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THE NEXT BIG THING IN BUSINESS INNOVATION—FROM THE NEXT GENERATION’S BRAND WHISPERER
What can an oil company (Pennzoil) learn from a great place to hang out (Starbucks) to create a new customer experience (Jiffy Lube)?
If you’re a manager, an executive, or an entrepreneur, you understand that your business is unique, with its own challenges and rewards. But thanks to the new science of the Business Genome® process, you’ll be surprised to see how many businesses share a similar “genetic” structure. And by understanding what works and what doesn’t for your business’s genomic type, you can play to your strengths, adapt to your weaknesses, and change the course of your company’s future.
Business Genome project creator Andrea Kates calls it Find Your Next—a field-tested, customized blueprint for mapping out your business DNA in four powerful steps:
1. Sort through your options and assess your 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.
This high-impact, transformative guide walks you through every step of the process, combining intuition and experience with statistical data and fascinating case studies. You’ll learn how two unrelated businesses—Hyatt Hotels and Sharp HealthCare—discovered untapped opportunities in their customer experience.
You’ll read how General Motors and OnStar hit the jackpot by examining something that wasn’t there. You’ll find in-depth interviews with GE’s Mark Vachon, IndieGoGo’s Danae Ringelmann, P.F. Chang’s Rick Federico, and other leaders of innovation. And you’ll learn how to crack the genetic code behind the six essential building blocks of business—product and service innovation; customer impact; talent, leadership, and culture; process design; trendability; and secret sauce.
Once you unlock the secret of your company’s DNA, you can evolve your strategy, build your future, and find your next.
PRAISE FOR FIND YOUR NEXT
“When you add it all up this is indeed a time of great change and arguably much of what we know about management today is becoming obviated. Which is why Find Your Next is such a helpful contribution to every manager’s arsenal. It embraces the shift from industrial models to models for the 21st century. And it’s a great read—packed with great stories and tons of practical advice. Read, enjoy and prosper.”
Don Tapscott, from the Foreword of Find Your Next
"Every great strategic thinker uses the ideas in this book... but it took Andrea Kates to write them down for the rest of us."
Seth Godin, author of We Are All Weird
”Andrea Kates is this generation’s new ‘brand whisperer’ and Find Your Next is the best toolkit for landing on your company’s ‘next.’”
Lane Cardwell, President, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro
“Andrea Kates’s ideas about the Business Genome project are cutting edge. They will completely transform the way we think about the impact of cross-organizational connections as a way to fuel business growth.”
James Fowler, author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, and Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science/UC San Diego
“Find Your Next combines radical thinking, innovative insight and real world experience to give corporate leaders a powerful compass in this era of unprecedented economic challenge.”
Catherine Crier, former judge, journalist and New York Times bestselling author
“Years ago I thought about what was next for music fans and turned to lessons learned from NASCAR and the NFL (not other musicians) to come up with the inspiration for the Lollapalooza festival. That’s exactly what Find Your Next provides—an easy-to-follow guide to game-changing innovation based on cross-industry thinking.”
Perry Farrell, founder of Lollapalooza festival and legendary rock frontman for Jane’s Addiction
"The difference between a great idea and a great business result is the ability to integrate insights from lots of different sources and get an entire organization on board quickly. Kates is onto something truly novel—Find Your Next could easily become the new industry standard for innovation. A must-read."
Mark Vachon, GE Company Officer
"If you thought you've been thinking creatively about your business, get ready for a new ride. In her book, Andrea Kates describes the Business Genome approach—a radically fresh roadmap to infuse innovative change into your business. Pure magic."
Nick Pudar, Vice President Strategy & Business Development, OnStar
“Andrea has a deep technical understanding based on years of global experience in innovation combined with a rare talent for communicating important issues very simply. The approach she describes in Find Your Next is so easy to grasp—you’ll see things differently and be able to lead your teams in refreshing new directions.”
Herwig Maes, Director of Strategic Sourcing & Supplier Relationship Management, Johnson & Johnson
“Find Your Next is the missing book on every business leader’s book shelf that fits right between Michael Porter and Malcolm Gladwell. It’s the playbook we’ve been wanting for hands-on innovation.”
Emily Watkins, Sr. Vice President, Innovation & Product Development, Jones Lang LaSalle
“What every business leader wants is tomorrow’s news, today. Find Your Next provides exactly that—a manifesto for innovators based on time-tested techniques. Mandatory reading.”
Tom Stat, Executive Director, Edison Universe; Adjunct Lecturer, Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, McCormick School, Northwestern University; and independent innovation consultant
“Find Your Next brings together a collection of insights and approaches that challenge everyone in an organization—from the CEO to the front line—to be nimble and build new muscles for rapid innovation. It disrupts the patterns of incremental growth from traditional strategic planning. The result is a process that can get your organization to market faster and leapfrog the competition.”
Alistair Goodman, CEO, Placecast
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE FIND YOUR NEXT / BUSINESS GENOME APPROACH: businessgenome.com
The Business Genome: The Key to Next
Before anything else happens, an idea is born.
Democratize the automobile. Naturalize cleaning. Give shoes to the needy. Smooth out ticket pricing. Crowd source creativity. Communalize coupons. Shelve books on cell phones. Deliver the world overnight. Bring Napa Valley to wherever you are.
Then, a business emerges. Many do: Ford, Method, Toms Shoes, ScoreBig, IndieGoGo, Groupon, Coca Cola, Vook, FedEx, Cooper's Hawk.
