Discovery-Driven Growth

Es el título del libro de Ian MacMillan y Rita Gunther McGrath; el asunto examinado es ¿cómo avanzar en las iniciativas innovadoras en tiempos de incertidumbre?: "Assumptions are what get most companies into trouble, MacMillan and co-author Rita Gunther McGrath... argue in their new book, Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity... It's not failure that companies need to avoid, they say, but rather "failing expensively."..."

Tenemos que anotar que tal prescripción ya se hallaba en la trilogía El Dilema de los innovadores, La Solución de los Innovadores y Seeing what's next, de Clayton Christensen y sus asociados en Innosight. Tenemos entonces aquí, una aceptación de la importancia del asunto por una parte, y de seguro un desarrollo más detallado de su llevar a la práctica por otro. Buenas noticias; esta teoría de la innovación, de la innovación que debe dintinguir la sostenida de la disruptiva, continúa su despliegue y verificación por parte de terceros

El consejo al gerente en la voz de uno de los autores:

"Knowledge@Wharton: If CEOs of Fortune 500 companies wanted to know what are some of the things that they could implement right away, what advice would you give them?

McGrath: I'd tell them first that a lot of strategy today is about learning. It's not about sustainable competitive advantage. It's not about the sort of stable industry forces that we're used to thinking about when we're thinking about strategy. I would encourage them to think of strategy as a very dynamic entity -- that means changes in behavior on their part. They need to stop talking about being right all the time. Instead, what we want to talk about is being disciplined. You need to stop talking about how failure is bad. Instead you want to think about intelligent failures -- low-cost intelligent failures that are rich in learning. That tone can only be set from the top. If you're the kind of CEO who [says] "off with his head" the minute something doesn't work out the way somebody predicted, I suspect you are going to have a lot of trouble in these incredibly dynamic, strategic environments..."

La explicación en la voz del otro autor:

"MacMillan: In uncertain environments, you don't have knowledge. You have to make assumptions. The key issue is to know from the start that the plan is wrong. That's the only thing I know about the plan -- that it's wrong. So, how do I plan in such a way that I come out with the right solution but not necessarily know what it is at the outset? That's what discovery-driven planning is all about. It's a plan to learn. We don't know. So what are we going to learn? What you really want to do is you want to learn cheap and you want to learn fast, and if it's wrong you want to go and do something else or you want to redirect. That's the idea... The ... challenge is to creatively invest only as you learn. In the beginning you invest very little so you can afford to be wrong. As you get more and more confident in your assumptions, which may change, and as you redirect the project you may make bigger and bigger investments..."