The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation
by A.G. Lafley, Ram Charan
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Book Summary Information
Author: A.G. Lafley, Ram CharanEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-04-08
ISBN: 0307381730
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Crown Business
Book Reviews of The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation
Book Review: Innovative Innovation Ideas and Process
Summary: 4 Stars
In the early years of business on the web, I was on a panel that addressed marketing in the then mostly new Digital Age. There was a senior executive from Proctor and Gamble on that panel who told the assembled marketers that P & G wasn't going to change because "we've got it all figured out."
As we were packing up, one of the other panelists said, "I don't know about you guys but I'm going home and sell my P & G stock. Any company with an executive that high up who thinks they've got it all figured out is going to go down sooner or later."
I remembered that incident while reading Game-Changer: How you can drive revenue and profit growth with innovation by A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan.
Lafley is the Chairman and CEO of Proctor and Gamble. Charan is neck-and-neck in the race with Warren Bennis for "Most Books Co-Authored by a Guru." Each writes parts of the book in his own voice. They are very different voices.
Lafley's voice is practical and down to earth. Here's a quote from chapter 1. "The Game-Changer is about what I have learned over the course of a lifetime in business, but particularly since I became CEO of P & G."
Charan has a more buzzword-rich style. "P & G is one of the few companies that has been able to break the chains of commoditization and create organic growth on a sustainable basis through implementing and managing the integrated process of innovation."
This is a book about the turnaround at P & G. Since Lafley took over, in June of 2000, the company has tripled profits, and improved revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins. The stock price has more than doubled.
A significant part of the turnaround was the development of a process for managing innovation at P & G. This book is about that process and how it works.
Those are both Lafley's stories. But this is a better book because Ram Charan adds commentary and examples from other firms.
If you want to learn the back story, chapter one will set the stage for you. After Charan's comments in chapter two, Game-Changer is organized into three parts.
Drawing the Big Picture sets the stage for the other parts. The chapter titled The Customer is Boss is one of those chapters you copy so you can re-read it often.
Every company says they are customer-focused. P & G has been known as a customer-focused company for most of its history. And yet it was easy for the customer to slide from the center of the business to periphery.
Chapter three is the best explanation I've seen of what it means to put the customer at the center of your company. I'd love to see P & G or the publisher put this chapter out as a pamphlet.
Part Two is about the innovation process itself. It begins with a chapter on organizing for innovation. This chapter is one of several that include excellent material on innovation at other companies.
If you're not at a consumer products company, you'll get ideas about how innovation looks in other industries. If you don't think a P & G practice will work at your company, the book gives you some other models.
The next chapter, on integrating innovation into your routine, is one of the best in the book because it concentrates on a key point. For innovation to be a real game-changer, it can't be bolted on to day-to-day operations and responsibilities. It has to be part of the routine, even as it challenges the routine. There's great material here on how ideas get killed and the importance of a regular, social mechanism for approving ideas.
After a chapter on the risks of innovation, the authors move to the final part of the book which discusses the culture of innovation. You'll learn how innovation is a team sport and how a leader's job should include innovation.
This is an idea book, not a how-to book. If you want an innovation manual, pass this book by.
But if you want lots of ideas and examples to hold up against the way you do business now, plunk down your money. Even if you only read the chapter on putting the customer at the center, you'll get lots of return on your investment in this book.
Summary of The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation
How you can increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job.Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; significantly improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. How? A. G. Lafley and his leadership team have integrated innovation into everything P&G does and created new customers and new markets.
Through eye-opening stories A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan show how P&G and companies such as Honeywell, Nokia, LEGO, GE, HP, and DuPont have become game-changers. Their inspiring lessons can help you learn how to:
• Make consumers and customers the boss, not the CEO or the management team
• Innovate to grow a mature business
• Develop higher growth, higher margin businesses
• Create new customers and new markets
• Revitalize a business model
• Reach outside your own business and tap into the abundant brainpower and creativity of the world
• Integrate innovation into the mainstream of your managerial decision making
• Manage risk
• Become a leader of innovation
We live in a world of unprecedented change, increasing global competitiveness, and the very real threat of commoditization. Innovation in this world is the best way to win—arguably the only way to really win. Innovation is not a separate, discrete activity but the job of everyone in a leadership position and the integral, central driving force for any business that wants to grow organically and succeed on a sustained basis.
This is a game-changing book that helps you redefine your leadership and improve your management game.
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