Apple has been sliced and diced in countless books and blogs to find its “secret sauce”. To me, Steve Jobs created a petri dish and threw in all kinds of rare elements – Tim Cook’s operational excellence, Jony Ive’s design aesthetic, Ron Johnson’s retail experience, Scott Forstall’s ecosystem vision, Phil Schiller’s marketing chops, and many others including Terry Gou, CEO of Foxconn, the contract manufacturer. It took a while to gell, and likely required all kinds of ego and conflict management, but his enduring legacy is having created and managed that dream team which even with a few changes continues to do well.
I am starting to see that comprehensive “build to last” thinking show up in at least a few companies. It is nice to see Keurig with its success with single serve coffee look to apply their tech and other disciplines to other categories. Fortune: "The question is, How do you do five, six, seven more of those in the next 10 years?"
In contrast, though I see way too many people look for the silver bullet, the plastic surgery. After I wrote The New Polymath, people suggested I write more about how to. So in The New Technology Elite I structured the book around 12 innovation traits from design elegance to paranoia, and gave plenty of examples of each in innovation settings. The new book, The Digital Enterprise is structured around business processes – product creation, manufacturing, human resources etc. Each has world class examples.
Now I am hearing some grumbles. It’s too much work – it’s P90X. Is there no simple diet for this? Is there no app for this? Can we not buy versus build slowly?
Sure there is. But that’s called process tweaking. In fact there is very good payback from that. Just take 1-2 chapters from my book and optimize those areas.
But then don’t think you will become Apple. That’s not building a dream team or a build-to-last innovation culture. That’s just a bit more work which needs working with 10-12-15 of my chapters. But when that comes together it is a sight to behold like the 1992 US basketball team in Barcelona.
