Pickleloaf.com : Books : The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation


Books : The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation In association with Amazon.com Rating: - Remember who your real BOSS is In the early 1990's P&G was the number two laundry company in the world with a 19 per cent share. Today, it has a 34 share - nearly double its next competitor. Not bad, not bad at all. This book will help you understand how this consumer behemoth was able to achieve this result and many others. I will be very surprised if THE GAMECHANGER does not become required reading in many Fortune 500 executive suites. It is not because there is anything dramatically new in it, but because it provides a good look at how Proctor & Gamble turned itself around from being a slow moving organization, poorly rated by analysts to one of the most respected consumer goods companies on the planet. Credit for much of this turnaround goes to Chairman and CEO A.G. Lafley who took office in June 2000. The co-authors, Lafley and Charan are corporate superstars. Lafley's contributions to the book are particularly interesting as he provides some excellent case study material on how innovation drove growth for key P&G brands. The most consistently captivating theme is the reference to "The Boss." No, not Bruce Springsteen, good and all as he is. The Boss is the consumer and if Lafley is to be believed, Proctor & Gamble spends its life trying to satisfy the Boss. I particularly like his phrase of placing a "laser-sharp focus on consumers." The authors tell us that Innovation is an integrated management process with the customer absolutely at the center. Eight drivers work together to fuel profitable, customer oriented growth. These are Motivating Purpose and Values Stretching Goals Choiceful Strategies Unique Core Strengths Enabling Structures Consistent and Reliable systems Courageous and Connected Culture Inspiring Leadership These eight drivers have fueled P&G's growth as the company focused on two "moments of truth," (Interestingly, no acknowledgement to former SAS CEO Jan Carlzon whom I thought was responsible for popularizing this concept in a book of the same name). These are at time of purchase and time of usage. Appropriately, as one of the most global of companies, P&G examples come from many different countries and product categories. Immersive in-store and in-home research has gained in popularity at the expense of the standard focus group. This deep dive research allowed P&G to dramatically grow share for Downy Single Rinse (fabric softener) in Mexico, Hugo Boss fragrances and SK-II skin care brand in Japan. I write about the Toyota concept of Genchi Genbutsu (Go to the source and learn) in my book Why Ireland Never Invaded America One of the underlying themes throughout the book is that Innovation is cultural. You either live it or you don't. P&G's commitment to innovation has even seen it create a joint venture with a major competitior - Clorox. The two got together to create improved product performance for the Glad brand of household bags. This book is not just about P&G. Other companies referenced in some detail include Nokia, Marico India, Best Buy, Lego, Honeywell and HP. Charan devotes a full chapter to "How Jeff Immelt made Innovation a way of life at GE." Given GE's ongoing struggles, the most apt sentence in this chapter is "It has taken time for GE's people and investors to be convinced." Ya think! Maybe the key lesson in this chapter is Innovation is not easy, no matter what your financial and commercial muscle is. Overall, a very good read. Whether it will change your company and business depends on you and how aggressively you buy into the cultural aspects of creating an innovative company. Rating: - Some Good Points The best way to win in the world is through innovation. However, you can't wait for a light bulb to go off in some-one's head - it has to be central to goals, strategy, structure, systems, etc. of your business. "The Game Change" is P&G's experience down this path, as well as short vignettes from other firms within Ram Charan's experience. Lafely began by establishing a goal that half of new product and technology innovations come from outside P&G (broaden its source of ideas, and break down the "not invented here" problem). He further focused on organic (not acquired) growth - less risky. Within that Lafley focused on current consumers, retailers, wholesalers, and distributors. Major issues were zeroed in on - missed cases, and improved pricing (lower). Realistic stretch goals were set (eg. growing 2X the rate of the market or GDP), and the firm exited areas without a long-term competitive advantage for P&G (eg. food and beverage). Improved market research was probably "the" game-changer. P&G went from focus-groups to immersion - eg. working at a store, living within a target group family, building an intense focus on the customer. Rating: - Sorry not much ground breaking, just good reenforcement The Game Changer is innovation and AG Lafley partners with Ram Charan to describe how P&G has changed the game in consumer products. Lafley is certainly has the credibility to speak as an expert on this subject and he does by discussing the basics of making the enterprise more innovative. Charan lends his considerable breadth of experience and ability to structure these points into a salient business book. Charan plays much the same role as he did with Larry Bossidy in the book Execution. This combination should make for a game changing book. Unfortunately, The Game Changer delivers on about 70 to 80% of these expectations. The book reinforces rather than reveals new insight into the innovation equation. In many ways it covers existing ground, from the descriptions it looks like P&G concentrated on implementing techniques related to understanding the voice of the customer, value engineering, and the like. All good techniques and well proven, but they are often hard to execute at scale. The book concentrates on the eight pillars of game changing customer centric innovation. The book does a good job of reviewing each pillar and its implications to business in general and at the high level. These pillars are: 1. Motivating purpose and values - using values and mission to inspire people to reach beyond the everyday to the innovation. 