Hack:
Please Don't Rate This Post 5 for Detail - Use Principles, Not Recipes

By Alastair Dryburgh

October 26, 2011 at 1:41am

Moonshots

Amplify imagination

Rethink the philosophical foundations of management

Summary

There is no recipe for innovation - after all, if someone has written down the recipe, it can't be innovative any longer.

There are however principles.

What matters is understanding the difference.

Problem

Let me illustrate the difference between a principle and a recipe. In my kitchen I have a cookbook with a recipe for chinese style chicken with cashew nuts. It's a good recipe, in the sense that I just need to follow the steps and get a consistent, tasty result. However, it's always the same dish.

If I wanted to innovate in the kitchen, I would need to go beyond the recipe and understand the principles of the dish. One of these is that of contrast of textures - the softness of the chicken contrasts with the crunchiness of the celery and cashew nuts. This gives me a clue as to what sort of innovations might work, but doesn't offer any guarantees that my experiment will be a success (substitute the chicken with banana? Don't think so).

Solution

Thus it is with business. We can study the recipes which others have used for success, but we need to adapt them to come up with what works for us. This needs two things:

an understanding of the principles behind the recipe;
an understanding of our own uniqueness and idiosyncracy, so that we can use what we see to come up with a solution that only we could use.

Practical Impact

When you want to learn from someone else, don't try to apply the recipe. Rather, ask yourself and your team "that's an interesting idea. How can we use that to do something unique?"

First Steps

I could expand, but I won't.

You need to register in order to submit a comment.