The Game-Changer Quotes

“What Have I Learned in 2007 About Innovation? At P&G, purpose-driven innovation—whose goal is more than sales and market share and profits—whose goal is meaningfully improving the everyday lives of the billions of consumers we serve—gets every P&Ger “in the innovation game” and inspires heroic efforts on a regular basis to come up with new ideas and then to transform these ideas into brands and products that enhance and improve daily life.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“At any organizational level, you can find ways to put customer-centric innovation at the center of your work. Even when you don’t have much leeway at the macro level—when, for instance, goals and strategies are handed to you—you can exert influence at the micro level, by reinventing a work system, creating a new enabling structure, or changing the culture. You can provide a motivating purpose and inspire your team and the leaders around you to search for growth opportunities and reallocate resources to them. Your starting point will be different from someone else’s, but if you keep working at it, you will see innovation permeate more and more aspects of your daily work. Eventually innovation will be integrated and self-reinforcing.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“At the CEO level, the job is to take the mid-to long-range views with an eye for balancing short-and long-term goals, high-and low-risk projects, and disruptive and incremental innovations.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“There is also an annual Cost Innovation Award given to teams that bring innovation to the market in a way that provides consumers a better value at a lower capital and/or cost structure than competition. P&G started this program to recognize people who are crucial to commercializing innovation in a way that gives consumers great value. It is given during an annual award dinner, and again, senior management is on hand to recognize and salute the winners.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“By publicly recognizing people for winning innovations and rewarding them, companies build pride in achievement and create a positive psychology. It’s not only a positive recognition of an individual’s accomplishments but an inspiration for hundreds, if not thousands, of others to follow the path to become a leader of innovation. It influences the behavior of people the day they enter the company and alters their aspirations. It muscle-builds the culture for innovation.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“When working on innovation, you can’t rely on numbers alone as most innovations have never been done before. Innovation leadership requires relying more on personal instinct and developing experienced judgment. The more diverse the experiences, the better the instincts and judgment of the innovation leader. It is important to include an element that ensures an individual continues to build experience across a variety of innovation situations with increased complexity, increased uncertainty, and increased risk.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“The linkage goes all the way to the CEO. Holliday holds a monthly Critical Growth Review in which he selects typically three programs and spends an hour on each. Holliday gets the discussion going with comments or questions such as “Tell me what are the most critical hurdles your team is facing” or “What makes you the right person to lead this team?” It’s usually a positive experience that gives people a chance to have their work recognized or gets them additional support or inspires them. He helps people see that what they might think of as a huge risk might not be one in the context of the corporation as a whole. It’s another way of building confidence that innovation is on track to produce revenue and margin gains.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Technology research projects three to five years from commercialization were the feeder system for DuPont’s future revenues and margins. There were lots of them, all consuming precious resources, particularly the expertise of key people whose efforts were diluted over too many projects. In Connelly’s view, so many projects could neither be properly managed nor given the proper amount of resources. He and Bingham looked at the hundreds of projects that were within three to five years of launch and picked seventy-five (limited to no more than a handful per business unit) that they judged had the highest probability of success. The top seventy-five projects had to meet three criteria: address a well-defined unmet market need; the business must have or be reasonably expected to develop a unique solution to the need; and the business must have an effective route by which the solution could be delivered to the market. For a company whose development efforts had been driven by R&D for most of its two-hundred-year history, that shift represented a major turning point.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“The ongoing effective intersection of marketing and commercial people in a business unit with the separate technology units was the missing link in DuPont’s culture.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Holliday chose Tom Connelly to lead DuPont’s process of innovation, seeing in him the ability to integrate what were two separate worlds at DuPont: technology and marketing. In addition to impeccable credentials as a chemical engineer and researcher, Connelly is also one of DuPont’s top three executives under Holliday, responsible for research and development and several line functions. He has also been a successful growth leader and P&L general manager of several DuPont businesses, including Kevlar and Fluoroproducts.