Anthony Ulwick

Reading any book is incredibly contingent upon what the reader brings to the table (no secret there). What is a moment of serendipity for me may be another part of the plodding you had to accomplish to finish the book. This is most true of self-help books in any of their guises. And, truth be told, business books are just self-help books disguised as professional literature. Many times someone has thrust a business book (usually one of those 50-page airport books that seem to have only four words a page) my way saying “it changed my life”; and I have read it and wondered what kind of horrible life a tree could have led to be forced to give its life so that such banality could be printed.

With that in mind, I found a large number of serendipitous moments within these pages, and only a few “ho-hums”. You should find that this book introduces concepts that make you rethink your approach to processes, innovation, and even the way companies are organized. (And, sorry, there are also extra words that don’t do a lot.) And, this book can seem like absolutely nothing new when described at its most basic - an approach that takes the focus of process analysis away from the internal process and moves it to the view of the customer. However, the revolutionary concept (the concept that was revolutionary and mind-freeing to me) was that the customer-centric view needs to start with what job the customer is trying to accomplish. From this, the author’s have built an entire process around development of innovation including idea generation, finding the important innovations, figuring what direction a process should take, finding processes to eliminate, and finding a new way to do things. Combining theoretical concepts with mathematical approaches, this book contains much food for thought. Yes, as noted before, there are self-evident facts that are spouted as profundities (every business book suffers from this – at it core, the need to fill a contractually-required, reader-expected number of pages) but it all leads through a logical exploration of what can often be a fuzzy process – creativity and innovation.… (mais)