A list of business and innovation books that can help you get more impact from your new products
After reading literally hundreds of business and innovation books over the years (I know – get a life), people regularly ask me which ones have had the most impact. What are the must-read new product books?
This page is intended to answer that question. Listed below are the books that I consider some of the most important resources in any organic growth effort. Most are thought-leading works, but they also offer practical, hands-on strategies and tools. You can order any of them by clicking on these direct links to Amazon.com’s secure site. Most are available in both paper, Kindle, and audiobook formats.
To your growth,
Michael A. Dalton
Managing Director
Guided Innovation Group, LLC
Unlocking Innovation Productivity – Michael A. Dalton
Creating your High-Performance Innovation OS. This Amazon Business Bestseller shows you how conventional project and resource management practices rob you of innovation productivity. It then goes on to share 9 Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Agile-based accelerators that companies across the globe are using to create high-performing innovation operating systems for drives faster and more predictable new product growth. New Revised and Updated Version – now available in book, Kindle, and audio formats.
Simplify Innovation – Michael A. Dalton
A framework for driving rapid new product growth. This provocative Amazon best-seller is a business novel that challenges conventions and outlines a unique framework for driving your new product growth with the Theory of Constraints. If you’re not a fan of the learning through story format that Goldratt pioneered in The Goal, it also includes a complete summary on how to apply the framework in your business.
Here’s what one of TOC’s leading thinkers and authors says about it: “A Theory of Constraints approach to the process of innovation was long overdue. Production, project management, supply chain, and policy constraint analysis have all been comprehensively addressed. But until now, no one has thought to examine the ramifications of constraint theory on the challenge of innovation. Mike Dalton’s novel was worth waiting for. Simplifying Innovation synthesizes innovation best practices and the focusing step framework to create a powerful new application of TOC. Let it stimulate your imagination as it did mine.”
–H. William Dettmer, author of Strategic Navigation
Download free chapters here
The Goal – Eliyahu Goldratt
It’s Not Luck” is the sequel that introduces the TOC thinking tools. And those who prefer a more traditional text can find the basic concepts in Goldratt’s “Theory of Constraints.” If you’ve been blessed with a recent ERP implementation, you might also like “Necessary But Not Sufficient.”
While Goldratt and TOC don’t address innovation specifically, “The Goal” is a “must-have” if you want to learn how to focus your improvement efforts. If you’re interested in the application of TOC to innovation, take a look at my first book, Simplifying Innovation, or download one of our free reports for accelerating your product development.
Critical Chain – Eliyahu Goldratt
Goldratt’s application of TOC to the project planning discipline. The critical path that everyone is so familiar with is actually a special case where there are no resource conflicts with other projects. But in the real world, resources are usually shared between projects and even between different parts of the same project. Critical Chain is a business novel offering strategies and tools for getting resource-constrained projects done on time and on budget.
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy – Richard Rummelt
My favorite book ever on strategy. Rummelt challenges the way most companies build what they call strategies – what he calls fluff and fuzzy thinking that fails to face the problem or focus on the window of opportunity. Instead, he shares the kernels of good strategy (Diagnosis, Guiding Policy, and Coherent Actions) that make it very clear what actions the company will take, and as importantly what it will not do, to create growth.
Also includes an excellent primer on how to think strategically based on several well-known companies like Apple and Nvidia.
The 80/20 Principle – Richard Koch
The reason focus is so powerful. Over 100 years ago, Vilfredo Pareto identified a peculiar phenomenon in the distribution of results; 20% of the effort delivers 80% of the results. The term 80/20 gets thrown around pretty loosely, but when used as a filter to identify and then focus on the high-impact items it provides significant leverage. Richard Koch’s book is a must-read for anyone trying to get more from their existing resources: shows how to apply 80/20 and gives many practical applications.
Note – 80/20 and Theory of Constraints are both focusing tools but differ in an important way. 80/20 creates a focus on the best among independent choices – such as the different projects you could work on or markets you could serve. TOC, by focusing on your constraint, helps you identify the improvements that will actually move the needle.
Profitable Top-Line Growth for Industrial Companies – James Hlavacek
A treasure chest of common sense strategies for any industrial or business-to-business firm trying to grow organically. Dr. Hlavacek’s Market Driven Management approach has made a huge impact at scores of companies and he has the client list and success stories to back it up. I’ve had the pleasure of working extensively with Dr. Hlavacek, and consider him one of my most influential mentors: A highly recommended book for any marketing library.
The Innovator’s Solution – Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor
The book on disruptive innovation. “The Innovator’s Solution” and its predecessor,”The Innovator’s Dilemma,” made the term disruptive innovation a bit of a buzzword. We’ll forgive them for that because there are some extremely useful frameworks here that can help predict a new product’s chances for success: very helpful for assessing new product and new technology programs.
The Strongest Link – Gene Slowinski and Matt Sagal
Hands down, the most practical hands-on guide to creating and managing Open Innovation. It wasn’t called Open Innovation when Slowinski and Sagal published this book, but Dr. Sagal’s Alliance Framework is a simple, yet brilliant, approach born of decades of managing highly complex technology and marketing alliances.
I’ve had the privilege of working together with them both as a client and as a colleague and can tell you their approach works. Dr. Slowinski has further developed the framework in his recent book “Reinventing Corporate Growth.”
Customer Visits – Edward McQuarrie
A very useful little primer on how to get maximum impact from a limited number of customer visits. And we’re not talking about sales calls here, but structured customer interviews to find unmet needs.
What Customers Want – Anthony Ulwick
If your company is one of the many that have struggled to implement voice of the customer, Ulwick hits on a primary reason. Voice of the customer provides data in the customer’s language, which is usually structured around what they want; you have to try to translate that into what they need, and we all know that translation is where it sometimes ends badly. His approach is a simple structured question format based on the things the customer either wants to maximize (e.g. time between maintenance intervals) or minimize (e.g. high-speed fuel consumption).
The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Leader – Patrick Lencioni
A brief leadership fable about how an extraordinary leader creates clarity and focus in his company. A great little book that helps you move from the analytic side of focus, to the people side of making it all work. Yes, like “The Goal,” it’s a story, but it also has a very useful section at the end that summarizes the concepts and gives advice on putting them into action.
Other highly recommended books by Patrick Lencioni are “Five Dysfunctions of a Team;” “Five Temptations of a CEO;” “Death by Meeting;” and “Silos, Politics and Turf Wars.”
Top-Grading – Bradford Smart
If you have done everything possible to get the most out of your constraint, raising the capabilities of your staff is an important next step. Smart provides a practical framework for determining if employees are capable of being top talent in their current roles, for developing their potential if they can, or if they can’t then moving them to a role where they can. Also provides an in-depth hiring process for getting to candidates’ real motivations and traits.