fuel to the combustion and kick starts our sleeping engines with clarity, sincerity and great stories, without being preachy, scripted or prescriptive.

Go Find Your Next!

Andrea Kates and I am among those who agree with Thomas Edison that "vision without execution is hallucination." In this book, she provides a brilliant analysis of an approach that can unlock the potential of sustainable business growth and prosperity. Over a period of 15 years during which she was involved in 250 strategy projects, Kates formulated what she calls the "Business Genome," an approach whose core DNA consists of six separate but interdependent elements. They are product and service innovation, customer impact, process design, talent and leadership, "secret sauce" (i.e. the recipe of differentiation and competitive advantage in a new world of unprecedented transparency), and trendability. No news there. They are merely words buzzing around unless and until they are integrated smoothly and then engaged effectively "as a strategic lever to move a company today to a dynamic future."

Kates recommends and explains a four step process: sort through the options and assess hunches, match the given genome (different with each company) that have already achieved the given objectives, "hybridize" the company by adopting ("grafting") what works for others, and adapt and drive after breaking old habits and fostering new traditions in the business. As she explains with meticulous care, the companies that thrive in months and years to come will embrace the new realities of speed, transparency, global reach, and customer dynamics that have rendered obsolete most (if not all) traditional, conventional business models and their assumptions and premises about how to establish and then sustain a competitive advantage.

It should be noted that the title of Kates' book refers to "your next," not to "the next." Companies are like snowflakes in that they share common elements and yet no two of them are exactly the same. Hence the importance of the fact that the business genome approach can be adopted by almost any company, whatever its size and nature may be. Cultural resistance that all change initiatives is usually the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." This resistance probably cannot be avoided and is very difficult to overcome. That is why, Kates explains, it is imperative to recognize the emergence of patterns and trends, in some instances paradigm shifts, within the business universe. Understanding them is both an art (i.e. envisioning what is only beginning to take shape) and a science (i.e. applying rigorous analysis to verifiable phenomena). In essence, Kates urges her reader to seek her or his Next New by developing a mindset that moves beyond the Current/Recent Old, a passive (perhaps stagnating) state that may have once been a Next New.

Think of the six elements as organizational capabilities, each of which must be developed and all of which must be coordinated within process of transformation by which to take full advantage of new opportunities revealed by business analytics, early-warning systems, inexplicable anomalies, and what I characterize as enlightened intuition. It would be a fool's errand to attempt to apply everything Kates recommends and/or replicate initiatives taken by exemplar companies in the case studies provided in Part 3. However, she can help everyone who reads this book can recognize the new realities, shift focus to new questions and to new answers to old questions, to recognize and then tap into "the patterns that are evolving today," and thereby shape rather than be shaped by whatever is next.

Find Your Next by Andrea Kates book seeks to illustrate the new principles that today's leading organizations must follow to survive in today's competitive business environment. (p. xxiv). Kates organizes the book around the idea of a business genome consisting of products & services, customer impact, secret sauce, process design, talent & leadership and trendability. Leaders are responsible for understanding and changing their organization to take advantage of (new) sustainable opportunities, adjacencies, trends you can see, cross-industry innovations, leapfrog opportunities and top hunches. Collectively Kates offers these as the framework and process for finding your next business.

Kates' thesis is that changes in technology, customers, markets, products and services have rendered traditional management; product development, marketing and other practices require radical change. Those changes revolve around increasing demands for agility and responsiveness in the face of increased customer choice, global competition and an ever-quickening pace of change. Taken together these forces render the fundamentals of commerce, strategy and customer value moot.

The business genome idea is interesting and can certainly provide a framework for understanding, borrowing and adapting best practices from other industries and situations. Kates presents each element as its own chapter in the second part of the book providing detailed demonstration of the elements of the business genome.

Kates presents good ideas and powerful arguments but they are bogged down by the book's layout and how Kates presents her argument. The book's layout is fragmented with text weaved in between call out boxes and sidebars. This makes it difficult to follow the argument. Kates further complicates the argument by spacing it out across the chapters rather than concentrating it into an introductory chapter. For this reason, the book is at best a four star book and more like three and a half stars.

Kates does support her argument through a series of case studies taken from different industries that illustrate her ideas. The case studies help bring these ideas to life, which is great support for leaders looking to create the changes necessary to adapt to a new world.

Not every idea in this book is original and Kates does a good job of providing references and citations. Kates does put these together in new ways and provide an integrated framework (the Genome) and a repeatable process involving:

1) Sort - through the elements of your business genome

2) Match you genome - comparing your elements to other businesses

3) Hybridize - cross grafting genomic patterns from others into your business genome

4) Adapt and thrive - recognize and respond to a changing environment.

Overall, Find Your Next provides an eye-opening view on how leaders are responding to a changing environment and its impact on the future of business. Recommended for business strategists, technology strategists and leaders looking for new ideas and new answer to new questions about competition, technology, products, customers and the future.