Relentless Growth: How Silicon Valley's Innovation Secrets Can Work for Your Business - Hardcover

Meyer, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684834464 ISBN 13: 9780684834467

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1998

Synopsis

The Achilles heel of every company is creating growth through new products and services-- a herculean challenge that must be met continuously, relentlessly, year in and year out. The antidote to this deficiency, argues high-tech expert Christopher Meyer, is to establish a "growth attitude", as Silicon Valley firms do, by making a sharp distinction between the innovation process and the operating pressures managers face daily. Drawing on fifteen years as an educator, researcher, and consultant in Silicon Valley, the world's oldest, most advanced, and most successful knowledge-based economy, Meyer presents a brilliant model for balancing these challenges based upon the actual strategies of explosive Silicon Valley growth machines. At the same time, he demonstrates how the Silicon Valley approach to growth and innovation has worked in companies far beyond the Valley, such as Procter & Gamble, Honeywell, and Ford Motor Company. Leaders must promote and diffuse the growth attitude throughout their firms, Meyer contends, showing how Valley leaders generate and spread competitive paranoia, get every employee focused externally, flatten and blur organizational boundaries, set "stretch" goals, and above all, find, nurture, and promote bright people with passion and motivate them with "skin". With Meyer's "loose-tight" approach to new product and service development, executives and managers will be able to establish a creative environment without losing sight of risk management and cost control. Unlike other books, "Relentless Growth" lays out a focused, five-part model for integrating innovation and operations comprising: (1) the role of leadership in creating an organizational attitude for growth, (2) strategic alignment, (3) the innovation process and development paradigm, (4) the application of predictive and balanced metrics, and (5) the people, who are the most important ingredient in any innovation process. By focusing on the role that leadership plays in the innovation process, Meyer paves the way for companies to compete effectively while maintaining a vibrant creative culture.

About this title

Review:

Edward R. McCracken Chairman and CEO, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems"Relentless Growth proves that you don't have to work in Silicon Valley to master innovation. Whether it's a manufacturing or service business, any company can do it. While the Valley may astound and amaze us with dazzling new products, Meyer shows it is their "process of innovation" that is the truly exciting news. His stories are fun to read and offer invaluable guidance on how to lead and manage innovation.

About the Author:

Christopher Meyer, Ph.D. is Managing Principal of Integral, Inc., a management consulting firm specializing in technology and innovation management, and he works out of Integral's Menlo Park, California, office. Dr. Meyer is author of the bestselling Fast Cycle Time (Free Press). He consults to world-class innovators such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Cirrus Logic, Emerson Electric, Federal Express, Motorola, and Procter & Gamble and is currently the Academic Director of Stanford University's Fast Cycle Time Strategy Program. He lives in Portola Valley, California, and his e-mail address is: cmeyer@integral-inc.com.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684834464
• ISBN 13: 9780684834467
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224