I often get a quizzical look when I ask, “Are you an innovator?”

Some people answer right away, but most have to think about it. There are several reasons why it can be a difficult question to answer. First of all, innovators are generally recognized after the fact, not while they are innovating. For example, in 2007, Sal Khan was a hedge fund manager creating YouTube videos for his cousin in his spare time. Five years later, after founding Khan Academy, his free online school where lessons are taught via video lectures, he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Sal Khan's achievement is a perfect example of what Marc Andreessen, the Internet visionary and co-founder and partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, says in describing how innovation happens: “Companies innovate by fostering a culture that strives to identify, embrace, and reward change. The idea that seems trivial today could be game changing tomorrow.”

Like Sal, most innovators are people who put their energy, intellect, and passion into achieving particular goals or solving specific problems. Like Sal, a few come up with the right solution in the right place at the right time, striking such a chord that they end up impacting an entire industry or culture or world. Unlike Sal, however, most innovators don't quite change the world, yet their solutions can still create significant value, at a smaller scale.

There's a second reason why my question is difficult for many people to answer. And that's because there's no universally accepted definition for innovator, or for what an innovation is.

Defining Innovation

For the purposes of this book, I suggest we think of innovation, specifically business innovation, very broadly. I like to define it as any new idea or solution that creates business value and increases competitive advantage. It can be a new or different process, product, service, strategy … anything, as long as it creates value and increases competitive advantage. I also suggest we think of a business innovator as anyone who is developing or adopting a new idea or solution in order to accomplish these ends.

I know there are people who will see this definition as too broad, too all-encompassing. And I understand why. Casting such a wide net somewhat diminishes the exceptional achievements of those who have brought about truly revolutionary change. However, that is a very exclusive club, and their achievements are captured elsewhere. I'm writing this book for a different purpose: My focus is not on the nature of radical, game-changing ideas and solutions, but rather on creating business value and increasing competitive advantage by doing things differently and better. Sometimes that means radical game-changing ideas, sometimes it means simple yet meaningful change, and generally it falls somewhere in between.

Let me give you an example from my own experience.

Making Innovation Business-as-Usual

When I was hired by State Street Corporation, one of the world's leading investment service firms, the company was already in the midst of unprecedented global expansion and preparing for even more. In Europe and Asia-Pacific, State Street was growing faster than the market itself. The company was also transforming its operating model and centralizing certain business processes in multiple global locations. As the head of State Street's global infrastructure services group, one of my first major initiatives was to overhaul the company's entire network to provide the foundation for a series of innovative solutions. Here, though, I want to focus in on a specific innovation that we developed to solve a particularly vexing problem.

Due to the nature of State Street's business, we cannot tolerate time delays as our data travels from one point to another, so we historically built local data centers in buildings located near our users. As a result, State Street had a very large number of these data centers and communications rooms, in various sizes, scattered around the world. You can imagine how expensive it was to build, equip, manage, and maintain these data centers. When State Street began to rapidly expand globally, we experienced increasing challenges trying to secure suitable locations, preparing buildings, installing our equipment, and getting everything online in time for use.

A large part of State Street's growth strategy was the acquisition of other companies in Europe and Asia. Acquisitions have very tight, nonnegotiable timeframes for change of control. They are also predicated on specific cost-saving models. I knew we needed an alternative solution if we were going to continue meeting business requirements involving deadlines and cost savings.

I challenged my team, telling them that we were no longer going to replicate individual data centers. At first, some members of the team were concerned that a new approach might itself jeopardize our ability to meet business expectations and timetables. However, a heart-to-heart discussion along with a close look at the facts made the case that the old ways would not work for much longer. Our changing and growing company needed a new kind of support from us, and needed it quickly. My team took on the challenge, and we all got busy looking for a solution.

At that time, a new technology called a network acceleration device was just being developed. We recognized that if it worked well, it could reduce network delays enough to allow employees in these new offices to access their data remotely from regional and enterprise data centers, rather than local ones. It would have to work so well that these employees would not even notice the difference.

Network accelerator technology was so new at that time that our network team had just started testing it and thought it would take another six months before we could implement it. That was not good enough. Our New Business Integration (NBI) team had a tight deadline to meet for a critical business initiative, and I didn't want another local data center. So, I told the NBI team that we had to take on some risk: We would go ahead and install the network accelerators—which were not quite proven—at the site. If it worked, the problem was solved. If it didn't … well, we would have to build a new data center at the site as quickly as we could.

