Unrelenting Innovation: How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance
By Gerard J. Tellis Jossey-Bass, $34.95 Beware the clutches of "incumbent's curse." That's the message from Gerard J. Tellis, an advertising and global marketing expert, in this innovative treatise on sustaining market dominance. Tellis describes how some successful companies become so focused on the products that elevated them to market dominance that they become blinded to coming innovations. Among them: General Motors, HP, Research In Motion, Xerox and Nokia."Incumbent's curse," Tellis maintains, caused them to set aside some of their own breakthrough innovations and allow competitors to bring them to market first and achieve dominance. He identifies three biases that contribute to such costly mistakes: a focus on current products instead of the future, resistance to cannibalizing currently profitable products and aversion to risky innovations.The antidote to the curse, he argues, is a culture that emphasizes relentless innovation like Google's. He describes the benefits and incentives provided Google employees as key ingredients of an environment that provides great rewards for successful innovations and no punishments for failures. He quotes one Google executive as saying: "If you're not failing enough, you're not trying hard enough."Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
