Ten Faces of Innovation [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I found Tom Kelley's book "The Ten Faces of Innovation" to be easy reading but also very helpful for my understanding of the needs of my global multi-disciplinary project teams. The investment projects I lead require close collaboration across cultures and across the functional silos of Marketing, Estimating, Sales, Project Operations and Supply Chain. While my intuitive sense of what is right is based upon experience, I do not have a broad network of peers experienced in innovation theory or broad ranges of experience applying those theories. Tom Kelley's book offers concise examples of success in diverse scenarios and the personality traits of the people who made the success possible. This provides me that additional level of insight and reinforcement I find valuable as I manage my team and extended project team deliverables. As opposed to academics who may offer an endless stream of opinions based on theory, Tom Kelley's book offers practical advice based on his own personal experiences over the past 20 years.

Kelley's "Ten Faces" makes for a light reading, but does not really bring any new insights or show a fundamental understanding of how growth really happens in companies and how these lenses might help. In the end, "The Ten Faces of Innovation" is yet another one-off in a seemingly endless series of "pop-innovation" titles...

"The Ten Faces of Innovation" (Tom Kelley - Currency - Doubleday, 2005)

Kelley elaborates discovery "personas", with a specific role for innovation. The results are underwhelming and this book, like so many others of the genre, perpetuates a pop view of innovation.

Kip Garland (*)

Tom Kelley is best known as a product design specialist. Together with this brother they preside over Ideo, a well known product design house in the USA. "Ten Faces" is Kelly's second book, following after "The Art of Innovation".

The overall theme of the book is set out in it's lackluster forward, which extols the virtues of innovation with the same platitudes heard in the popular press about innovation. In fact the forward is so content and insight-free that the big highlight is that... "The Economist Magazine claimed innovation as the most important ingredient in any modern economy". Ahh.... Isn't this the same kind insight-less generalizing we are used to over-hearing? Something akin to - "good economies are essential for a country". At least other pop-innovation titles, like Michael George's "Fast Innovation" try to make some serious grounding for their claims using valuations and other rooted arguments, instead of the same old worn-out innovation platitudes.

The book rolls along at a yawning pace, outlining the three Persona categories for the Ten Faces. These include the "Learning Personas", The "Organizing Personas", and the "Building Personas". In the process Kelley builds a nearly shameless running advert for his own consulting firm. However, before he outlines his "Faces" he takes shots at the big anti-innovation organizational boogey-man... the "devils advocate" (come-on Tom, who really advised you to write to your audience at a third grade level?). Without giving any real understanding for the motivations, organizational values, situational contexts that drives "devil's advocate" he simplistically says that his ten faces will help an organization defeat the evil "devils advocate" in your organization. Like the rest of the books, Kelley's arguments are weak, and his explanations extremely simplistic, and conclusions obvious.

We then move into the actual Ten Faces that make up the bulk of Kelley's book. In theory, I guess the concept of these "persona" could be really cool. However in reality... well, lets just say they could be much more, uhum... interesting. Kelley uses the first-hand throughout the book which limits the bulk his focus to the "Ideo world" (very limiting indeed..). Additionally there is a huge gap in terms of theory, or that is, attempts to explain the "why" behind the assertions he makes. He tries to sprinkle the book with a good dose of practical "tips", but the collection is altogether uninspiring (do we need to be told to go to news-stands to find "meta-leaning" (ie - scan magazines..)??) since there are no common underlying themes or premises that tie these together and most of the tips are quite obvious or trivial. A deeper dive into development psychology, pedagogy, and other behavioral and organizational constructs would help greatly.

However, the biggest gap in the book is related to its lack of foundations in growth (the overall "why" of innovation, and, at the core premises of any efforts to innovate). Missing is any hint of understanding of the sustaining and disruptive innovation. He uses the same muddled language as all the pop-innovation books, using the confusing term "breakthrough" as equivalent as disruptive. He fails to develop any line of thinking about how you might apply "faces" or "personas" to create disruption, where a fundamentally different set of resources, processes and values are needed (and, therefore, very different set of discovery lenses would be needed). In line with the rest of the pop-innovation crowd, his examples are all sustaining. In fact the good bulk of his work is focused on very narrow definitions of existing customers and circumstances (like for example putting a clock on top of a soda machine to get train passengers at stations to buy more soft-drinks) , which is the very nature of the innovator's dilemma. In this respect the book turns from an obvious and innocuous fast read to a toxin - dispelling just plain bad advice. All and all, Kelley's book is not a particularly good read, however at least it isn't particularly "heavy" either (i.e. the effort to benefit ratio is not completely out of whack), thereby having the additional benefit of not spitting any "grease" on you in the process. Guess this is fitting for a book from a California-roots design firm. And while the book is "fat-free", there really is nothing particularly innovating about this book.

* Kip Garland is an Adjunct Professor at the Fundacao Dom Cabral in Brazil. He is the founder of innovationSEED and implemented the Latin American portion of the global innovation process outlined in Harvard Business School Case # 9-705-463 (translated into Portuguese with permission by the Fundacao Dom Cabral). He can be reached at kgarland@iseed.com.br