Paolo Review
A success recipe for both entrepreneurs and managers
The reason why I cite this book is because it does have two sections that are of interest to those who are pursuing the development of intrinsically new products and more broadly are trying to substantially innovate within their companies.
a) The book has a section dedicated on how to build relationships for success and how to build a culture of innovation
b) An entire chapter is dedicated to the concept of resilience and describes many useful examples and recipes that are very suited for innovation managers.
Innovation requires horizontal and lean organizations. R&D driven products like AI products are even more dependent on the human factor than ordinary products. Kim Perell offers a great 360 degrees view on how important are relationships to execute a project. Most importantly she shares several insights of her experience. Some that I find worth discussing in this context are:
a) Letting people expressing their talent and own their projects instead than forcing a top-down approach. This is so crucial when scientists are involved in a process.
- b) The second crucial insight is for a manager to understand that if he is looking to go from A to B and wanted to do it with a certain methodology, there is actually no arm to let teamwork with their own methodology. At the end of the day what matters is to get to B not so much which method or path is taken. Moreover letting the team deciding on the method may several times result in a better overall result than what it could have been achieved following the strict prescriptions for a single manager.
Innovation requires also persistence and resilience; the books is great in this area as it both illustrates the personal challenges that the author faced and overcame and also gives recipes to build resilience.
One insight above all is that often we picture in our mind the worst-case scenario and visualize it as the most likely outcome. However, the contrary is quite the truth, that is the worst-case scenario is hardly the final outcome.
I recommend this book to both entrepreneurs and innovation/product managers that are guaranteed to face challenges if they want to do anything of meaning in this world.
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