Sometimes an organization—a brand—develops organically, inspiring a group of people to naturally flock to it and engage with it with little persuasion necessary. Other companies show up ahead of the crowd that will eventually come to support it. In either case, as the idea evolves, so do the processes, systems, people, products, and modes of distribution that will sustain it. And the company carves out its niche in the competitive landscape.
Corporate growth continues down a path, creating silos of expertise in finance, accounting, product development, research, marketing, and talent, until the organization defines its point of difference in a mushrooming world of customers.
Then, one day, someone in the organization will have an idea, a hunch.
"I wonder if we could take this concept national."
"I think we could expand our product line."
"What if we could solve a bigger problem for our customers?"
"I bet we could tap into the economic trends much more powerfully."
"We're missing a big opportunity."
There the process begins: writing the company's next chapter, uncovering its next set of opportunities, realizing its next competitive edge, developing its next area for reinvention, locating its next group of customers. Or, for an entrepreneur, planting the seed of a brand new company altogether.
And, until now, that journey would have started with dissection. The company would measure its current strengths, weigh its component parts, evaluate its past results, and scrutinize its industry peers in search of its "next." The silos of capability that grew and developed to support complex business requirements now come to define the options for analysis. The range of potential places of where to go next may look a lot like what a company has already done, but instead is actually bigger, better, or different.
The strength of the most powerful opportunities is born from the cohesion of disparate elements from multiple strategies, and an incorporation of trends that can drive business in the future. The best way to write the next chapter for your organization is not to tweak each structural element individually but to create something bigger and all-inclusive—and then a game plan for how to get there.
1 + 1 + 1 = 5: The Value of a Systems Approach to Change
Matt Winter, CEO and President of Allstate Financial, believes in the value of what he describes as the systems approach to the sale of financial services: a multifaceted, interdisciplinary process with which the contribution of any individual component—product, for example—is enhanced by the impact of the other parts of the overall capacity—price and people, for example. As Matt Winter sought to reinvent his company, he realized it was time to recalculate the entire equation of consumer satisfaction. He thought it through, eliminating the obvious: simplification of the policy issue process, offering the same products being sold online, or updating slogans and branding. That approach would mitigate the true power of the change he envisioned. Winter knew that simply changing individual components wouldn't get Allstate Financial to its next level. The power of the company's reinvention, Winter believed, one that led to the development of an entirely new product set, customer experience, and distribution model and economic framework, had to come from the power of the combined, synergistic effect of multiple components, and not the individual effect of alterations to any single element.
Genomic Patterns Offer a Fresh Lens for Business
Learn from leaders of companies whose strategies reflect the Business Genome approach:
Groupon, dedicated to bundling discounts online, took the idea of newspaper coupons and mixed it with the power of community to create a business that made $500 million in revenue in its first two years.
OnStar matched the phone call home with GPS and the 911 emergency phone system to invent a way to exit the dashboard and enter Best Buy, morphing from a GM factory-installed service to an electronic device that can work on any vehicle.
Cooper's Hawk infused great food and a relaxing atmosphere with Napa Valley vibe and added Facebook's viral sense of connection, community, and the power of recommendation to create a restaurant/winery that boasts the fastest-growing community of club members of any restaurant "cult" in the country.
G.E. applied its desire of incorporating the new world of energy use and sustainability to its manufacturing powerhouse and invented its ecomagination generation of manufacturing products and facilities.
Toms Shoes jumped on a growing philosophy to make a difference and defined a new space for shoes, in which the sense of community and social contribution could be married with every purchase.
The Business Genome approach is designed to allow everyone in business to follow their hunches, look at the world in a new way, and craft ideas for growth in just the ways that Groupon, OnStar, G.E., Toms Shoes, Cooper's Hawk, and Allstate Financial did. These ideas that became profitable organizations were conceived not by comparing an existing industry to the restaurants, insurance companies, shoe companies, or manufacturers of the company's competition, but by following a genomic process and finding patterns.
The Genomic Approach to Business
Businesses consist of components of great ideas that can be melded together to create and launch new business opportunities. When the higher-ups at Jiffy Lube started to suspect the value of selling oil had diminished in favor of a more holistic approach to the oil change experience, they used a genomic process to borrow ideas from other industries. Who had a great waiting room experience that could be built into a new model for Jiffy Lube? How could that experience be grafted onto the existing interior of Jiffy Lube's stores to create a killer app?
The genome mindset sparks new insights for translating the DNA of one business to the growth challenges of another. It allows us to see through a new lens. Now we can read the facts and figures in a different way, and shift our focus toward response and away from prediction. What we'll need are ideas—novel ideas—influenced by strategies that have worked successfully in other arenas. The Find Your Next process can help us get there by offering a systematic way of sorting through those ideas to land on opportunities for building up any company, whether a large, global enterprise or a local start-up.
The heritage for the genomic approach truly began in 1991, when the Human Genome Project defined a new playing field for genetic scientists interested in the next step of DNA analysis, thereby enabling people to trace their individual biological inheritance. It was a huge project that started with gene mapping and led to new medical innovations, because, for the first time, scientists could actually look at patterns of biological information and visualize connections.
But g
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Excerpted from Find Your Next by ANDREA KATES. Copyright © 2012 by Andrea Kates. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Overview
THE NEXT BIG THING IN BUSINESS INNOVATION—FROM THE NEXT GENERATION’S BRAND WHISPERER
What can an oil company (Pennzoil) learn from a great place to hang out (Starbucks) to create a new customer experience (Jiffy Lube)?
If you’re a manager, an executive, or an entrepreneur, you understand that your business is unique, with its own challenges and rewards. But thanks to the new science of the Business Genome® process, you’ll be surprised to see ...