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Defer judgment Encourage wild ideas Build on the ideas of others Stay focused on topic One conversation at a time Be visual Go for quantity These are IDEO’s rules for brainstorming,”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“An example that brings these elements to life comes from P&G Asia, where the leadership team has made creating an innovation culture a fundamental organizational strategy. They use the concept of “IDEAS” to emphasize the need for out-of-the-box ideas as a source of game-changing innovation, as well as a reminder of the behaviors required to create a more innovative culture. Inclusive: Reaping benefits of diverse thinking and ideas needed to foster game-changing innovation Decisive: Eliminating organizational swirl, debate, and overanalysis to enable faster innovation development, qualification, and commercialization External: Externally focused to get and stay in touch with consumers, customers, suppliers, and the need for honest and objective benchmarking versus external competition Agile: Quickly reacting to changing consumer and marketplace conditions, being forward-thinking, becoming more comfortable with taking (calculated) risks Simple: Ongoing streamlining and simplification of work structures/processes to free up more time for innovation”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Peter Drucker believed that for an existing business to be capable of innovation “it has to make sure its incentives, compensation, personnel decisions, and policies all reward the right entrepreneurial behavior and do not penalize it.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Simply put, culture is about everyday behavior. Changing the culture, therefore, requires changing behavior. That means clearly defining both business and personal development expectations.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Analogy can be a rich source of insight; and there can be no innovation without insight. But this is often not a linear matter. It requires synthesis.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Teams also need to be contained—a dozen people at the very most (some social science research suggests five or six as the ideal). Amazon has the two-pizza rule—no team so big it cannot dine on two pies. Google typically has three-person teams that work for three to four months on a project. A permanent team of many people is just another way of saying bureaucracy.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Diversity is not, however, a virtue in itself. Heterogeneous teams, by definition, are less tight knit and can be more difficult to motivate because the bonds that tie them are looser. Trust, mutual respect, and open debate have to be encouraged right from the start—an essential element of the social process of innovation. Done right, the advantage of diversity is that there are many different kinds of minds crackling all around a subject. A team of people who think alike may, in fact, be more cohesive and report less friction—but it is also less apt to come up with answers that move the needle.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“There also needs to be risk diversity. Some people tend to see barriers and assume this can’t work. They are blocked; their brain architecture is linear and intensely practical. High rollers do not worry so much about whether something can be done; they conceive impossible things and work backward. They may not know how to do it, and sometimes it can’t be done—but the journey toward finding that out can be valuable in itself. An innovation project needs both types of people. In the early stages, the wild things are particularly valuable; later, the practical folks come into their own.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“The composition of the team itself is another task that falls to the leader. The principle here is diversity—not in the sense of affirmative action, though a range of ethnic and social backgrounds can certainly be useful. The more important kind of diversity is intellectual, to draw in people with different ways of thinking. This needs to be done strategically. Throwing a bunch of people from different backgrounds into a room and calling it diversity misses the point, which is to bring varying kinds of expertise to bear that are related to the problem at hand. The team that reinvented Febreze started with just five people; in a video explaining their experience, they described themselves this way: an artist, an archaeologist, a scientist, a philosopher, and the head honcho. All were acknowledged experts in their fields; they brought a self-confidence and mutual respect to the endeavor that allowed the creative juices to flow.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Remember, it was Susan Arnold who not only released a dozen people to attend—an unmistakable sign of commitment—but also backed her people’s concept on the production line, to the tune of $1 million. And she let them get on with the job. Arnold knew what she wanted—a strategy to save the brand—but did not tell the team how to get there. This is the kind of structured flexibility (or perhaps flexible structure) that makes success more likely. The leader’s job, says Bennis, is to “inspire, communicate, and choose” the ideal is not to micromanage the project as it goes along, meddling as people try to work out problems, but to settle issues when the team has gone as far as it can (e.g., giving the go-ahead to the nesting bottles).”