Book: lessons in radical innovation, Wolfgang Grulke with Gus Silber

This book was OK. Perhaps I expected a bit more from a ‘radical innovation’ book.

It is a very easy reading book, and reads fairly quickly as the author only used the right hand pages, leaving most of the left hand pages blank in case you want to make notes.

With that said, there were elements in the book that I did like and found interesting –

I liked that there were South African examples used; it is always great to hear and learn about  South African successes, e.g. Chef Works and Mark Shuttleworth.

What was also interesting was: (page XIII) In the 1960’s, South Africa represented 6% of the world GDP. Today that figure is less than 0.5%, but year-on-year the South African economy has never shrunk. South Africa has simply been out-innovated by other nations who saw the signs and acted fast.  

This I see as a great opportunity for businesses in South Africa to up their innovation game.

This leads to the next section I found interesting (page 266):

There is clearly not enough time being spent by management on strategic thinking and creating the future, everyone is too involved with operations. This relates to one of my six business rules of working on the business instead of in the business. As a leader, you need to know where you are heading, you are at the helm of the ship and need to steer that way. You can’t do that if you are too busy with day to day activities of the business. There is a huge opportunity for innovation in South Africa and beyond for innovative thinking.

So, as much as this was just an ‘OK’ book, it did get me to remember about working on the business, be innovative and realising that there are many innovative opportunities to be tapped into to take businesses to the next level.