Relentless Growth: How Silicon Valley Innovation Strategies Can Work in Your Business

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.