Innovators’ Book Club: Think Big Act Small

A summation of Mission Field's philosophy and the title of a great book is Think Big, Act Small. In the book, Jason Jennings shares anecdotes of how America’s best performing companies keep the start up spirit alive. At Mission Field, we apply lessons we learned while building small companies to innovation challenges of big companies. The parallels between the two are one of the reasons we decided to kick off our new Innovators’ Book Club with a book that has the same title as a Mission Field mantra.

Jennings writes the book with the organization as a whole in mind, we read the book with the lens of how to apply the best practices to innovation. Many of the ways the leaders of nine best performing companies Jennings profiles in his book (Petco, SAS, Strayer, Cabela’s, Dot Foods, Koch, Medline, O’Reilly, and Sonic) are also approaches that can improve the performance of innovation.

These are some of the core building blocks for the best performing companies outlined in the book and our thoughts on how they can also be applied to build best performing innovation:

  1. Down to Earth

Transparency is a key attribute of a down to earth culture. Part of being transparent is sharing the bad news and the good. Its the bad news that often contains the best lessons. That is why Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, said “the fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” Making sure information and people at all levels are accessible to the entire team ensures the free flow of learning and enables the team to move more quickly and make better decisions.

2. Keep your hands dirty

Get in the trenches and stay there. Innovation leaders who outsource consumer empathy-building and don’t get in the trenches alongside consumers miss a hugely important part of good decision making; intuition. Some companies have special initiatives for executives to get their hands dirty but its temporary. As Jennings highlights “there’s no need for getting-your-hands-dirty initiatives at the companies we studied because keeping their hands dirty is the very essence of who these leaders and organizations are.” At Sonic, executives spend as much as half of their time visiting stores and in the kitchen. Being in frequent contact and involved with consumers is critical for anyone who is making innovation-related decisions. Its a key reason why entrepreneurs out maneuver big companies - they know their consumers so intimately (they usually are the consumer) and have such strong intuition, that they make high-quality decisions quickly.

3. letting go

This excerpt from the book sums it up quite well: “companies waste so much time trying to resuscitate yesterday’s breadwinners, defending past decisions, assuaging executive egos, and tinkering with broken processes that they don’t have time to concentrate on the important things…” The decision of what not to do is just as important in strategy as what to do. Finding ways to quickly (and accurately) assess whether your innovation ideas have potential or not is an important way to make sure you are using resources most effectively. But its also important to give good ideas the room to iterate and realize their potential. Real world learning like transactional testing is one of the best ways to do that.

4. have everyone think like the owner

“You have to create an environment where people are encouraged to act like entrepreneurs.” – Brian Linneman, EVP Cabela’s. “We have an attitude here that you can’t make mistakes if you don’t try things and if things don’t work out or if you make a bad decision, you raise your hand and say ‘that one was mine.’  There are two very important tenets here:

  1. Create a culture where mistakes are encouraged, not punished

  2. Make sure incentives and decision-making rights are designed so that innovation project owners feel like they have skin in the game (just like an entrepreneur does) and are rewarded when the innovation is successful

5. create win-win solutions

As Jennings reminds us “when there is no competitive advantage to distinguish a good, product, or service from the competition’s, the only thing left to talk about is price.” Which quickly becomes a race to the bottom. To avoid this, a company must identify true pain points for its customers and create products that solve these needs and solve the company’s need for a sustainable profit stream. Seven ways of doing this are featured in the book. Below we chose the three that are most relevant for innovation:

  1. Sell directly

  2. Love your customers

  3. Don’t let extra layers of management slow things down. One of my favorite quotes from the whole book is “less bureaucracy plus speed equals the ability to seize opportunity.”

6. Be a little entrepreneurial

Make lots of little bets and take small chances, but don’t make a bet so big that it would upend the firm if it didn’t work out

All of our core services are designed with this in mind – test, learn, iterate, before you invest in a big launch.

7. build communities

Develop new products with the foothold consumer in mind - the most passionate, fervent supporters. Word of mouth is the most effective and efficient way to grow awareness of a new product. If you design the product to appeal to this core target, they will reward you with their advocacy.

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