Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62913
bookshelf REVERSE INNOVATION AUTHORS: Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press, US$30 TOO MANY companies try to approach emerging nations with scaled-down and less expensive versions of products that have succeeded in Western markets, but that tactic is bound to fail, say Govindarajan and Trimble of Dartmouth. Customers in these nations are starkly different from their Western counterparts; they have less money, unreliable infrastructures, different regulatory systems, different preferences, and a bias toward sustainable technology. To succeed in these markets, corporations must design new products from scratch. "You must let go of what you've learned, what you've seen, and what has brought you your greatest successes," the authors write. "In fact, it's best to assume you've just landed on Mars." The payoff is not just the huge market at the base of the pyramid. Products such as portable ultrasound machines that have been "reverse innovated" for emerging nations are often hugely popular in Western countries. If MNCs don't design these products, the authors warn, local "emerging giants" will—with wide-rang- ing and game-changing consequences. UNCOMMON SERVICE AUTHORS: Frances Frei and Anne Morriss PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press, US$29.95 SERVICE JOBS represent 80 percent of the U.S. GNP, so why is good service so rare? In this upbeat and highly readable book, the authors isolate "four ser- vice truths" that companies must understand: They can't be good at everything, so they have to choose to perform badly on some dimen- sions. They have to fund great service through high fees, low costs, or some other tradeoff. They can't expect employees to show superhuman dedication, but must create a model that "sets up average people to excel as a mat- ter of routine." And they have to make customers do some of the work, whether it's hunting for the items they want in a cavernous 76 May/June 2012 BizEd warehouse or assembling the final product at home. Frei, a Harvard professor, and Morriss, who is with the Concire Leadership Institute, guide readers through the process of identifying their own core attri- butes, as well as the ones custom- ers really value. Then they, too, can become organizations with "offer- ings, funding strategies, systems, and cultures that set their people up to excel casually." WHAT MATTERS NOW AUTHOR: Gary Hamel PUBLISHER: Jossey-Bass, US$26.95 HAMEL, MANAGEMENT guru and London Business School profes- sor, offers a passionately argued and extraordinarily articulate discussion of everything wrong with management today and what might be done to fix it. He identi- fies five issues that companies need to address or embrace—values, innovation, adaptability, passion, and ideol- ogy—and offers five unblinking, uncompromising essays on each. In a chapter on values, for instance, he heaps scorn and indignation on the scandal-plagued CEOs of the past decade, but then he asks the next hard question: "Are you going to be a values leader or a values laggard? It's easy to excoriate fraud- ster CEOs and greedy bankers, but what about you? … We can't expect others to be good stewards if we're not." He doesn't cut govern- ment regulators any slack, either. "The bomb that blew up the U.S. economy may have been detonated on Wall Street, but it was manufac- tured in Washington, D.C." It's a tough, beautiful, angry, and hopeful love letter to capitalism. A WIDE LENS AUTHOR: Ron Adner PUBLISHER: Portfolio/Penguin, US$29.95 IN THE 1990S, Michelin devel- oped a "run-flat" tire that the