Hello, reader. We are going to have fun and meet some interesting characters, we promise. First, however, let’s detail the essence of this book in plain, simple language.

This is a book about innovation. More specifically, it is about how to make innovation a day-to-day habit in your organization. You eat every day, you sleep every day, and today’s quickly changing world means you should innovate every day. Hence the title Eat, Sleep, Innovate.¹ This book is a practical guide for building a culture of innovation where the behaviors that drive innovation success come naturally.

If you work in a large organization and consume articles and books about innovation, you may be thinking, Hmmm, culture of innovation? I’ve heard this before. What’s next? Another story about the wonders of some hypergrowth company that spends luxuriously on the food in its cafeteria and the trimmings in its game room?

If you’re skeptical, we understand. We’ve been on the frontlines of innovation efforts and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. In our experience, companies are well-intentioned—they want to innovate and they want to build a stable of creative employees—but their attempts usually fail, or, in some cases, completely backfire. Hence the skepticism.

In our quest to unpack and help leaders create cultures of innovation, we have formed an obsession—not with BATs and FAANGs² but, rather, with NO-DETs: normal organizations doing extraordinary things.

Here is a brief story about one such NO-DET: DBS, one of Southeast Asia’s largest banks. Its history is intertwined with its home country, Singapore, which broke off from Malaysia to become an independent country in 1965. Three years later, Singapore’s government founded the Development Bank of Singapore to take over financing activities from the Economic Development Board. That bank grew to become Singapore’s largest bank and was renamed DBS in 2003.

Asian banks are generally conservative, highly regulated organizations. Singapore has a well-earned reputation as an orderly, rule-abiding country. A new CEO, Piyush Gupta, joined DBS in 2009, the same year that Paul joined.³ Over the last decade, DBS has become recognized as a global leader in innovation, winning numerous accolades and becoming the most valuable publicly traded company on Singapore exchanges. Did it buy a high-growth startup and outsource innovation to it? No. Did it dramatically turn over its workforce, replacing boring bankers with mischievous millennials? No. Did it order people to innovate? No.

It’s easy to assume that people can’t change. That lifetime workers have well-worn habits and lack the requisite knowledge to adopt cutting-edge technologies. Many DBS leaders assumed just that. But a few years ago, Adrian Cockcroft, then a development leader from Netflix, came to visit DBS.⁴ Cockcroft described how another bank had visited Netflix and had bemoaned the fact that Netflix clearly had an advantage in attracting young, talented engineers. Cockcroft made two observations. First, he told the bank that the average Netflix engineer was forty years old. Second, he noted that he had hired a good proportion of his engineers from banks and had simply “gotten out of their way.”

The innovators had always been there. It just took something to bring them out.

In Eat, Sleep, Innovate, you’ll learn more about how DBS went from lagging in its local market to being globally recognized as an innovation powerhouse. You will see how the HR department of a leading telecommunications company started an innovation movement and how UNICEF uses its broad reach to find innovative ways to help children around the world. These and other organizations featured in this book are normal. They look like where most people in the world work. But Eat, Sleep, Innovate will show how they are, like all organizations, capable of doing extraordinary things.

Close your eyes and imagine a sunset on a beach, with lapping waves and a gentle breeze. You probably pictured an idyllic landscape and are starting to think about a future vacation (see the sidebar “COVID-19 and Innovation”). Beyond beauty, what else is in this picture? Untapped energy. Wind, water, and light all carry tremendous energy as they move through the world, their intermingling cycles infinitely renewable. You can see and feel their energy directly. But for it to be useful, you must capture, store, and channel it to a useful end versus letting it naturally diffuse and spend itself.

Now close your eyes again and picture the sort of never-ending cubicle farm you would see in movies like Office Space or in cartoons like Dilbert. Your mental image is probably a lot less idyllic. You might be thinking again about your next vacation. Beyond gray walls and a desk, what else is in this picture? Untapped energy, in the form of the organization’s innovation capacity. Every organization houses deep veins of raw human ingenuity or partially formed ideas that could be transformed into massive value if they could only be liberated from their burial spots within the unyielding rock walls of the organization. Even when innovation energy is expended, it is often spent inefficiently or chaotically, yielding at best only a fraction of its potential utility.⁵

The central argument in Eat, Sleep, Innovate is that the world’s biggest untapped source of energy isn’t the wind, water, or sun. It is inside existing organizations, which are brimming with innovation energy. Today that energy is largely constrained and contained. You need to release, harness, and amplify it. This book will show you how.

