Jeff Degraff - Innovation You: Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved

Innovation You is a work of nonfiction.
Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2011 by Jeff DeGraff

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeGraff, Jeffrey Thomas.
Innovation you : four steps to becoming new and improved / Jeff DeGraff.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-53070-7
1. Self-actualization (Psychology) 2. Creative ability. 3. Change (Psychology)
4. Career changes. I. Title.
BF637.S4D435 2011
158.1dc23 2011017710

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Tom McKeveny
Jacket photograph: Lisa Dunlap/courtesy Detroit Public Television

v3.1

AppendixInstructions for the Innovation You
Assessment

One day it hits you: The game has changed. What always worked for you before, professionally or personally, no longer gets results. Maybe you lose a job or reach the end of a long relationship and you realize: Im done herebut this could be my chance for something better. Maybe you hold on to that job, or meet your commitments to family, friends, and community, but underneath your success you feel: This isnt enough. Not anymore, not at this time of my life. At such moments, you know that both the game and you must change, and theres only one way forward: Innovate. Make it new. Make you new.

For so many people I meet, that moment has arrived. I think of Teri, a high school math teacher who had always secretly dreamed of becoming a baker. In the same week, she lost her teaching job to budget cuts and heard about a six-month sublease on a storefront downtown with good baking ovens. Her savings would just cover it. It was a big risk for her, but then again, this was what shed always wanted. She asked me: Should I go for my dream?

Then there was Vago, who ran a successful financial advisory practice. Hed built his company by providing a unique service for high-net-worth investors, and as it grew he handpicked a circle of disciples who learned to do what he did. As the company expanded, each of the members of that circle hired his or her own circle. In theory, this meant that everyone in the company could provide the same excellent approach that Vago had first pioneered, but in recent years it had been more like photocopying the photocopy of a photocopy: The lines blurred and the quality was lost. Vago had begun to worry that his companys star was fading and that his best days were behind him. Was there a way to get back to the excitement and the success hed known before?

Vago and Teri were in very different situations, but their basic life situation was the same: Their old approaches had stopped working and they were both trying to do something new. They had to do something they hadnt done before in a way they hadnt done it. And thats what it means to innovate. You dont know exactly where youre going, you dont know how to drive this kind of car, and you need to get there soon.

So how do you learn to innovate? These days, people from all walks of life come to me for individual guidance. Who am I? Why should you trust me to help renew and improve your life? I am one of the leading innovation experts youve never heard of until now. I have been called the Dean of Innovation for my work with hundreds of the most recognized firms in the world, including American Airlines, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Pfizer, and Toyota, and my business writings are found in the playbooks for innovation programs at Thomson-Reuters, Johnson & Johnson, and other industry leaders. I headline conferences for everyone from Visa to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Telemundo. Im a top-rated professor at the prestigious Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and founder of the Innovatrium, a creativity lab where executives come from around the world to learn our proven scientific method and to jump-start innovation for corporate reinvention and growth.

Increasingly, Ive found that my clients at the Innovatrium and my speaking audiences around the world are coming to me with something new: personal stories. And behind every story is the same urgent question: Jeff, you work with companies that continue to innovate, grow, and thrive, no matter how bad the weather gets out there. How can we do what they do?

How do you innovate you?

In this book, I show how its done. Think of Innovation You as the key to your own personal Innovatrium, a private creativity lab where you will learn my four-step model for restoring growth and remaking your life. Here, I draw on twenty-five years of success with corporations of every kind, some in crisis, some broadening their ambitions, to show you how to innovate better so you can grow to reach your own goalswhether personal or professional.

This book is broken down into four sections, corresponding to the four steps our corporate clients take at the Innovatrium. Step I, Rethink Innovation shows you the opportunities to inject creativity into every aspect of your life. Step II, Revise Your Approach with Prismatic Thinking, explains the four most common approaches to innovation, as established in a model of corporate growth that I codeveloped for business use, and that has become one of the most influential theories of organizational culture and competency. In this book, Ive adapted that method for individuals. By making use of this tool, you will come to recognize which of these four approaches you commonly use to create value in your life, and what you could be doing if you understood the full range of your possibilities. In Step III, Run Your Experiments you learn to implement your freshly revised approach in the cycle of innovation. And in Step IV, See the Whole Journey, you discover how ongoing success, whether for an individual or for a multinational corporation, depends on understanding and working with innovations long-term cycles.

Guided by Innovation You, you will:

• Discover the mistaken assumptions that hold even creative people back.
• Recognize the approach to innovation you rely on without thinking, and learn to craft a more effective approach to better reach your goalseven as conditions change around you.
• Identify practical methods for setting meaningful goals, overcoming resistance from yourself or those around you, and turning setbacks into vital discoveries.
• Reimagine innovation as a lifelong practice, so that personal growth never ends.

The recent severe recession has made personal innovation an urgent priority, not only for individuals but for companies and nations. I think of one Fortune 500 client, which Ill call Fortuna, whose ongoing success depended on a steady flow of new ideas and products. Executives at Fortuna called me because they discovered that their carefully planned processes and incentives had stopped working. Despite their system of offering greenhouse funds, seed money for employees who wanted to test new projects, the money was just sitting in a bank account. No one was testing new ideas anymore. What had gone wrong?