Once the plan was set, we met with the firm that was developing the accelerator technology and asked them to provide their best support. They sent their top engineer to our remote location, and he worked side-by-side with our own team. Remarkably, they got the network accelerators installed and working beautifully. Response times were the same as for data centers situated locally. The team then focused on integrating this new technology with other advanced network, server, and desktop virtualization technologies to develop an end-to-end solution. Within weeks we had an entirely new way to support real-time global business processing without requiring IT infrastructure (including servers, storage, e-mail, and backup) at local offices. The solution was so ground-breaking that we even acquired a registered trademark—“Zero Footprint, Maximum Impact”™—and won several industry awards for our innovative solution.

But the most important part of the story is not what we did or how we did it or even how innovative it was. It's the impact that our solution had. To the end-users, of course, the impact was invisible. In fact, that was our goal! In the infrastructure domain, we inherently understand that the less they notice us, the better. To the business, however, the impact was substantial and strategic.

As one might expect, the most visible impact was a dramatic reduction in technology expenses associated with business growth. Rather than having to provision every small office with a specially outfitted room filled with servers and storage, we could leverage existing data centers and equipment. In addition to avoiding costs, this allowed us to greatly reduce the lead-time and staff-effort normally required to prepare new offices or integrate acquired ones. By reducing costs and lead-time, we also reduced project risk for the business, especially for deadline-driven acquisitions.

The benefits went even beyond individual projects. The centralization of infrastructure and application data within regional data centers brought about greater control and resiliency. It eliminated downtime for maintenance and ushered in immediate recovery for local offices, significantly improving business continuity, an increasingly important requirement for operating in a global economy. And it ensured that effective management, security, retention, and other key business controls would be in place, addressing the customary challenges brought on by significant growth.

Soon afterward, this strategic solution became State Street's standard operating model, and the company has continued to reap the strategic benefits for many years. Our work created a brand new and valuable competitive advantage for the company and made a major contribution to rapid business growth and enduring global success.

We had taken a calculated risk—integrating new and unproven technology into a larger business solution. And it paid off. Our team was positively thrilled with our collaborative triumph, and the industry recognition we received became a major milestone in everyone's personal careers. My favorite part of the story, though, is the motto the team repeated every time we were congratulated for our efforts: “It's just another day!”

That's what this book is about: making innovation business-as-usual.

Different Contexts

Since my background and experience has been with large corporations, most of the material you will find in this book has also been written in that context. However, in developing the book, I was very fortunate to have received input from many renowned innovators and prominent executives with an extraordinary range of experiences. If I wasn't convinced before, I certainly am now: There are many more similarities than differences when it comes to introducing something new, regardless of the context in which we are operating.

My background has also included technology and management. I began my career as an IBM scientific programmer assigned to NASA, programming the onboard computer for the last three Gemini space flights. Over the years, I moved into IT (information technology) infrastructure, which soon became my specialty. As I mentioned, the best infrastructure is the least noticed infrastructure. Often, the role of infrastructure becomes most visible when it's not working. For example, prior to Superbowl XLVII, how many football fans ever gave a moment's thought to stadium lighting?

I bring up my background in IT infrastructure because it has lessons to offer aspiring innovators in many different fields. Innovation is challenging in IT infrastructure for several reasons. First, except to a small segment of the population, there's nothing “cool” about infrastructure. In most corporations, there's not much interest, funding, or support for good infrastructure ideas when everything is running smoothly. Generally, the much “cooler” revenue-generating ideas get the most attention. And by the time things conveniently ignored in the existing underlying infrastructure are not running smoothly, well, it's too late. We're suddenly getting the wrong kind of attention! To make matters even more challenging, infrastructure demand grows and changes with unparalleled speed and frequency. We all recognize the impact that trends like mobile computing, web conferencing, and social media have had on our own usage patterns, so it's not difficult to imagine the extent of infrastructure growth and the amount of changes required to support these. Moreover, rapidly evolving business trends such as globalization, regulation, and outsourcing have a similarly significant impact on infrastructure demand, although few business decision maker have reason to recognize that in advance. It is up to infrastructure leaders to anticipate and plan for business and technology trends, so that by the time something is needed, it's always ready.

