Books by Vijay Govindarajan

How to Innovate and ExecuteLeaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing businessone that is still thrivingwhile dramatically reinventing it? How do you envision a change in your current business model before a crisis forces you to abandon it?Innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan expands the leaders innovation tool kit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organizations energy, time, and resourcesin balanced measureacross what he calls the three boxes: Box 1: The presentManage the core business at peak profitability Box 2: The pastAbandon ideas, practices, and attitudes that could inhibit innovation Box 3: The futureConvert breakthrough ideas into new products and businessesThe three-box framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring these different sets of behaviors and activities across all levels of the organization. Supported with rich company examplesGE, Mahindra & Mahindra, Hasbro, IBM, United Rentals, and Tata Consultancy Servicesand testimonies of leaders who have successfully used this framework, this book solves once and for all the practical dilemma of how to align an organization on the critical but competing demands of innovation.

In their first book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators, the authors provided a better model for executing disruptive innovation. They laid out a three-part plan for launching high-risk/high-reward innovation efforts: (1) borrow assets from the existing firms, (2) unlearn and unload certain processes and systems that do not serve the new entity, and (3) learn and build all new capabilities and skills.In their study of the Ten Rules in action, Govindarajan and Trimble observed many other kinds of innovation that were less risky but still critical to the company's ongoing success. In case after case, senior executives expected leaders of innovation initiatives to grapple with forces of resistence, namely incentives to keep doing what the company has always done--rather than develop new competence and knowledge. But where to begin?In this book, the authors argue that the most successful everyday innovators break down the process into six manageable steps:1. Divide the labor2. Assemble the dedicated team3. Manage the partnership4. Formalize the experiment5. Break down the hypothesis6. Seek the truth.The Other Side of Innovation codifies this staged approach in a variety of contexts. It delivers a proven step-by-step guide to executing (launching, managing, and measuring) more modest but necessary innovations within large firms without disrupting their bread-and-butter business.