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Serial Innovators: Firms That Change the World
The average life expectancy at birth of a firm is roughly 15 years, and only one out of twenty lives longer than fifty years. Firms are born, they grow, then they struggle to keep up with changing markets. Slow adapters often become big losers, fall by the wayside, and die. Serial Innovators studies the factors affecting the aging of firms, particularly those that slow down their ability to adapt to changes in the marketplace. The book reviews recent findings in relevant academic fields--behavioral economics, psychology, neuroscience, organizational science, network theory, anthropology, sociology, and strategy--to understand how firms, as they grow, develop rigidities that prevent change.
It develops a model of organization that is adaptive, innovative, and can create significant value for its stakeholders for long periods of time.
It develops a model of organization that is adaptive, innovative, and can create significant value for its stakeholders for long periods of time.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
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254 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 4, 2021
What I love about this book is that the author has done thorough research i.e. collected information from various books and arranged it carefully into a case study and also tried to tell a compelling story.
The best part of the book has to do with discussion about religion, where the author includes a few excerpts form various books about research into religion and spirituality. The exact paragraph that talks about a rare disease which makes people lose their ability to detect where their body begins and where it ends, and leads to the environment. This also happens to effect or give spiritual people illusions about being one with nature, and the illusion that they have attained enlightenment, whatever that might be! I saw this illusion quite starkly emphasised in the teachings of Sadguru where he claims that he had attained enlightenment when he failed to distinguish between himself and the surroundings after a meditation session that lasted a week. His brain simply lost the ability to do it. And this book helped me discover that Meditators i.e. monks, nuns and other idle religious people tend to be able to lose this perception quite often.
The split brain being unable to do creative or be able to articulate concepts is also well depicted in this book.
The book begins with ascribing darwinian evolution to organizations and how they exhibit darwinian evolution on steroids. The firm resembles biological creature that is born then ages and then dies. This entirety of the book is dedicated to prolonging the life of this invisible construct of a company, so that it would survive centuries. The author has taken a radically different approach counter to what majority of studies have tried to do in the past few decades. Book like Built to Last have tried to analyze companies that have survived centuries in the Fortune 500 list. Unfortunately most of these studies have proved false. The radically different approach in this book is a qualitative attempt to understand, not the common qualities of successful companies but the interventions that the companies have adopted, i.e. changes in reward and performance structures, changes in habits, changes in organizational culture and structure and other changes made by the organizations and their leadership forms the crux of this book. The book focuses not on the tactical initiatives across various companies but the strategic initiatives behind the visible tactical initiatives and the theories behind them. The book is a collection of theories, all extracted from various other book. So I would recommend this book for such strategies which are priceless. This book serves as peer review guide to other books that are worth reading. I have read almost all the books, except the books suggested about spirituality and God, I could not waste my time on such books, since I am staunch atheist and the answer has already been established. I felt spending more time on this specific topic isn't worth while.
A better book would be LEAP, which also deals with the same problem of infusing life into dying and decaying companies with a new product, new market strategy and changing core competencies and leaping into new markets. This has been discussed in a chapter of this book too.
But the book kind of proves the power of research and the ability to aggregate relevant information into a coherent whole.
Unfortunately if you have read the books GRIT, MINDSET, Predictably Irrational, Mental Models, Nudge, Misbehaving and other behavioral economics books freakanomics etc. or sociology books and some books about psychology, pricing models and other books about habits like Power of habit, atomic habits etc... You would realize that the author just rephrased most of these terms from large number of books.
Towards the end of the book, it becomes a complete and utter bore, as it starts talking about the 7 Interventions. I am sure that I would not remember any of it but I think this is a very good collections of excerpts from various books.
Here is a list of works that are mentioned in this book.