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“The project manager In a nutshell, think type A, with a sense of humor. Project managers are accountable for making sure that all the pieces come together. They need to be disciplined, attentive to detail, and able to organize complexity. They also need to be able to get the team to the finish line on time, and together; that is where the sense of humor is essential. A project manager who lacks social skills will be seen as a nag, not a leader, and provoke guerrilla resistance.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“When it comes to making innovation a nucleus of corporate life, creating a culture of teamwork inside the organization is crucial. You might argue that game-changing innovation is simply the by-product of highly connected, collaborative, and purpose-driven cultures.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“The fairly extreme example of Clay Street is a useful template for thinking about teamwork more broadly. It is a proven human phenomenon, from Edison’s New Jersey lab to SAMSUNG’s innovation center, that when you have a clear goal and you put together a team (ideally six to ten people) with the right blend of intellectual diversity and real expertise for an extended period, you create conditions that can lead to breakthrough ideas. Given the right social processes, such as trust, time, deep concentration, and total immersion in a well-defined problem, finding the right insights becomes likelier. This is something that can be done, improved, done again, and improved again. It is replicable.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Molding diverse experts into a functioning team, through total immersion in an innovation project, is a unique experience, substantially different from the way people participate in other types of teams. Total immersion involves every member of the team listening, often simultaneously, to different viewpoints about topics outside the expertise of any one individual, then going further and connecting and integrating those viewpoints to push forward imagination and thinking to create new insights until the whole team has a breakthrough.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“The common starting point is always the consumer,” says Sean Sauber, another Clay Street staffer. A team needs to find a way to let go of their own biases and know their target consumer inside and out. To encourage this, Clay Street creates innovative ways for teams to interact with consumers. “We look at the consumer in ways you never have before.” By encouraging teams to think and act like the consumer, not just talk about her, and defining a total consumer experience, Clay Street can figure out how to meet the consumer’s needs.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Although innovation cannot depend on hoping for “Eureka!” moments, Clay Street is all about building an atmosphere in which each team has one (and so far, they all have). “The room is a disaster, a mess; people are frustrated; and someone comes in and says this-and-that—it all comes together out of chaos, a novel and higher order always emerges,” is Kuehler’s scientific description of what happens. “There are always little ideas all along the way, and then comes a moment when they figure it out. It’s magical. You can’t exactly plan for it. You have to be awake, aware, and ready when it does.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Around week six, there is a period of chaos. There is no directive that says “chaos week,” but it inevitably happens around this time. The team, typically, isn’t quite sure where it is going, or how it is going to get there; it is fretful and sometimes fractious. They can’t believe they are going to be able to complete their task and can be irritated with both the process and the people running it. Kuehler calls this period “adolescence.” Like the real thing, it is blessedly brief.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Obviously, we want to have a lot of winners; but we also want to encourage a set of what I call “connecting behaviors”: If we get the behavior, the winners will follow. An innovation culture fosters openness, curiosity, networking with suppliers and customers, and the ability to say, “I have a problem I can’t solve. Can someone help?” That is the attitude that both describes an innovation culture and helps to create one. It is one in which people want to go above and beyond the norm because they have a sense of mission. To do that, you need the social mechanisms and tools to mold diverse experts into highly functioning teams.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“But why, if teamwork exists, does it often fail to result in organic revenue growth and profits on a consistent basis? The reason is that, in actual practice, collaboration and teamwork are limited to the silo or function where people spend their workdays. Innovation requires something different—collaboration and teamwork across silos and inclusion of people from outside the organization. That means leaders have to think and act differently for innovation to happen. Leaders set the pace by establishing and modeling the values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors conducive to innovation.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

“Yes, innovation can be risky, but not innovating is much riskier. It is, in fact, a guarantee of failure. As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter put it, companies that resist change are “standing on ground that is crumbling beneath their feet.” That has always been true; what is different is that the ground is shifting faster than ever.”
― A.G. Lafley, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation