Product Description

This text shows how, in the past, business processes have been thought of as something static, as a series of instructions laid down in manuals to be repeated exactly the same way every time. In order for the process-orientated organization of the 21st century to be successful in this area of change, companies need to move into action. This book shows that superior processes will have to incorporate a built-in ability to thrive on change. The key to excellent processes lies in the the ability to inject continous innovation into the process design. It is no longer enough to inject innovation only at the design stage, which leaves the execution as mechanical. This text provides perspectives and approaches for helping companies compete in today's changing environment and pulls together the critical concepts of process improvement, e-commerce, and innovation into a single framework.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1441978 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From the Inside Flap
"Steve's book provides a timely focus on innovation as competitive advantage, and it is well worth your time." --Charles Koch, CEO and President of Koch Industries

"Steve offers a pragmatic, global, business savvy realism as well as artistic flair to anyone who needs to be an innovator in business. --Peter Keen, CEO, Keen Innovations and Co-Author of The eProcess Edge

"Steve shows how companies can be innovative everywhere, everyday, by everyone. This is a must read book for anyone who is serious about 24/7 Innovation." --Dr. Trevor G. Gibbs, Head of Global Clinical Safety and Pharmacovigilance, GlaxoSmithKline

"24/7 Innovation weaves a compelling picture of what will be needed to win in the new millennium." --Steve Stanton, Co-Author of The Reengineering Revolution

"24/7 Innovation is a must read for anyone in business who is faced with the need to be constantly innovating in order to remain competitive." --John Renesch, author of Getting to the Better Future

"Shapiro's ideas provide just enough structure for innovation to grow, but never so much as to stifle it." --Thomas H. Davenport, Director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change and Distinguished Scholar, Babson College

From the Back Cover

Techniques for Awakening Your Organization's Innovative Potential­­in a Global Marketplace That Never Sleeps

Praise for Stephen Shapiro's 24/7 Innovation...

"Shapiro's ideas provide just enough structure for innovation to grow, but never so much as to stifle it."
­­Thomas H. Davenport, Director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change, Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Babson College

"24/7 Innovation weaves a compelling picture of what will be needed to win in the new millennium."
­­Steve Stanton, Coauthor, The Reengineering Revolution

"Steve's book provides a timely focus on innovation as competitive advantage, and it is well worth your time."
­­Charles Koch, CEO and President, Koch Industries

"Steve offers a pragmatic, global, business savvy realism as well as artistic flair to anyone who needs to be an innovator in business."
­­Peter Keen, CEO, Keen Innovations, Coauthor, The eProcess Edge

"Steve shows how companies can be innovative everywhere, everyday, by everyone. This is a must read book for anyone who is serious about 24/7 innovation."
­­Dr. Trevor G. Gibbs, Head of Global Clinical Safety and Pharmacovigilance, GlaxoSmithKline

"24/7 Innovation is a must read for anyone in business who is faced with the need to be constantly innovating in order to remain competitive."
­­John Renesch, Author, Getting to the Better Future

"The volatility of markets and the wider choices that customers enjoy today make complacency tantamount to business suicide."
­­From Chapter 1

In one of the great paradoxes of twenty-first-century business, market leaders must continuously pursue the obsolescence of their own best-selling products. Why? Because they know that beyond their own corporate walls, hungry competitors are "borrowing"­­and improving on­­the strengths of those products in order to take their hard-won customer base to the next level of satisfaction. And if they plan to stay on top, leaders know it is up to them to reach that next level first.

Whether you are a leader or a pursuer, 24-7 Innovation takes you beyond the rigid policies, prescriptive processes, and fragmented organizational structures that have stifled true innovation for too long. This step-by-step book shows you how to instill a mind-set of continuous innovation at every level of your organization, one that will allow you to achieve and sustain a leadership position in any market. It outlines a lean, action-based framework designed to put your organization in the state of "perpetual innovation" that is necessary for creating sustainable business success.

Look to 24/7 Innovation for the latest techniques and strategies to:

-Create a culture of innovation­­and inject innovation continuously throughout the execution of each process
-Implement the Capabilities approach at every level of your organization, and coordinate its five essential components­­Strategy, Measurements, Processes, People, and Technology­­to consistently interrelate with each other and deliver measurable results
-Align all stakeholders­­from customers to shareholders to employees­­at all levels of an organization

Moving far beyond theory, 24/7 Innovation reveals what today's most innovative companies are actually doing­­right now­­and provides guidelines to help you replicate these successes in your own organization. It offers a blueprint for creating a truly flexible organization, one that builds upon current successes even as it promotes rapid change and adaptability for maximizing those successes.

In today's age of unprecedented access and unlimited competition, constant change is the prerequisite for survival. Let 24/7 Innovation show you how to introduce constant change throughout every level of your organization­­revolutionary change that is strategic, pervasive, and ultimately overwhelming to your competitors.

