The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation
Author: A G Lafley
How you can increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth . . . whether you're running an entire company or in your first management job.
Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; significantly improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. How? A. G. Lafley and his leadership team have integrated innovation into everything P&G does and created new customers and new markets.
Through eye-opening stories A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan show how P&G and companies such as Honeywell, Nokia, LEGO, GE, HP, and DuPont have become game-changers. Their inspiring lessons can help you learn how to:
• Make consumers and customers the boss, not the CEO or the management team
• Innovate to grow a mature business
• Develop higher growth, higher margin businesses
• Create new customers and new markets
• Revitalize a business model
• Reach outside your own business and tap into the abundant brainpower and creativity of the world
• Integrate innovation into the mainstream of your managerial decision making
• Manage risk
• Become a leader of innovation
We live in a world of unprecedented change, increasing global competitiveness, and the very real threat of commoditization. Innovation in this world is the best way to win-arguably the only way to really win. Innovation is not a separate, discrete activity but the job of everyone in a leadership position and the integral, central driving force for any business that wants to grow organically and succeed on a sustained basis.
The Economist
This is a game-changing book that helps you redefine your leadership and improve your management game. A. G. Lafley has made Procter & Gamble great again.
BusinessWeek
Of all the firms on the 2007 ranking of the 'World's Most Innovative Companies,' few are more closely associated with today's innovation zeitgeist than . . . Procter & Gamble . . . now famous for its open approach to innovation.
U.S. News & World Report
The proof of Lafley's approach is plain enough. . . . P&G has not only doubled the number of new products . . . but also more than doubled its portfolio of billion-dollar brands and its stock price.
Fortune magazine
Lafley brought a whole lot of creativity and rigor to P&G's innovation process.
Chief Executive magazine
A. G. Lafley has reenergized a venerable giant . . . with a style and energy that will be the subject of business school cases for years to come.
Table of Contents:
Game-Changer: A Definition vii
Our Goal xi
How and Why Innovation at Procter & Gamble Changed Its Game 1
What P&G's Innovation Transformation Means for You 18
Drawing the Big Picture
The Customer Is Boss: The Foundation of Successful Innovation 33
Where to Play, How to Win: How Goals and Strategies Achieve Game-Changing Innovation 69
Leveraging What You Do Best: Revitalizing Core Strengths with Innovation 95
Making Innovation Happen
Organizing for Innovation: Building Enabling Structures 119
Integrating Innovation into Your Routine: From Generating Ideas to Go to Market 154
Managing the Risks of Innovation 185
The Culture of Innovation
Innovation Is a Team Sport: Courageous and Connected Culture 221
The New Job of the Leader: Innovation and Growth 253
Conclusion: How Jeff Immelt Made Innovation a Way of Life at GE 283
Afterword 301
Acknowledgments 307
Index 311
Look this: The Three Signs of a Miserable Job or Bringing Home the Birkin
The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
Author: Tim Harford
Life sometimes seems illogical. Individuals do strange things: take drugs, have unprotected sex, mug each other. Love seems irrational, and so does divorce. On a larger scale, life seems no fairer or easier to fathom: Why do some neighborhoods thrive and others become ghettos? Why is racism so persistent? Why is your idiot boss paid a fortune for sitting behind a mahogany altar? Thorny questions–and you might be surprised to hear the answers coming from an economist. But award-winning journalist Tim Harford likes to spring surprises. In this deftly reasoned book, he argues that life is logical after all. Under the surface of everyday insanity, hidden incentives are at work, and Harford shows these incentives emerging in the most unlikely places.
The New York Times - William Grimes
The world is a crazy place. It makes perfect sense only to conspiracy theorists and economists of a certain stripe. Tim Harford, a columnist for The Financial Times and the author of The Undercover Economist, is one of these, a devotee of rational-choice theory, which he applies ingeniously and entertainingly to all kinds of problems in The Logic of Life…Mr. Harford has a knack for explaining economic principles and problems in plain language and, even better, for making them fun.
Publishers Weekly
Financial Timesand Slate.com columnist Harford (The Undercover Economist)provides an entertaining and provocative look at the logic behind the seemingly irrational. Arguing that rational behavior is more widespread than most people expect, Harford uses economic principles to draw forth the rational elements of gambling, the teenage oral sex craze, crime and other supposedly illogical behaviors to illustrate his larger point. Utilizing John von Neumann and Thomas Schelling's conceptions of game theory, Harford applies their approach to a multitude of arenas, including marriage, the workplace and racism. Contrarily, he also shows that individual rational behavior doesn't always lead to socially desired outcomes. Harford concludes with how to apply this thinking on an even bigger scale, showing how rational behavior shapes cities, politics and the entire history of human civilization. Well-written with highly engaging stories and examples, this book will be of great interest to Freakonomicsand Blinkfans as well as anyone interested in the psychology of human behavior. (Feb.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationKirkus Reviews
Or, the things people will do for money-and for good reason. Contrary to pop economists who have examined the stranger moments of human behavior vis-a-vis the benjamins (Freakonomics, etc.), Financial Times and Slate columnist Harford (The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, Why the Poor Are Poor-And Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!, 2005) centers on the predictability of much of it. Criminals, for instance, "can be brutal and remorseless, but many of them are far from indifferent to the 'pains of imprisonment,' " because they know that in the calculus of life crime literally doesn't pay. That calculus comes into play when Mexican prostitutes (Harford picks many examples from the demimonde) determine whether or not the john must use a condom, charging more if not; and when soldiers decide whether to risk their lives by re-enlisting in exchange for the healthcare and other benefits offered by the military. "Even a coward like me will risk his life for money," writes the author, and risk is omnipresent, in various degrees, whenever money enters the discussion. Harford occasionally gets caught up in the inevitable abstractions of economics, but for the most part his narrative is refreshingly down-to-earth and even useful. The reader learns here, for instance, why he or she should damn the torpedoes and bet with a handful of bad cards: "Your opponent will have to call you a little more often. Because he knows that your bets are sometimes very weak, he can't afford to fold too easily." Would that the rest of life operated so predictably. But then, at least in a way, it does, so that, as Harford explains, it becomes apparent why Detroit is a third-rate city and NewYork a first-rate one, why New Orleans should not be rebuilt and why agribusiness contributes to political campaigns while real-estate agents do not. Chock-full of numbers and money talk, but oddly entertaining-of a piece with Dan Ariely's superior Predictably Irrational (2007) and other recent popularizing works in behavioral economics. Agent: Sally Holloway/Felicity Bryan Agency
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