“Essential reading in an age of disruption.”
David Reay, Senior Vice President, Sony Music Entertainment
“This is an invaluable step-by-step guide to sparking, scaling and sustaining a culture of bold innovation.”
Ash Tailor, Global Brand & Marketing Director at LEGOLAND
“Packed full of practical tips to boost your company's lifespan.”
Ash Schofield, CEO, giffgaff
“At a game company like Electronic Arts, we're no strangers to zombies - both in the games we produce and in our daily battles against the many disruptive forces trying to make us obsolete. It's the same everywhere. Most leaders struggle to get the innovation performance they need. This is the practical playbook they've been waiting for.”
Andy Billings, Vice President Profitable Creativity, Electronic Arts
“A book of some brilliance. Everyone with an interest in pursuing sustainable, profitable relevance should read it. Compelling, fiendishly clever and full of practical ideas and tools delivered with great skill. The implications for business are vast!”
Jo Wade, Specialist Account Manager, Oncology, Pfizer UK
“In business a lot is talked about entrepreneurial spirit without giving it the oxygen to develop and thrive. Very often the difficulty is where to start. Be Less Zombie is an excellent and practical guide for any leaders trying to turn on higher levels of innovation in their organisation.”
Denis O' Flynn, former Managing Director, Pernod Ricard UK
“This book is packed with vital knowledge and essential strategies that you can adopt and apply immediately to help create an innovation mindset within any team or organisation. Written in an engaging and impactful way it puts theories into practice, sharing new tools and insights based on a decade of innovation experiments conducted inside Fortune 500 companies of all shapes and sizes.”
Chris Parles, Senior Fellow and Programme Director of Music & Branding at University for the Creative Arts Business School
“Innovation begins and ends with the right leadership and culture. It's so refreshing to see more of the innovation ‘how' codified with practical examples and tools.”
Gareth Hussey, Chief Marketing Officer, Tesco Mobile
“The definitive leadership guide to simplifying, mobilising and humanising innovation.”
Teresa Kotlicka, People & Culture, Sony Music Entertainment
“In the struggle all organisations face to drive innovation, this book defines the rallying cry you need to bring everyone together and provides an excellent handbook with the essential tools to make it happen.”
Alan W. Brown, Professor in Digital Economy, University of Exeter, UK
“An indispensable read that unashamedly kicks wide-open the door to real-world innovation. Engaging, accessible and with lots of invaluable tips and insights for leaders at all levels on how to create a culture and climate in which innovation thrives. A great wake-up call for all zombies … now there are no excuses!”
David Riley, Business Psychologist
“Be Less Zombie is a practical guide for equipping leaders and managers trying to turn on higher levels of innovation in their business.”
Samantha Seal, Talent Strategist and Director, on the wing Ltd.
“A leader's lifeline for evoking, embedding and living an innovation culture.”
Laura Ellis, Head of Talent Management, EMEA, Ogilvy
“A must-read for anyone – in any business sector, at any career level – who is passionate about the serious business of innovation. A practical guide to curating a culture of innovation and navigating against the headwinds of organisational status quo.”
Simon Collins, Senior Vice President, Mastercard
“At last a book that gives permission to create, collaborate and innovate. Elvin Turner intelligently challenges the status quo with a sprinkling of very good humour. Essential reading.”
Lee Widdows, Associate Head of Fashion, University for the Creative Arts
“Be Less Zombie is more than a book, it is a toolkit for any senior executive who wants to drive positive change in their business. Turner gives you everything you need to create and deliver your own innovation agenda within the limits of your budget and ideas.”
Ben Sullivan, UK/IRL Managing Director, bibliotheca
This edition first published 2020
© 2020 Elvin Turner.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Turner, Elvin, author.
Title: Be less zombie : how great companies create dynamic innovation, fearless leadership and passionate people / Elvin Turner.
Description: [Hoboken, NJ] : Wiley-Capstone, 2020. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019057699 (print) | LCCN 2019057700 (ebook) | ISBN 9780857088208 (paperback) | ISBN 9780857088246 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9780857088239 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Organizational change. | Leadership.
Classification: LCC HD58.8 .T876 2020 (print) | LCC HD58.8 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/063—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057699
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057700
Cover concept: Jacqueline Turner
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Images: Zombies © Big_Ryan/Getty Images, Collection of people © Imagewell/Shutterstock, Business women © Nevena Radonja/Shutterstock, Business man © msan10/Getty Images
For Jesus
Elvin Turner is an award-winning leadership advisor and associate professor of innovation, entrepreneurship and marketing.
Elvin has coached hundreds of innovation and performance programmes around the world, helping leaders, managers and teams overcome the many barriers that they face when trying to develop breakthrough ideas and turn them into action.
Elvin's work spans consulting, coaching and facilitation in the areas of strategy, innovation and leadership development.
His clients include some of the world's leading organisations in the financial, technology, music, pharmaceutical, drinks and publishing industries. His experience extends from working with new and disruptive technology start-ups, through to seasoned leadership teams inside conservative, global institutions.
This book has been a collaboration with many people. I'm so thankful to everyone who has been on the ride and especially want to call out the following people:
Richard Johnston, my ever-patient and ingenious collaborator.
Jean Gomes, who set me off on the innovation track many years ago.
Simon Pratt for his continuous flow of best-selling author insight, encouragement, friendship and spiritual bulldoggedness.
Nigel Wilkinson for keeping my hands held up.
Carol Herzig for encouragement and wisdom.
Phil Tennant for helping me realise that this book was actually two books (watch this space!)
Lionel Medley for reminding me about nerds.
Tony Ryce-Kelly for talking some sense into me on many occasions.
Mark Swain, Emily Charles and Mary Cole at Henley Business School for taking the first risk with the Unicorns vs Zombies programme.
Jim Sears and Dr Ben Shenoy for insightful course corrections.
Mel Toms for being my school-run sounding board.
All who contributed to the content of the book, in order of appearance: Ben Sullivan, Managing Director, Bibliotheca UK; Andy Billings, Vice President of Profitable Creativity at Electronic Arts; Mark Bjornsgaard of System-Two; Professor Alan Brown of Exeter University; Lee Widdows, Associate Head of School (Fashion/Fashion Business) at the University of the Creative Arts; Chris Parles, Programme Director Music and Branding at the University of Creative Arts; Ashley Schofield, CEO of giffgaff; Gemma Metheringham, Creative Director of Label/Mix; Matt Madden, author of 99 Ways to Tell a Story; Denis O'Flynn, former Managing Director of Pernod Ricard UK; Bridget Gardner, Head of Employee Capability, Pernod Ricard UK; Patrick Venning of Breakwater Marketing; Rafael Orta, Chief Product Officer at moneysupermarket.com; Harvey Wade, Managing Director of Innovate 21; Alex Osterwalder, Co-founder of Strategyzer; David Reay, Senior Vice President at Sony Music Entertainment; Teresa Kotlicka, talent and culture advisor at Sony Music Entertainment; Emily Bollon, Founder of Motivation by Music; Jo Twistleton; Becky Allen, President of Decca Records; Dr Alice Cook; Simon Walsh; Bob Dickman; Malcolm Hassan; David Riley; Jennifer Robison of Gallup; and Fiona Conway, Director of Retail Customer Operations at Santander Bank.
The many experts and pioneers who have directly and indirectly influenced the content of this book and direction of my thinking, including Alan Klement, Arthur Burk, Eric Ries, Professor Clay Christensen, Bill Johnson, Steve Blank, Kathy Sierra, Professor Rita McGrath, Doug Sundheim and Robert Quinn.
The continual cry of members of Guildford Community Church: ‘There's more!’
The editorial and production teams at Wiley.
And my incredible family: Jackie, for your endless sparkle; Daisy, for your inspirational cake fuel; Luke for your chirpy banter; and Leilani for your ‘home-from-school’ hugs.
Thank you all, so much.
Elvin Turner
© Richard Johnston.
It was a perfect day to meet zombies.
Inside the idyllic rural campus of England's prestigious Henley Business School, 40 executives were jostling for position along a line that I had marked out on the floor:
‘More unicorn’ at one end, a term that's come to mean a hot, most-wanted, $1bn innovation powerhouse.
‘More zombie’ at the other, meaning a decaying monolith staggering into the future.
The task: Stand in the place on that spectrum that best describes your organisation.
There were a lot of self-declared zombies out that day.
But the truth is there are a lot of zombies out every day. Research shows that company lifespans are shrinking fast.1 But it's not just companies. The experience of working inside an off-kilter company can be deadly for the people inside, too. Simply being at work is now the fifth biggest killer in the United States because of the illnesses that stem from rising workplace stress.2
So what's driving this zombie advance?
Imagine standing on the edge of a chasm that is widening before your eyes. Your side of the chasm is crumbling fast. Getting to the other side is your only chance of survival. There is a rope in your hand that you could use to swing across. But fear stops you from jumping and keeps you rooted to the spot, gripping on to that rope for dear life. Meanwhile, the ground crumbles beneath your feet. The wider the chasm yawns, the riskier the swing, the greater the fear, the less likely that you'll leap.
A little Indiana Jones, maybe. But that ‘holding on’ instinct, that false sense of security of hanging on to what we know, sets off a chain reaction of subtle and painful demise inside many organisations: declining margins; efficiency initiatives that mean more work for fewer people; an exhausted and disengaged workforce that is continually putting out fires; sales teams who would rather lead with discounts than push the new, longer lead-time solutions; and less appetite and resourcing for innovation which is ultimately what gets us across the chasm.
Over the last 25 years I've seen variations of this scenario play out inside companies of all shapes and sizes. But I've also observed two factors that can make a huge difference to the inevitability of innovation and high performance showing up:
We get what we measure, and we measure what we value. So what are we overvaluing that opens the doors to zombieism?
In most companies, a minor business model tremor creates a standard, anxiety-driven knee-jerk response: ‘Grab the cash while you can.’
‘The prevailing mindset inside most boardrooms is “We love money,”’ says Ben Sullivan, Managing Director of bibliotheca UK, a library technology company. ‘It's too easy to say “yes” to this quarter's numbers at the expense of developing the ideas that the future needs. No-one ever frames it in such black-and-white terms, but deep down, the dopamine hit of a short-term cash injection usually feels too good to resist.’
Yet the twenty-first-century rate of change means that business model tremors are now an everyday occurrence. The short-term, cash-grabbing response is often triggered by the anxiety of having nothing in the new product pipeline. And it is anxiety's sibling, fear, that stops companies from backing the more risky ideas that the future pipelines need. It's a circular paradox resulting in companies that are literally scaring themselves to death.
Organisations need to put in place counterbalances to resist the short-term, control freakism that shuts down any appetite for innovation that ventures beyond the status quo.
‘Incremental improvement guarantees obsolescence over time, especially in fast changing industries,’ says Joi Ito, the former Director of the MIT Media Lab.
We need some new dials and needles in our corporate dashboards. Ones that compel us to make the decisions that our future needs us to make today; those specifically relating to better performance around innovation and change.
‘Don't tell me why, don't tell me what, just tell me how to get innovation moving in this place,’ is how I was once greeted by a frustrated CEO who was smarting from a recent, failed innovation initiative.
It's the underlying narrative inside most organisations that I meet. More specifically, whilst organisations tend to want more overall innovation, their greatest need is a bigger bag of bolder ideas that could become tomorrow's cash cows. So where are they hiding?
Well, if we define culture as ‘what is ordinary’, we can't realistically expect many ‘extraordinary’ ideas to emerge and thrive from business-as-usual operations. ‘Extraordinary’ creates an understandably allergic reaction from the status quo. It's a life form likely to mess with our repeatable, predictable ways of working.
(An interesting anagram of Be Less Zombie is ‘blob seizes me’. It's how I imagine a bold idea feels when it encounters corporate bureaucracy.)
It's not surprising that the bold ideas cupboard is pretty empty in most organisations.
Hmmm…Looks like we'll need to discount our way out of this one again, Winston.
Innovation has a reputation for being a black art, but it's really not. Yet because so few companies have designed a deliberate system for repeatable innovation, its ad hoc nature causes it to fail, or at best deliver more of the same.
After coaching hundreds of innovation projects around the world and mixed with my own research and that of other experts, I've discovered that bolder innovation becomes a more inevitable and repeatable outcome when teams and organisations focus on six areas, each of which has a simple ‘turn-on’ path.
Turn It On framework © Elvin Turner
Innovation Strategy Ad hoc innovators tend to be continually frustrated. A clear innovation strategy, on the other hand, galvanises the whole business behind it.
Process A clear, efficient and effective innovation process that everyone understands. Give everyone a roadmap for their ideas.
Capabilities Deliberately acquiring and developing the capabilities needed to deliver today whilst discovering and designing tomorrow.
Resourcing Dynamically allocating sufficient and appropriate resources to incremental and disruptive growth initiatives. With the right process in place, this often results in significantly reduced resource wastage in innovation.
Culture Calibrating the culture and climate to the innovation outcome, rather than one-blob-fits-all. Incremental ideas are generally tweaks, working with relatively well-known cause and effect dynamics. It's predictable and feels safe, so metrics around certainty of outcome are appropriate. Bold ideas, on the other hand, have high failure rates, so they need a context which gives them a higher chance of making it out of the building alive than status quo operations usually afford.
Leadership Equipping and incentivising senior managers to orchestrate appropriate levels of innovation and entrepreneurship.
When these six elements combine to become a deliberate innovation system, companies give themselves the greatest possible chance of thriving today and showing up in the future.
Turn it on, then turn it up My aim with this book is to help you succeed where most companies fail: to turn on innovation and to keep it turned on with proven tools that you can tailor for your context. Establish foundations, get some quick wins, build confidence…and then turn up the scale and sophistication as and when you need them.
What's more, every organisation is unique. Whilst the tools I'm sharing are universally applicable, beyond a certain point in your journey towards greater innovation performance, only you can know what's right for your specific context. This book helps you turn on innovation, but beyond a certain point only you can turn it up.
What works for Apple is unlikely to work in exactly the same way for you. Discovering and developing your unique innovation DNA is a pathway towards competitive advantage that few companies deliberately pursue.
Not for Geeks Finally, this is not a book for innovation geeks. It's for everyday business people who need practical tools, ideas, workshop formats and coaching tips to turn on innovation. So I've deliberately written this in short, sharp chapters with practical advice that you can try out immediately. (Sorry fellow geeks, not much innovation jargon in here – I hope.)
This book is based on what I've learned from companies that are recalibrating themselves to pursue sustainable, profitable relevance.
They are creating healthier organisations, happier people and more hopeful futures.
They are being less zombie.
Innovation is an argument inside most companies – frail, new ideas versus the overwhelming power of the status quo. An innovation strategy helps create an environment where new ideas can emerge and thrive. It is the single-most important way to build and sustain innovation performance. And it doesn't have to be difficult.
Why innovation doesn't happen without a deliberate leadership choice.
Innovation is an argument that most companies lose.
Why? Because usually they are far too casual about it.
Innovation demands change in the status quo. And typically, the greater the change, the bigger the argument.
So, when companies aren't deliberate enough about innovation, efforts evaporate quickly: business-as-usual is too busy and too powerful to make room for upstart, inconvenient, unproven, resource-hungry ideas. It's a fight that is always rigged.
The transition from a casual ‘dating’ mentality with innovation to a strategic always-on commitment is what sets apart the innovation powerhouses that we read about: Amazon, Google, Pixar, Netflix, Corning, Tesla and the like.
In these companies, innovation is a deliberate, never-ending pursuit. It is strategically aligned, deeply embedded, appropriately resourced, and meaningfully rewarded across the organisation. And anyone can do it.
© Richard Johnston.
Innovation has to be as intentional as any other function in the business. A company will usually have a sales strategy, finance strategy, marketing strategy, IT strategy and HR strategy…but rarely a meaningful innovation strategy. Of course, each function is supposed to layer on some innovation as part of its own strategy; but the truth is that it's rarely enough. At best, it delivers incremental levels of innovation across the organisation.
The bottom line is inescapable. If you need more innovation (especially more disruptive innovation) you must have a dedicated innovation strategy. But it doesn't need to be complex.
How do you create an innovation strategy that galvanises a sustainable higher performance state?
Whilst every innovation strategy will be subtly different, all will benefit from a focus on two foundational elements:
This the ‘why’ of innovation and covers the strategic ‘needles’ that innovation needs to move. It also includes understanding our preparedness for the changes that are approaching from the future:
This is the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of innovation: With the strategic drivers in mind, how should we organise and mobilise innovation to turn the right ideas into new value? This falls into five broad categories:
Aligning these areas allows a company to answer the question that an innovation strategy is designed to answer: ‘To what extent are we creating the conditions where bold ideas can emerge and develop?’
Turn It On framework © Elvin Turner
Throughout the book, we'll be looking at how to practically ‘turn on’ each of these areas. We'll also be looking at approaches to governance that keep innovation moving on an even keel.
Whilst every innovation strategy will benefit from a focus on these areas, bear in mind that every company's approach will be subtly different. The ‘perfect’ innovation strategy is the one that most powerfully supports your unique culture, direction and context.
So let's get started with a brief look at what is often the sink-or-swim issue for sustainable innovation: alignment to corporate strategy.
How alignment with strategy creates powerful and sustainable innovation momentum.
According to research,1 54% of companies struggle to align their business and innovation strategies. That's a lot of ideas potentially ‘flying blind’, and my experience is that when they do, most crash and burn.
When an idea can't point to a meaningful strategic landing strip, turbulence is inevitable.
Alignment with strategic goals makes innovation sustainable. It simultaneously connects innovation with hard commercial outcomes and provides the motivation for a crucial chain reaction to take place behind it. If innovation becomes the means by which we will meet our numbers, suddenly the resources, processes, culture required rise up the list of leadership priorities.
Alignment with strategy pulls the whole innovation system forward. And this is especially important when allocating and defending the resources required for strategic creativity which often get cut during leaner times.
But first, a reality check. Many executives that I meet coyly admit that their company doesn't actually have a strategy. Instead they have a revenue objective and a 12-month plan that serves as the strategy. This makes alignment with impactful, sustainable innovation strategy tricky.
But no strategy doesn't mean you can't make progress with innovation. In fact, often, a corporate strategy is inadvertently born during the process of developing an innovation strategy. The conversations force a point of view about the most important factors that define a company's future.
So, if you're light on strategy, jump to Chapter 13, ‘Quick-Start Innovation Strategy Workshop’, for a pragmatic starting point.
If your company does have a strategy, hopefully it will include some clear points of view on:
In most contexts, the strategy demands growth in scale and impact. Often that growth exceeds what can be achieved by the status quo business and operating models.
But it's not always a growth issue. Often strategy requires operational change provoked by shifts in underlying industry dynamics that have varying degrees of do-or-die significance.
The reality for most companies is a combination of both – growth amidst change.
Either way, when the status quo model won't quite cut it, success becomes impossible without innovation. The greater the stretch, or the more turbulent the market, the greater the requirement for more transformational levels of innovation.
That gap between the destination that the strategy demands, and the status quo future trajectory, is essentially what informs the innovation strategy.
Inside the gap will be a mixed economy of needs, ranging from incremental, continuous improvements through to transformational shifts that deliver exponential impact.
The role of the innovation strategy is to assess the strategy gap and co-ordinate an appropriate portfolio of programmes, projects and experiments that will close that gap.
© Elvin Turner
There are no right answers on how to approach this; every company will develop their own process that is aligned to their individual strategy-setting cycle. Throughout this book I'll be suggesting approaches that can help, but the most important thing is establishing the connection: making it explicitly clear how all innovation activity directly contributes to delivering the strategy.
That makes good financial sense (so that we're not allocating scarce resources to too many ‘moonshots’) but it also makes good strategic sense: innovation is too easy to sideline in both good times (through complacency) and bad (through cost-cutting). When that happens, we become strategically vulnerable.
One of the most effective ways of maintaining the connection between strategy and innovation is to create a financial dependency, which is the focus of the next chapter.
Metrics that make innovation a commercial inevitability.
Many innovation strategies are dead within 12 months. The reason? ‘Show me the money.’
Rule 101: Innovation strategy ultimately must deliver more money somehow, somewhere, sometime soon. If it doesn't, the status quo will quickly discredit and overrun it.
Genial innovation strategies often stumble because they spark too many initiatives that have slow-burn fuses or are commercially naive. We'll look a little later at how to strike the right balance.
But whatever your balance, executive patience will wear thin if financial returns aren't appearing on the horizon before long. Smart executives use this to their advantage. They design financial targets that make innovation an inevitable outcome.
3M uses a method that fits handily onto a Post-it® note, one of its 55,000 products: ‘30% of each division's sales must come from products less than four years old.’ Sales targets affect bonuses and so everyone pays attention.
It's a rough gauge but useful because it marries financial growth with customer-focused innovation. If new products don't create meaningful customer progress, they won't deliver sustainable revenue. That helps avoid the temptation to do innovation for innovation's sake too, a common problem in many companies.
The right ratio of sales from new initiatives also helps mitigate against a dangerous overemphasis on incremental innovation.
I once knew of a company that pitched too low. It demanded that 10% of revenues came from products that didn't exist 12 months ago. If you are an unstoppable disruptive innovation machine with a product range that is simple to reinvent rapidly, awesome. Go for it.
But the reality is that this kind of focus will mostly lead to a lot of thin repackaging of existing products that are called ‘new’.
In a mature industry where you're continually looking for new forms of growth, that kind of innovation is likely to be an important part of the marketing innovation mix. And in the short term it can work. But beware of the giddy feeling of succeeding in the area of low-hanging fruit at the expense of investing in long-term growth.
So, over to you. Looking forward, what renewal rate would ensure that innovation is focused on delivering the right kinds of growth? Only you can decide and it may vary according to business unit. A range of factors can influence this, including:
Depending on your company's circumstances, I would suggest beginning with a moderate degree of stretch. Establish the cause-and-effect principle across the company, experiment with different ratios in different areas, and work towards something that is most likely to deliver ongoing profitable relevance.
It's a great question for an executive off-site. What cause-and-effect relationship between revenue and innovation would deliver the healthiest future for us?
It's one of the most important conversations an executive team can have. And, perhaps most practically, it's a financial metric that directly correlates to bonuses. A strong motivator for keeping innovation front-of-mind in the boardroom.
Creating a laser focus on the innovation that matters most.
Creating a cause-and-effect relationship between revenues and innovation is a powerful galvanising force.
But there is a lesser-known relationship that has equal potency. It de-risks innovation, creates a focus on what matters most, and reveals the most profitable areas of creative pursuit.
It is the specific amount of progress that customers make in their lives because of you.
What does that mean? I'll be covering this in much more detail in Part Two: Turning on a Fast-Track Innovation Process. But for now, think about these questions:
Five years?! Who can predict customer churn, retention and growth levels across that time frame?
‘We're doing well, but our whole company could unwind within three years,’ a senior executive of a 30,000-employee company once told me. This was a hot, born-digital brand, well-versed in agile transformation principles.
But what if you could predict what will matter most to customers? You'd be looking into the future and investing in innovation with greater certainty and at lower risk.
Using techniques that I'll describe later, it is possible to decode the ‘units of progress’ that are likely to matter most to your customers, and that actually change very slowly – often only incrementally nudging over decades.
‘Computer games are largely similar to what they were 30 years ago,’ says Andy Billings, Vice President of Profitable Creativity at Electronic Arts, the world's largest video game company. Quite a statement in an industry with a reputation for fast and furious innovation.
Looking at the historical rates of customer progress, this information can help leaders predict the approximate rates of increased progress that they will need to match in the future to stay relevant.
Aligning innovation investments to a likely trajectory of customer progress gives leaders some choices to make around competitive advantage. Rather than pitching for the minimum rate of progress with incremental innovation, they can choose to aim higher and beat the progress curve that the industry will likely trend towards.
Rate of customer progress is an approximate and subtle metric. It's not a magic formula, nor will it deliver 100% certainty. But it's another important tool to keep innovation aligned with what matters most to customers, and to avoid the temptation to pursue ideas that are born fizzy but quickly go flat.
After reading the chapters in Part Two, be intentional about developing specific progress metrics to guide your innovation strategy.