A few years ago, Scott was in Cambodia with his family.⁶ He was visiting an inspirational organization, a socially oriented venture that provided employment for thousands of desperately poor Cambodian artisans who hand-created garments, carvings, statues, and more. While visiting a silkworm farm connected to the venture, the Anthony family saw a bright blue box. It was called the Ideas Box, and the text on the front said it was “for you, for your colleagues, for your well-being.” Sounds inspirational, right? Look closer. The box had a lock on it. And the lock was so rusted, it was clear that it not been opened recently—or, perhaps, ever.⁷

Companies seeking to spark innovation often instinctively copy artifacts they see in other innovative companies. Maybe they install a well-stocked cafeteria with bright colors or provide scooters. But quick-and-easy artifacts that are simply bolted on and don’t represent and reinforce leadership’s real vision lack soul. And soulless artifacts simply function as “innoganda,” or innovation propaganda.⁸ While innoganda can generate a burst of energy at first, it typically leads to cynicism over the long term.

Culture is a complex, interdependent system. It’s easy to do something different in a single meeting. But having something that changes the day-to-day actions of hundreds, if not thousands, of people is hard. You simply can’t change a system by doing a thing.

This book lays out a system-level way to encourage and enable people to think and act beyond the status quo. Our approach sits at the intersection of four streams of research: organizational culture, habit change, innovation-enabling behaviors, and innovation-enhancing structures and systems.⁹ The four of us—Scott, Andy, and Natalie, as advisers at Innosight, and Paul, as a practitioner at DBS—are connected to and passionate about this literature. Over the last few years, we have sought to augment the literature with additional primary research and field experience (including a 2017–2018 project between Innosight and DBS) to create a practical toolkit that brings clarity to the often-fuzzy topic of culture change. Our perspective is that success requires focusing on changing people’s daily habits through a series of interventions, and then ensuring that the new habits stick and scale. We’ll have plenty of time to go into specifics, but here’s the “CliffsNotes” version:¹⁰

1. Culture change starts by getting granular and defining the specific behaviors that enable innovation success. We like to say that innovators are curious, customer-obsessed, collaborative, adept in ambiguity, and empowered. But the desired behaviors may vary from company to company.
2. You have to acknowledge and defeat a tough enemy called the shadow strategy—the hidden but powerful forces that prioritize today over tomorrow. Doing this requires moving beyond innoganda campaigns to concerted efforts to shape day-to-day habits.
3. To succeed in these efforts, borrow from the habit-change literature to encourage desired behaviors and overcome identified blockers by hacking people’s habits with BEANs: behavior enablers, artifacts, and nudges.
4. You can create an alpha version of a culture of innovation for your team, group, or department via a six-week sprint that includes a focused BEANstorming session.
5. Ensuring that change sticks and scales requires integrating day-to-day habits into supporting systems and structures, most notably those that determine how your company allocates resources.

Here is a more detailed roadmap for readers who like to know what they are getting into. We have broken the book into two parts. Part I lays the book’s foundation with four long-form chapters and three companion case studies.¹¹ Chapter 1 starts with definitions. The phrase “culture of innovation” itself is a barrier, as it is typically used in such a vague and ambiguous way and is ascribed to so many wildly different situations that it has become almost meaningless. We define a culture of innovation as one in which the behaviors that drive innovation success come naturally. Chapter 1 parses this definition, describes the behaviors that drive innovation success in plain language, and shows those behaviors in action at UNICEF. Following this chapter is a detailed case study describing how The Salvation Army’s Eastern Territory is seeking to create more “innovation chefs.” Chapter 2 starts with a puzzle. Why is it that humans are born innovators, but organizations struggle with it? A story about Scott’s son “Happy Harry” and Microsoft missing the search-advertising market highlights the problem (the shadow strategy that institutionalizes inertia), and the ensuring case study about DBS’s journey shows it is solvable.

How do you create a culture of innovation? Don’t bring in foosball tables. Don’t run useless campaigns exhorting people to give it their all on Wacky Idea Wednesday, Free-Thinking Friday, or, heaven forbid, Special-Purpose Sunday. Instead, follow the guidance of chapter 3 and hack habits with BEANs. Inspired by the habit-change literature, a BEAN is a behavior enabler, artifact, and nudge. We’ll describe what a successful BEAN looks like, and share stories of BEANs that work, such as DBS’s Gandalf Scholarship, Tata’s Dare to Try award, and Adobe’s Kickbox program. The case study after this chapter details an intervention at a DBS tech center in Hyderabad and describes keys to successfully creating a BEAN.

