New Book by P&G CEO A.G. Lafley

Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek has written a glowing review of A.G. Lafley's new book co-written with Ram Charan called "The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation." Writes Bruce: "Lafley, the remarkable CEO of Procter & Gamble, gives us the state-of-the-art in innovation. It tells you exactly what the best practices are in the one non-techie company that has embraced innovation as a total corporate strategy and as an organizational culture."

I wrote an article about P&G a couple of years ago called ‘Even Giants Start Small’ In it, I use a quote by Elting Morrison to describe the company: “No intellectual heroism or psychic leap will take you from the development of the wheel immediately to the internal-combustion engine and the automobile.”

For anyone out there who thinks they can’t achieve what this company has done, think again. P&G experiments all the time and they've done it for generations. They don’t have one open innovation initiative running – they have dozens. There’s a mountain underneath their success in terms of the learning that took place, the evolution of programs and the various types of experimentation. As Larry Huston, the creator of P&G's Connect + Develop program (and BIF Research Advisor) once told me "We started with a small team, in a small office and jumped on the learning curve."

Back in 2001, when P&G came up with 90% of its innovations internally, A.G. Lafley publicly proclaimed that the company would work toward a goal of sourcing 50% of its innovation externally (they achieved that goal btw last year). Changing the mindset one of the world’s largest companies from ‘not invented here’ to ‘ideas can and will come from anywhere’ was a transformation that required research, commitment and a lot of motivation. Most importantly though – it required leadership. And that, I believe, is the secret sauce for successful innovation.

Related
Read my article on Larry Huston and Connect + Develop

Don't miss Bruce Nussbaum this October in Providence when he co-hosts our 4th annual Collaborative Innovation Summit. Details here.

Posted April 15, 2008 05:23 PM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink