Reading List for Jun-13

8 Steps to Innovation
This is a book by a very close friend and my guide/philosopher for years, Vinay Dabholkar (along with Prof. Rishi Krishnan of IIM-B) and they present a guide to systematic, as opposed to incidental, ad-hoc innovation. I had privilege of going over the manuscripts a while ago as and when they were developed, but now I'm reading with an intention of running an Innovation Campaign in my team.

Innovation need not only be jugaad. For the first time a book shows us how in India, innovation can be introduced in one’s organization in a systematic, deliberate way.

8 Steps to Innovation explains how you can do this by building an idea pipeline in your organization, improving the velocity of ideas coming in, and implementing the ideas within the given constraints. All this is shown through nice, snappy examples, mostly homegrown Indian ones. Few books in the market talk about innovation in the Indian context with Indian examples as this one does.

More articles by the authors on the subject of innovation can be found here.



Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice


Syed, sportswriter and columnist for the London Times, takes a hard look at performance psychology, heavily influenced by his own ego-damaging but fruitful epiphany. At the age of 24, Syed became the #1 British table tennis player, an achievement he initially attributed to his superior speed and agility. But in retrospect, he realizes that a combination of advantages—a mentor, good facilities nearby, and lots of time to hone his skills—set him up perfectly to become a star performer. He admits his argument owes a debt to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, but he aims to move one step beyond it, drawing on cognitive neuroscience research to explain how the body and mind are transformed by specialized practice. He takes on the myth of the child prodigy, emphasizing that Mozart, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, and Susan Polgar, the first female grandmaster, all had live-in coaches in the form of supportive parents who put them through a ton of early practice. Cogent discussions of the neuroscience of competition, including the placebo effect of irrational optimism, self-doubt, and superstitions, all lend credence to a compelling narrative; readers who gobbled up Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational will flock to this one.