As I read Madge Meyer's book The Innovator's Path, I could not help but think about my first week at my new job at State Street Bank. I had been working for a competitor for twenty years where I watched as State Street built an unassailable franchise serving the mutual fund industry. Luckily, after twenty years of competing against State Street, I had an opportunity to join the company and manage its largest business, the mutual funds servicing business. That first week told me why they had been consistently successful all those years, and why I had such difficulty competing against them.

Very early during that first week I had many conversations with the senior officials of the company. One of them took me aside and said, “You need to know one thing, you are not working for a bank, you are working for an IT company disguised as a bank.” It became very clear to me why I had such difficulty competing against State Street. I had been working for a bank that thought of itself as a bank and used IT as a “necessary evil.”

State Street very early on figured out what Madge writes about in her book—making innovation business-as-usual. In today's fast-paced, high-tech world, this approach is more important than ever. Any industry using technology, and I would suggest that almost all do, may want to think of itself as an IT company disguised as whatever it is they do—at least when it comes to innovation.

Later during that first week, a young, aggressive salesperson bounded into my office saying he needed my support for a new product, that in his words, “would revolutionize the mutual funds world, and we had to be the first to do this and seize first mover advantage.” He was working with our asset management group, State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), and the American Stock Exchange to develop a mutual fund that could be traded on a stock exchange. The cost advantage would be significant, and therefore, the advisory fee charged would be far less than traditional mutual funds, among the many advantages of such a product. These products were to be known as exchange-traded funds or ETFs. This was 1991, and as the world now knows, State Street offered the first ETF in early 1993, called the Standard and Poor's Depository Receipt, or SPDR, which is today still the largest ETF in the world, within an investment category that has, in fact, revolutionized the mutual funds industry.

So what type of environment exists within a firm that allows an idea like the ETF to be created? That gives an individual the freedom to marshal resources to address a current customer's idea? That would normally consider the idea a threat to the largest and most profitable business of the company, the mutual fund servicing business? How does that idea not get killed somewhere in the normal corporate process of annual budgets, expense cutbacks, organizational jealousies, and the like? The answers, I believe, can be found in Madge's book. Yes, it is about making innovation business-as-usual. But how does that happen? There has to be a discipline and a simple-to-understand methodology if it is to be inculcated within a large organization and adopted as a way of life for so many. It obviously starts with what the organization thinks it is. The innovation doesn't always have to come from IT. It just happens that IT creates a great deal of innovation. Process change, regulatory change, environment, geography, customer needs, and many other things can facilitate innovation.

What Madge Meyer has done in her book is use a simple, common-sense approach to following through with the good idea that all too often dies a premature death. Focusing on the eight disciplines, she carefully describes a set of critical skills for turning a good idea into reality and, many times, into competitive advantage. If you apply them to my ETF example, you will see how practical the discipline is, and how effective it can be.

My aggressive salesperson, long before bringing this idea back to management, spent significant time LISTENING to the customer, the American Stock Exchange, and SSgA, making sure in his mind that it was viable and worth fighting for. He demonstrated his LEADERSHIP by aligning the key stakeholders, including me, to support this vision, which he saw was POSITIONED to succeed. This salesperson needed others to make the product a reality, so he CONNECTED with IT, mutual funds operations, legal, and so on—as Madge says, no one innovates alone. This salesperson was COMMITED to this idea. Courage is needed to put one's career on the line for a new idea. An innovative organization must allow failures to occur, or else others will not try. This salesperson, being a salesperson, PROMOTED the idea throughout the organization, selling it internally just as he would sell a service to a customer. This salesperson demonstrated perseverance and EXECUTED over a sustained period of time. And we didn't stop there. We continue even today to EVOLVE this game-changing innovation.

The best way I can explain it is, without these disciplines, it does not happen. This is why Madge Meyer's book needs to be read, not just by CEOs and other senior managers, but by all those numerous facilitators within the corporate hierarchy who have the power to kill or proceed with an idea. It is only when more people within an organization are employing these disciplines, than are not, that an organization will become truly innovative.