Thoughts on Excellence Free E-Newsletter Series
Volume 24, Issue No. 2
October 15, 2025
By Dan Coughlin
Innovation is the process of creating more value than people are currently receiving.
If you move your toaster to a different place on your kitchen counter that makes the breakfast experience better for your whole family, that’s an innovation. If you build a toaster that makes the toast just the way each person wants it with a preprogrammed button, that’s an innovation.
The lifeblood of every organization is innovation. When we stop creating more value for other people, we quickly fall behind other people and other organizations.
Innovation has been one of my favorite topics to read about. Here are several of my favorite books on the topic.
The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor
From this book, I learned an incredibly valuable insight: the greatest opportunity for you to innovate is when other people can’t be bothered. When you have great big successful competitors, there will be many things that they just won’t try to do because they are too busy or too successful to be bothered with something so minor.
And there is your golden opportunity.
You just have to be really, really patient as you make things better or make better things. You won’t turn a profit for a very long time. But then one day the value you offer will be worth people paying for it. And as you continue to innovate the value you offer will be worth a lot of people paying a lot for it.
Remember that Amazon did not turn an annual profit until nine years after it started. When no one else made animated feature films, Walt Disney invested four years to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Other companies could have done what Jeff Bezos and Walt Disney did. They had a lot more resources to work with. But they couldn’t be bothered with something that seemed so small and trivial.
What could you do to make things better or make better things that other people just don’t want to be bothered with?
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo.
Steve Jobs did not create innovations. He saw innovations in his mind, and then he guided other people to create those innovations. This was his tremendous contribution to Apple. He saw a huge opportunity with personal computers. The big computer companies didn’t want to be bothered with them, and Jobs saw a world where every desk would have a computer on it. He saw that computer-animated films could be even more spectacular than artist-animated films. He personifies visionary leadership in innovation.
And then once he saw the value of a potential innovation in his mind, he became extremely focused and committed to the idea. Not all of them turned out to be successful, but the ones that did succeed did so because of his maniacal focus on the customer and on simplifying every solution. And Jobs explained that the key to maintaining maniacal focus on something is a strong willingness to say no to many other projects and ideas and not allow yourself to be pulled off in many directions.
Loonshots by Safi Bahcall
This book synthesizes the ideas from many different examples of very large innovations. He talks a great deal about the relationship between Creators and Executors. He calls them Artists and Soldiers.
Bahcall feels there are times when Artists and Soldiers should interact (Dynamic Equilibrium) and times when they should not interact (Phase Separation).
This is a powerful insight on common sense: to make things better or to make better things sometimes requires people to work together and sometimes requires them to separate and work on their own. A simple example is a football team. Sometimes the players need to practice together to run plays smoothly, and sometimes the players need to practice separately to work on their individual skills.
The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
IDEO, Tom and David Kelley’s Design Firm, is one of the most innovative companies in the world. Two of my favorite ideas from this book are “Innovation Begins with an Eye” and “Prototyping is the Shorthand of Innovation”.
They are big proponents of going into the customer’s world and seeing what the customers actually deal with every day. Talk with the customers. Really work to understand their situations from their point of view. Begin to sketch out ideas of how you can help them.
And then when you’re ready to start to turn an idea into a reality, begin with making a simple prototype using inexpensive items. Just create enough of the idea so people can see it in their minds and be able to give feedback on it.
This approach to innovation connects to a very old saying: walk a mile in the other person’s moccasins in order to understand them before giving advice. Tom Kelley teaches a great deal about the role of empathy in being an effective innovator.
Conclusion
Innovation is critically important for all organizations to survive and thrive into the future. Some people get apprehensive when they think about innovation, but in reality innovation is something we all do on a regular basis. It really is the application of ideas we have all been familiar with for a very long time.