Preview Thursday: The New Science of Radical Innovation

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to The New Science of Radical Innovation

When an organization achieves a higher level of complexity, it increases the organization’s options and ability to respond to external challenges and produce radical innovation. It can also dramatically improve the capacity for innovation all companies need to successfully compete.

That is what this book is about: demystifying radical innovation—what it is, how it comes about, and what companies, and leaders within them, need to do to consistently produce it. That is a challenge because of the unpredictable nature of business environments, but this book will teach you how to harness complexity to your advantage instead of becoming paralyzed by or irrelevant because of it. It will teach you the concepts and tools necessary to adopt and exploit positive complexity, stimulating radical innovation with your products and services. It will also teach you how to transform traditional companies into Quantum Companies by implementing the tools and concepts in this book.

Every company and every leader can benefit from applying the leadership principles in this book. Even if you are a line manager and the rest of the company has not bought the concepts in this book, you can start experimenting with these tools and concepts within your own sphere of control. Before you know it, you will be making radical changes and the rest of the company will be curious to learn about what you’re doing. Then you can increase your circle of influence by sharing with them how to use the tools in this book.

This book is not about how to make incremental improvements. There are myriads of books out there to help you achieve that goal. This book is about radical innovation, the kind that causes everyone to play by the rules that you define, changes the fundamental dynamics of an industry, catapults your company a generation ahead of the competition, and set a new framework—a new platform for others to build on, with 10x improvements, as Peter Thiel calls it.

These are the principles that I wish I had known when I was managing my teams. In many aspects, I failed as a leader because I didn’t know the role of a leader and, even worse, how to become a good one. If I had known these tools and concepts, I would have been a much more effective leader. It is my sincere hope that this book will help leaders in all walks of life to transform their organizations and lives and make the world a better place for all of us.

Dr. Sunnie Giles is President of Quantum Leadership Group. She catalyzes leaders to produce radical innovation and redefine the game as individuals and organizations. Her upcoming book on radical innovation will be published in April, 2018.

She is an advisor at the Stanford Business School Institute of Innovation in Developing Economies. Her recent research on global leadership for innovation has been published by Harvard Business Review.

Dr. Sunnie received her MBA degree from the University of Chicago Booth school of Business and a PhD in systemic psychology from Brigham Young University.

Learn more about Sunnie at sunniegiles.com.