About the Author
Stephen M. Shapiro leads Andersen Consulting's Process Excellence practice in Europe and is a pending partner at Andersen Consulting. Within his 14-year career at Andersen Consulting he has worked with more than 20 leading companies including Xerox, UPS, Lucent, and ABB. He was one of the founders of Andersen's Process Excellence practice in 1996 and has been one of the leaders of Andersen's reengineering practice since its inception in 1992. From 1996 to 1999, he was the global head of Process Excellence R&D, working with external thought leaders, including Michael Hammer, Peter Keen, University of Cambridge, to create leading edge capabilities. Within and outside of the firm, he is a recognized thought leader in the area of process. Over the past three years, he has spoken to over 40,000 people at large internal and external events focused on Process and eCommerce. He was recently acknowledged in Bill Gates's book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, for contributing to a chapter on Process and Technology.

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Customer Reviews

Creating More Competitive Organizations
Mr. Shapiro argues that continuous innovation is the only possible source of competitive advantage in a rapidly changing business environment. Yet most companies organize themselves and their efforts in ways that will discourage the development and implementation of these necessary innovations. So rather than doing what you did yesterday better, he wants you to do something new today. This requires a major change in thinking from the typical "lower your costs" and "improve your quality" mentality of many companies. The book is enlivened by many examples from Europe, where Mr. Shapiro practices as a management consultant for Accenture.

One of the things I liked best about this book was the figure on page 18 that describes the organizational progress that is typically followed to go from a functionally bound operation to one that is an alliance-based network of capabilities with partners performing many noncore roles. Many people have difficulty in grasping the different approaches, and this figure may well be helpful to some of them.

The book's focus is around organizing new and improving on old capabilities. A capability is a holistic concept of something that enables "an organization to perform optimally in activities that typically require processes, people, and technology. Capabilities derive from an explicit strategy, and they deliver measurable results." It is in this context that innovation is conceived of as a capability. Mr. Shapiro wants you to focus on where outdistancing the competition will make a difference with the customer, and then use your innovation capability to enhance your capabilities in this differentiating capability. For a pharmaceutical company, this might mean improving the capability to generate new products to market. The main point here is that there is a combination of factors that need to be considered that is beyond what is contained in a single process. The best way to think in capability terms is to focus on some output of the organization that is meaningful to customers. He is also mindful of the problem of optimizing a system, rather than part of a system, as The Fifth Discipline has made us all sensitive to.

One of the nice qualities of this book is that Mr. Shapiro has a sense of humor, something rarely found in business books. He tells a very funny story about buying airline tickets on-line as a counterpoint to his emphasis on the importance of information technology.

Those who like to take an analytical approach to any problem will find Mr. Shapiro's thinking the most helpful. He has taken right-brained tasks and described them in left-brain terms. But be sure to pay attention to the Koch examples, which take a more right-brained approach to the challenge than most of the other examples do. For those with little intuition, this left-brained "connecting the dots" may be the only way to move forward. If you have also read nothing on improving corporate innovation, this is a good book to start with.

While I admired the book, Mr. Shapiro seemed to have limited his thinking in two important areas that you should be aware of. First, he sees innovation as being most valuable in creating new business models, yet he pays relatively little attention to this specific form of innovation in the book. Instead, most of the book talks about enhancing capabilities where an organization needs an external partner or to blend individual processes better. Second, he sees using information technology as a critical element to improving innovation. My own experience in studying innovation has shown that using more information technology is seldom a critical element in creating a new competitive advantage. Creating better communication and mutual understanding are often quite important, and these can be aided by simply better organizing the communications that take place now. So take this part of the book with a grain of salt.

I didn't know enough about the European examples to know how accurate they were. I was struck by many minor errors in the U.S. ones though. Since Mr. Shapiro worked in Accenture's New York office for 15 years and has many U.S. colleagues, I found these errors puzzling. The errors made me wonder how accurate the European examples are.

If you have already been through The Fifth Discipline, The Fifth Discipline Workbook, and The Dance of Change, you will probably find this book more general than what you need to expand your understanding of corporate creativity that leads to successful innovations.

If you are trying to decide whether to read Michael Hammer's The Agenda or 24/7 Innovation, take 24/7 Innovation.

How can you continuously create improved business models?

Innovation doesn't quite hit the mark!
I was very impressed when I heard Stephen Shapiro speak and this prompted me to purchase his book without checking through it for content. Although full of examples of companies who are being innovative, the book fails to give you much detail about how these innovation leaders go about managing, stimulating or driving innovation, or indeed how a business should go about developing a new climate to stimulate innovation. Although Stephen's speech was full of passion and content, unfortunately in my opinion it has failed to transfer itself into the book.