Capitalism, socialism and democracy
Creative destruction
The origin of wealth
Thinking slow and fast
Nudge
How the mighty fall
God's brain
The minds past
The fourth great awakening and the future of egaletarianism
Built to last
The literary mind - mark Turner
In search of excellence
Theory Z
Freaknomics
Alchemy of growth
The theory of the growth of the firm
The best part of the book has to do with discussion about religion, where the author includes a few excerpts form various books about research into religion and spirituality. The exact paragraph that talks about a rare disease which makes people lose their ability to detect where their body begins and where it ends, and leads to the environment. This also happens to effect or give spiritual people illusions about being one with nature, and the illusion that they have attained enlightenment, whatever that might be! I saw this illusion quite starkly emphasised in the teachings of Sadguru where he claims that he had attained enlightenment when he failed to distinguish between himself and the surroundings after a meditation session that lasted a week. His brain simply lost the ability to do it. And this book helped me discover that Meditators i.e. monks, nuns and other idle religious people tend to be able to lose this perception quite often.
The split brain being unable to do creative or be able to articulate concepts is also well depicted in this book.
The book begins with ascribing darwinian evolution to organizations and how they exhibit darwinian evolution on steroids. The firm resembles biological creature that is born then ages and then dies. This entirety of the book is dedicated to prolonging the life of this invisible construct of a company, so that it would survive centuries. The author has taken a radically different approach counter to what majority of studies have tried to do in the past few decades. Book like Built to Last have tried to analyze companies that have survived centuries in the Fortune 500 list. Unfortunately most of these studies have proved false. The radically different approach in this book is a qualitative attempt to understand, not the common qualities of successful companies but the interventions that the companies have adopted, i.e. changes in reward and performance structures, changes in habits, changes in organizational culture and structure and other changes made by the organizations and their leadership forms the crux of this book. The book focuses not on the tactical initiatives across various companies but the strategic initiatives behind the visible tactical initiatives and the theories behind them. The book is a collection of theories, all extracted from various other book. So I would recommend this book for such strategies which are priceless. This book serves as peer review guide to other books that are worth reading. I have read almost all the books, except the books suggested about spirituality and God, I could not waste my time on such books, since I am staunch atheist and the answer has already been established. I felt spending more time on this specific topic isn't worth while.
A better book would be LEAP, which also deals with the same problem of infusing life into dying and decaying companies with a new product, new market strategy and changing core competencies and leaping into new markets. This has been discussed in a chapter of this book too.
But the book kind of proves the power of research and the ability to aggregate relevant information into a coherent whole.
Unfortunately if you have read the books GRIT, MINDSET, Predictably Irrational, Mental Models, Nudge, Misbehaving and other behavioral economics books freakanomics etc. or sociology books and some books about psychology, pricing models and other books about habits like Power of habit, atomic habits etc... You would realize that the author just rephrased most of these terms from large number of books.
Towards the end of the book, it becomes a complete and utter bore, as it starts talking about the 7 Interventions. I am sure that I would not remember any of it but I think this is a very good collections of excerpts from various books.
Here is a list of works that are mentioned in this book.
Capitalism, socialism and democracy
Creative destruction
The origin of wealth
Thinking slow and fast
Nudge
How the mighty fall
God's brain
The minds past
The fourth great awakening and the future of egaletarianism
Built to last
The literary mind - mark Turner
In search of excellence
Theory Z
Freaknomics
Alchemy of growth
The theory of the growth of the firm
August 24, 2017
There's nothing in this book that hasn't been said before. All I liked about this book was how it moved from one chapter to another and each chapter is a business case study of its own.
February 27, 2018
Written in a great format - this book contains some amazing pearls and key knowledge points that I will definitely refer back to during my career.
August 27, 2014
I read this one as a recommendation from a colleague. Some of it was interesting, some of it was rather obvious, I would have preferred a little more depth on the people as well as the innovation processes - but that might just be my bent for autobiographies coming through!
October 16, 2012
A lovely book with an innovative format--fictional narrative and well-researched ideas. Inspirational ending.
October 29, 2012
Brilliant combination of fictional narrative (a single case through the book) interspersed with interesting references to academic research.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews