Amy J. Radin - The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company

As a fellow change maker, Ive long admired Amy Radins impact and resilience. In The Change Makers Playbook, she offers a practical guide to getting to the other side of change in a way that creates value and meaning. An important resource for anyone looking to innovate better.

Beth Comstock, author of Imagine It Forward and former Vice Chair, GE

What businesses need today is change makers: driven leaders who turn market disruption into innovation opportunities, creating real impact and value. If youre up for this, Amy Radins fearlessly focused and practical book is your next must-read.

David Rogers, Columbia Business School faculty and best-selling author of The Digital Transformation Playbook

Seek. Seed. Scale. Amy Radins formula for innovation is uncommonly clear. The true lesson woven throughout the book is that it all begins and ends with culture, an important lesson for organizations of every size.

Ajay Banga, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mastercard

Innovation is clearly a MUST but never comes easily. Thanks to The Change Makers Playbook, we now have a practical, actionable guide to help tackle the non-negotiable task of delivering value through innovation.

Emma Weisberg, Head of Global Business Marketing, Waze

This book has become my teams manifesto. Radin inspires you to keep the momentum while laying out the steps to move through the inevitable resistance youll face. This is the book for teams with a bold agenda.

Dave Edelman, Chief Marketing Officer, Aetna

An indispensable guide for marketers and those who want to truly deliver better products and experiences for their customers, not just talk about it. In her accessible and relatable way, Radin lays out the path for finding and delivering innovation essential to brand impact.

Lewis Gersh, Founder and CEO, PebblePost

So much of innovation focuses on developing and testing breakthrough ideas. Yet, the vast majority of these ideas fail to be adopted. Amy Radin not only focuses on the generation of innovative ideas (seeking), but also the process of shepherding those ideas through organizational hurdles (seeding), and become drivers of real organizational performance (scaling). Executives who find themselves in an increasingly fast-paced and unpredictable world would be well advised to seek counsel in The Change Makers Playbook.

Michael Wade, Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation, Professor of Innovation and Strategy, IMD

Radins Seek, Seed, Scale framework should be in the workspace of any leader who wants to create sustainable franchises and shape the future (and not be undone by the forces at play in todays world).

Ashok Vaswani, CEO, Barclays UK

For at least a dozen years before I finally met her, I heard rumors of Amy Radin. As a partner at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, where we pioneered the idea of digital strategy in the mid-1990s, I made it my business to know as many leading innovators as possible, and Amys name kept surfacing among my partners because of the work she was doing, first at Citigroup and then at E*Trade.

Before joining Diamond, I spent seventeen years majoring in innovation as an editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal, mostly covering technology. My first book, Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, a best seller about IBMs near-death experience, which I published in 1993, hit what has become the prime innovation theme for me and for much of the business world ever since: What happens when a major company doesnt adapt quickly enough to step-changes in digital technology? My partners and I later explored that theme at Diamond, where we helped clients go on the offensive by unleashing killer apps. We struck a nerve directly enough that Context, the small-circulation magazine I developed and edited for Diamond, was a finalist in 2000 for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

The focus on separating innovation winners from losers persisted when I left Diamond and went out on my own, pursuing the mantra, Smart people, interesting projects. Those people and projects eventually connected me with Amy.

Jim Collins has done great research into what drives corporate successes for his books Built to Last and Good to Great, but I realized around 2005 that no one had taken a systematic look at failures. And you have to understand both sides of the equation, right? You not only have to know what to do; you have to see where the land mines are, to understand what not to do. Chunka Mui and I got our old friends at Diamond to lend us twenty researchers over the course of two years to look at 2,500 failures. We turned the research into a book, Billion Dollar Lessons: How to Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, which drew rave reviews, including from the WSJ. Amid all the great research (really... and its still in print), the fundamental insight of the book was that nearly half of the failures we studied stemmed from ideas that were obviously flawed, but that werent blocked because internal dynamics glossed over the problems. What was needed was a devils advocate who would make sure that all assumptions were brought to the surface and that all uncomfortable questions were asked. That insight led us to work with some of the worlds top strategists, and to several fascinating consulting engagements with Chunka, as the Devils Advocate Group. Eventually, the smart people and interesting projects mantra brought me to insurance, one of the four areas that we identified a few years ago as still virgin territory for digital disruption. (The others were government, higher education, and medicine.)

By this point, Amy had made her way to insurance, too, as chief marketing officer for AXA, following her senior operating role at Citi and innovation role at E*Trade. At a time when insurance had yet to catch the insurtech fever that has taken hold over the past couple of years, she shone as one of the very few lights in the firmament. I had become the editor-in-chief of Insurance Thought Leadership, a startup publishing platform trying to drive innovation in risk management and insurance, and I decided I finally had to meet Amy. She graciously agreed, and, over coffee at the Grand Hyatt in New York City, we had a meeting of the minds. Chunka and I had summarized our approach to innovation as Think big, start small, and learn fast. Amy had landed in a similar spot (with the terms Seeking, Seeding, and Scaling, as youll see in this book). Crucially, she also supplements her thinking with a huge amount of practical experience, actually getting stuff done inside big organizations. As a result, she understands that, as much as we might wish otherwise, innovation isnt linear; the process needs to jump, double back, do loop-the-loops, iterate, repeat, whatever... but within strict enough parameters that you stay focused on the goal and eventually get there.

Amy agreed to become part of the ITL Advisory Board, so Ive had the excuse to pick her brain for more than three years now, and to watch as she has expanded her repertoire considerably by investing in and advising many startups, beyond mine. She was more than worth the wait.

She is exceptionally smart and insightful and down-to-earth. I developed a world-class B.S. detector during my days at the WSJ, and I promise that Amy is as straightforward as they come. Im delighted that shes chosen to share her experience and her insights more broadly in this book. I think youll learn a lot. I certainly did.