Tag Archives: publishing

Your Chance to Help Change Change

Your Chance to Help Change ChangeMy first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire was designed to help organizations identify and remove barriers to innovation, but readers also found it to be a great primer on how to take a structured, sustainable approach to innovation, and as a result the book has found its way into university courses and libraries around the world.

I’ve been thinking over the last few years about where I could provide the most value in a follow-up book, and it came to me that innovation is really all about change and that where most organizations fail to achieve innovation is in successfully making all of the changes necessary to transform their inventions into innovations. At the same time, the world has changed, the pace of change is accelerating and organizations are struggling to cope with the speed of changes required of them, including the digital transformation they need to make.

So, my next book, this time for Palgrave Macmillan, will focus on highlighting the best practices and next practices of organizational change. And where does any successful change effort begin?

With good planning. But it is really hard for most people to successfully plan a change effort, because it is hard to visualize everything that needs to be considered and everything that needs to be done to affect the changes necessary to support an innovation, a digital transformation effort, a merger integration, or any other kind of needed organizational change.

But my Change Planning Toolkit™ and my new book (January 2016) are being designed to help you get everyone literally all on the same page for change. Both the book and my collaborative, visual Change Planning Toolkit™ are nearly complete. But before they are, I’d like to engage you, the intelligent, insightful Innovation Change Management community to help contribute your wisdom and experience to the book.

I’m looking for a few change management tips and quotes attributable to you (not someone else) to include in the book along with the other best practices and next practices of organizational change that I’ve collected and the introduction to my Change Planning Toolkit™ that I’m preparing.

It’s super simple to contribute. Just fill out the form, and the best contributions will make it into the book or into a series of articles that I’ll publish here and on a new site focused on organizational change that I’m about ready to launch.

I look forward to seeing your great organizational change quotes and tips!

UPDATE: The book is now out! Grab a copy here:


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Seth Godin and Amazon – The Domino Project

Will the Innovation Dominoes Fall and Disrupt the Book Publishing Industry?

Seth Godin and Amazon - The Domino Project“The enemy is not piracy, the enemy is obscurity.”Tim O’Reilly

I came across a TechCrunch TV interview with Seth Godin today about his future publishing plans.

I’ve been wondering what Seth meant when he told me last year at the World Innovation Forum that he would never publish another traditional book. Here is the video:

Now, he has made it clear what he meant, and just what his future plans are in the below video from Tech Crunch. His plans have a name, The Domino Project, and it is a publishing house venture he is undertaking with Amazon and it starts with a simple question:

How do you make a book spreadable?

Right now books work very hard against being spreadable, and in Amazon’s continuing quest to evolve the book business beyond just selling ebooks and blogs on Kindle, they apparently approached Seth Godin, gave him a blank sheet of paper to envision a new way of approaching book publishing. He described this collaboration with Amazon – The Domino Project – through a series of questions:

What happens if we allowed you to buy a 5-pack for only slightly more than one book? Wouldn’t you then give four of them away to people who would be interested in reading them?

What happens if we allowed people to share a Kindle book for free for a certain period of time and then try to figure out how to make money from it?

Can you dream big enough?

Can you do something that is worth doing, or will you hold back and play it safe?

Amazon will be working directly with authors – including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Godin’s new book will of course be included (and will be on initiative). He also mentioned that the trend of these new books will be towards the spectrum of manifestos. Traditional book publishers can’t do 96 page books, but The Domino Project can. Godin says that the success of the effort will be measured on whether or not the first 10,000 people who get the book, actually share it.

So, what was the most depressing part of the interview?

“The average American buys one book a year.”

Will The Domino Project successfully disintermediate the traditional publishing houses and transform how authors go about publishing book? Is there anything here that is actually new? What do you think?

Here’s the video interview if you would like to watch it for yourself:

Seth Godin’s new book Poke the Box will be The Domino Project’s first title and it will come as a limited edition, a hardcover, a Kindle ebook, an audiobook, a 5-pack, and a 52-pack.

Oh, and if you don’t have my a copy of my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire already, it’s available on Amazon as a hardcover or a Kindle eBook, or from other great physical and online booksellers:

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

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