‘Innovate – 90 Days to Transform Your Business' by Dr. Rekha Shetty, corporate consultant and founder of Mindspower, is a business self-help book, one that promises to introduce the ‘culture of innovation' to your company through a series of steps in, obviously, 90 days.
Shetty's credentials are certainly impressive — she's been in the corporate innovation business for 25 years and has a number of interesting case studies to her credit.
However, the launch of the book at Landmark, which promised a panel discussion on the subject, ended up as a series of lengthy speeches by the executives on the panel and less of a discussion. The audience interaction was cut short to just two questions and one comment for lack of time.
Still, the audience was given some insight into why constant corporate innovation was so essential, with ringing endorsements on how effective Shetty's toolkit had been when applied practically in the past.
“If you can't sense change, you can't survive in today's environment, and that's where innovation comes in handy,” said V. Narasimhan, executive director, Brakes India Foundry Division. “We worked with Dr. Rekha on this 90-day programme two years ago — it is eminently practicable.”
Counter-intuitively, Shetty suggests in the book that innovation and creativity can be boiled down to a mathematical formula which can be applied to daily corporate life. “If you want a culture of innovation, it has to be a formula that everyone employs, from doorman to chairman,” she said. “I wrote this book so there would be a map that could be picked up and used by anybody.”
Shekhar Arora, executive director, HR, Ashok Leyland, addressed this apparent contradiction, saying, “In the beginning I disagreed with her, saying that you can't have innovation bound by structure or process; it just happens. But she's proved me wrong many times over.”
K. Pandiarajan of Ma Foi gave the audience a feel of what was between its covers. “There are a lot of business books on discovery, invention and innovation, but this one is nicely anchored in the Indian context, crafted around the navarasas and, for example, powerfully linking the ancient art of kalari to ideational fluency,” he said.
