I just finished listening to an executive summary of Geoffrey A Moore’s recently released Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past. I strongly recommend this book to all businessmen and business woman out there (I’m planning on purchasing the book once I’m done remodeling my apartment!). However, the take-home message can be applied to any aspect of one’s life: “Escape the Pull of the Past”

I agree wholeheartedly that innovation is a must for all companies, no matter how long you’ve been playing the game… Does Playboy and Blockbuster ring a bell?

What I found particularly interesting was the 6 Levers Model of Innovation. A company must innovate to create not only its future, but also to coexist in its present and to release itself from its past.

6 levers model of innovation

1) Centralize – Bring operations under a single authority to reduce overhead and create a single point of control to manage mission critical risk

2) Standardize – Reduce the variety and variablity of processes delivering similar outputs to eliminate costs and minimize risks

3) Modularize – Deconstruct the system into its component subsystems and standard interfaces for future cost reductions

4) Optimize – Eliminate redundant steps, automate standard sequences, streamline remaining operations, substitute lower cost components or otherwise cost and resource reduce.

5) Instrument – Characterize the remaining processes in terms of the variability of key parameters and develop monitoring control systems to monitor their performance

6) Oustource – Drive processes out of the enterprise entirely to further reduce overhead, devariabalize costs and minimize future investment. Incorporate vendor use of monitoring control systems into service level agreement.