Chapter 4 will draw on a case example from the HR department at a large Asian telecommunications company to provide step-by-step guidance on how to conduct a six-week sprint capped by a BEANstorming session to develop practical interventions and catalyze a group of change agents.

Part II of Eat, Sleep, Innovate contains practical tips and tools and inspiring stories to help you drive culture change that sticks and scales. Short sections are organized into chapters tied to the phases a would-be innovator must follow: discovery (chapter 5), blueprinting (chapter 6), assessing and testing (chapter 7), and moving forward (chapter 8). Each phase contains example BEANs, “BEAN boosters” (that help amplify the impact of selected BEANs), case studies, and practical tools.

Eat, Sleep, Innovate concludes with reflections, a process for culture change, and our call to action. The book’s appendix contains reference material: our culture of innovation bookshelf, a culture-change literature review, and our “bag of BEANs,” with brief summaries of 101 BEANs. The book’s companion website has a range of additional tools and templates to help you put the ideas of Eat, Sleep, Innovate immediately into action.

While the four of us come at the problem from different perspectives, we are united in our goal to address the challenge of constrained, contained innovation potential. We are convinced that organizations are capable of so much more than they realize. We’ve seen firsthand the awesome power of established organizations combining the unique assets that they’ve built over the years with behaviors that are consistent with successful innovation. The book draws on our collective seventy-plus years of field experience working with organizations all around the globe on these challenges and decades of accumulated research from some of the world’s leading academics—but that doesn’t mean it is easy.

Culture change is not a paint-by-number exercise. The solution for your organization needs to be tailored to your unique goals, current context, and history. This should be good news for leaders who might look admiringly at innovation icons like Apple, Disney Pixar, Google, or 3M while simultaneously sensing that these models are not replicable within their own walls. What we will share are battle-tested ideas that work, providing you with the language, the tools, and—perhaps most critically—the confidence to create your own culture of innovation.

1. 1. The authors proposed Unleashing Innovation or Hacking Innovation as a title. Our publisher thankfully had a much better idea (although it did take some getting used to on our part)! And hello, footnote reader. We are glad to have you with us. The notes section at the end of the book has sources and references. The footnotes are here to expand on the text and to have a bit of fun (see, it isn’t a boring book). You don’t really need to read them. But you should.

2. 2. BAT is the acronym for Chinese internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (with market capitalization of $1.1 trillion); FAANG is for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (with market capitalization, including Google’s parent Alphabet, of $4.1 trillion). While these companies are all interesting, their cultures are too intertwined with their origin stories and charismatic founders (like Jack Ma, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page) to be easily replicable.

3. 3. That’s coauthor and faithful Norwich City Football Club supporter Paul Cobban. You’ll see Paul, along with Andy, Natalie, and Scott, throughout the manuscript. We debated whether to call each of these people “coauthor” upon first reference in every chapter, but we figure you, dear reader, are smart enough to follow along without such a reference.

4. 4. As of the writing of this book, Cockcroft was at Amazon Web Services.

5. 5. The doodle that goes with this paragraph is from Paul, who contributed more than fifty distinct doodles for this book. If you are looking for a different memento from your wedding, give him a buzz!

6. 6. Scott Anthony, one of the book’s coauthors. (We’re going to stop doing this soon.)

7. 7. One of our favorite reviewers (Karl Ronn) said, “This should be an Internet meme.” Scott’s fourteen-year-old son would consider it life-changing if his dad were connected to a meme. Maybe not in a good way, though. He is fourteen, after all.

8. 8. Some call this “innovation theater.” Innoganda is shorter. Take that, Steve Blank and Eric Ries (but read their stuff; it is great).

9. 9. You can see the books we found most influential in each stream in the “Culture of Innovation Bookshelf” in the book’s appendix.

10. 10. Natalie and Scott remember, um, augmenting their detailed reading of assigned books in high school with these short synthesis guides known for their signature yellow and black covers. They definitely never replaced reading the book. For sure.

11. 11. A typical business-book chapter is roughly six thousand words, or about twenty pages in print. The chapters and case studies in part I of this book range in length from about one thousand to eight thousand words, and the DBS case study is actually longer than the chapter that precedes it. For those looking for monotonic consistency, we apologize, but this is, after all, a book about creativity and innovation. Go with it!