So confronting such challenges through the years, I devised strategies and techniques for innovating without the advantages of an R&D budget, customer demand, or obvious competitive necessity. These strategies and techniques, or disciplines as I call them, can be successfully applied in any environment, whether currently “cool” or not.

There's a second reason why I think IT infrastructure is a good model for other business areas and disciplines, and that's due to the impact that recent advances, such as the cloud, social media, big data, and analytics will have on business innovation going forward.

Technology is integral to every business and industry now, and will play an increasingly critical and strategic role in the future. Because of big data and analytics, the information available to companies will be far more sophisticated and powerful, allowing analyses, predictions, and insights that were never before possible. When combined with the new capabilities offered by mobile, cloud, social media, and other still-emerging trends, innovation possibilities are magnified immeasurably. They are also democratized. A wider than ever group of employees will have increasing opportunities to innovate strategically, creating business value and increasing competitive advantage in ways that they never could before.

I asked John Swainson, president of Dell Software and former CEO of CA Technologies, if he could discuss the nature of technological innovation as it has come to be practiced today. His response aligns completely with the point of view readers will find in the chapters that follow:

The Eight Disciplines

Then where do we go from here? How do we begin the journey to understanding and making innovation a way of life for ourselves and our organizations? This is where the eight disciplines come in. Readers may be wondering: “… is she really saying there are only eight things people need to know in order to be successful innovators?” No, unfortunately not. It's just that these eight disciplines are the ones that I've seen even the most competent, skilled, and hardworking people struggle with. These aren't the only difficulties, of course, but they're the major ones. Once we understand and put the disciplines to use, we can achieve better focus with our energy, intellect, and passion. We can better create business value and increase competitive advantage by pursuing the ideas and opportunities that propel them forward.

Also, as any Chinese person will tell you, if you must choose a number, choose eight—it's the most auspicious number we have! And it also happens to be just about the upper limit of what people can typically remember, not that there's a need to memorize these disciplines. If they apply to us, we'll know right away. However, for those of us who do have a reason to memorize them, I have leveraged a simple naming convention to make it easier. I've chosen just one word to represent each discipline, and then doubled up on the first letter so there are two Ls, two Ps, two Cs, and two Es: Listen, Lead, Position, Promote, Connect, Commit, Execute, and Evolve.

In naming and organizing these eight disciplines, of course, I needed to choose an order. It would probably be confusing, I thought, to put Listen after Commit, for example. However, these disciplines are not intended to be seen as individual elements of a linear process. Not at all. Instead, we should regard them as competencies that successful people carry with them everywhere they go. Much like the five senses, they may not all apply at any given moment in time, but each of the eight should always be on the ready every waking moment.

Here, I'll mention them each briefly. Each one is the subject of its own chapter in the pages that follow.

Many people believe that the most common challenge facing corporate innovators is other people's “natural” resistance to change. I don't believe that at all. Sure, we will always encounter people who are stuck in the mud and unwilling to consider new and better ways of doing things. However, I think that most of the people we encounter on a daily basis just want to feel that they are part of the solution, not part of the problem. And they will usually feel—and become—one or the other based on our expectations of them. That's why our goal, as innovation leaders, is not to convince people to support our creative, new ideas. Rather, our goal is to inspire and support people in seeing, seizing, and achieving new and better ways of creating business value. And our mission is to create an environment where the word natural describes our approach to innovation. Each of the eight disciplines in this book provides principles and techniques to help innovators to achieve that mission, clearing the path for themselves, their teams, and their organizations.

Dean Kamen, the renowned inventor and entrepreneur, spoke to me about innovation in a way that is similar to what we did at State Street when we challenged our team to find a new way to approach our data networks. As Dean put it:

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In the chapters that follow, I give you a closer look at the essential nature of the eight disciplines. I introduce you to three different levels of effectiveness for each discipline, which you can use to assess your current and desired performance. I provide workplace-proven techniques to help you adopt the disciplines and pass them on to company teams. I discuss my own experiences using the techniques and provide a few selected case studies showing them at work. Finally, in the context of everything I've talked about previously, I provide interviews and insights from some of the world's most noted innovators and leaders.

To start, then, let's turn to Listen, the first of the eight disciplines of innovation and the foundation of all successful change.