2. Stretching goals - carting clarity through goals that focus on strategies that win and align everyone's energy and activities. 3. Choiceful strategies - making the hard choices that require to achieve the clear goals by deciding where you are going to play and then dedicating the resources on the right strategies. 4. Unique core strengths - focusing on how you are going to win based on taking advantage of your strengths. 5. Enabling structures - pointing out the important and necessary reality that innovation at speed and scale requires more than just being innovative. Here Lafley provides a good explanation of the structures involved in P&G's Connect and Develop strategy. 6. Consistent & reliable systems - Discusses the need to move chaotic and disruptive invention into valuable innovation. These systems are not just IT systems but the managerial decisions, financial control and other processes needed to go from idea to value at scale. 7. Courageous & connected culture - recognizes that people are at the heart of innovation. Now that may sound trite, but Lafley provides good insight into how P&G has gone outside of its comfort zone to understand customer and market needs. 8. Inspiring leadership - is a natural because innovation requires doing something new that can come up against the status quo. Here the book falls back on tried and true concepts such as emotional intelligence. It's good to know that such an idea works and the authors are to be commended for not trying to re-invent the wheel. Overall a solid, but not spectacular book as the formula that worked well for Execution has lost some of its luster and appeal on this topic. The Game Changer is aimed at the same executive audience who I am sure is already polishing up their notions of getting close to the customer, be more innovative and the like. Given the proven experience and success of P&G, I had expected this book to be more of a case study and more implementation oriented than it is. The individual product innovation stories are helpful, but difficult to translate outside of consumer products. So, that is the basis for the four out of five stars. Worth the read for reinforcement, but not something I would run out and buy ahead of other books. Rating: - 4.5 Stars... Chief Innovative Officer It was exactly a year ago when ex-Procter & Gamble CEO John Pepper's book "What Really Matters" came out. In it Pepper provides an outstanding overview of what makes a company like P&G move forward. Now comes a book by the current P&G CEO and Chairman A.G. Lafley, co-authored with Ram Charan, to discuss the role of innovation in today's business world. (Disclaimer: I live in Cincinnati, but I am not a P&G employee. I do own P&G stock.) In "The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation" (348 pages), the authors methodically dissect what true innovation is and how it can change a company around. At times this book reads like an MBA course book. For me the best moments of the book are when Lafley discusses the enormous challenges he daced when he became CEO in 2000, taking over for the unpopular and unsuccessful Dirk Jager. Speaking about his first day as CEO: "My instincts pointed me toward two things: firstm the foundation of P&G, its purpose and values; second, the need to reset external expectations about growth goals and the business and financial results we would have to deliver to put P&G's performance back among the leaders in the fast-moving consumer products industry." We all know what an incredible turnaround Lafley has spearheaded and as a P&G shareholder, I am very appreciative of that. Charan notes that "In effect, A.G. Lafley is the Chief Innovation Officer if the company as a whole but he partners very closely with the chief technology officer and with the group presidents who are the CIOs of their respective businesses." If I have a criticism of the book, it is that at times it states the obvious, without contributing further. On the selection and green-lighting of ideas, the book states "There must be a clearly-defined social mechanism for selecting ideas to be green-lighted. The composition and leadership of this social mechanism must be explicitly considered and carefully chosen." Well, yes! As noted before, this is not a book you will read in a couple of hours, but the bottom line is that it is well worth your investment of time. Rating: - OK but not the cure for everything I purchased the audio CDs to listen to in the car. It's a four or five CD set. I stopped after the second CD as it got very repetitve. Most of it is Business 101. Get close to the customer, enable your org to innovate, leverage the existing brand when innovating.....that's about it. The rest of the book is a good run down on Proctor and Gamble. If you want to learn a lot about consumer marketing and branding then there is some good stuff in it.