My last few posts have dealt with books that look around the world for case studies and examples, and this post shares that perspective. Beverly Schwartz’s new book, Rippling: How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation Throughout the World reveals how a wide variety of countries, the U.S. included, have seen ideas turn into action which then spread change throughout the nation.

Consider the Center for Inspired Teaching in the U.S., which puts the educational focus on the student, where they find ways to solutions on their own, and by doing so, own the process and are more inspired to keep learning. The teacher is merely there to guide them, not to tell the students everything and then expect them to remember every detail.

Or the DMT Mobile Toilets in Nigeria, where mobile toilets are placed in areas of need, where private toilets per household do not exist. This effort has cut down substantially on environmental waste, and the communities where they exist are involved in building, maintaining and encouraging use of the facilities – which historically was a taboo topic.

These examples of shifting the perspective of a group of people, who then drive that change in others, are not only inspiring stories in themselves, but also great metaphors for how teams within business can create projects with the “rippling” effect of change built into them, creating a more powerful and successful venture.

Each example is insightful, as the writer is VP of marketing at Ashoka, the world’s largest association of leading social entrepreneurs. Whether you want new ideas on how to create and launch change efforts, or to simply read real current examples of some highly interesting, and likely unknown, stories of positive efforts throughout the world, this is an engaging read.

Following up my recent post on Jugaad Innovation, which detailed Western companies that looked at non-Western innovation as inspiration, today I’m reading Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble’s Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere. What’s interesting about this book, is the authors are calling companies to actually innovate from within non-rich countries, and then tweak that innovation to adapt to richer nations.

If this sounds over-ambitious, consider Gatorade, and example from the book, whose fundamental recipe began in Bangladesh to treat victims of cholera. When British medical journals reported on the success of the treatment, this information reached the University of Florida, with the idea being, “If such a treatment worked well for cholera patients, it would surely work for healthy football players.”

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, is quoted in the book, supporting the concept of Reverse Innovation:

“If we don’t come up with innovations in poor countries and take them global, new competitors from the developing world…will. That’s a bracing prospect. GE has long had tremendous respect for traditional rivals like Siemens, Philips, and Rolls-Royce. But we know how to compete with them.
They will never destroy GE. The emerging giants, on the other hand, very well could.”

Statements like this are not only a concern for GE people, but for the rest of us as well. The economic impact of outside companies destroying our own giants is something we all need to pay attention to. And this book helps put the situation into a clear perspective while offering a way to change.

Here’s a final interesting statement from the authors themselves, that sums up why the concept needs to be taken seriously:

“One person with ten dollars to spend has a completely different set of wants and needs than ten people with one dollar to spend. That’s why it’s unrealistic to expect rich world products and services to have much of an impact in poor countries. Doing more business in high-growth hot spots – aka poor nations – requires much more than ramping up sales, distribution, and production. It requires innovation. Reverse innovation.”

This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in how concepts of innovation need to change in order to succeed, and an even more important book for those who can actually take part on the level the authors advise.

Innovation continues to be a concern for Western business, as manufacturing struggles and local movements continue to push toward supporting regional companies and products. The issue lies in how either of those efforts can gain more leverage by innovating processes and products.

Navi Radjou, Jaideep Parabhu and Simone Ahuja encourage companies to discover new innovation practices by looking East, in their book Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth. The book is filled with case studies about companies like 3M, Apple, Facebook, GE, Google, IBM, and PepsiCo who looked to countries like India, China, and even Africa to learn new, bottom-up approaches to business and innovation.

The six underlying principles of the book are:

- Seek opportunity in adversity
- Do more with less
- Think and act flexibly
- Keep it simple
- Include the margin
- Follow your heart

Although it all sounds rather easy, the book will show how these principles in action transformed the organizations, which is not such an easy thing to accomplish. And through the case studies presented, such as an Indian villager that developed a refrigerator made entirely of clay, it becomes clear that costs and materials can be re-examined in many cases. In essence, this is an interesting book for leaders that want to think differently about how they approach business, and not spend unnecessary money and energy to do so.

For some, relationships are easy to talk about. For others, that discussion is avoided, either out of fear, ego, or the perception that it’s just not a topic to verbalize. So, even talking about them can be complicated, and being active within them, even more so.

There are many historical examples of leaders who had great relationships, and because of that, experienced great success. Quite often, success is dependent on the quality of the relationships a leader possesses. And, of course, the opposite is also true. When relationships are bad, leaders struggle.

This is the focus of Diana McLain Smith’s recent book The Elephant in the Room: How Relationships Make or Break the Success of Leaders and Organizations. The book begins:

“Relationships? Get over it!” a leader once told me, looking askance. “We’re not married. We just have to work together.” Yes, and that’s exactly the point, I replied. You do have to work together, and if you don’t get your relationships right, a lot can go wrong – both for you and your organization.”

From there, various examples of positive and negative relationships among well-known leaders are discussed, identifying along the way how we readers can learn from both scenarios to help develop our own relationships. In fact, this book is less “business stories” than it is an educational guide, helping readers understand the complexity of relationships and following with extensive direction on how to strengthen and transform them.

Relationships can be affected in the moment through a surprising turn of events. They can also change over time based on patterns and assumptions. Our understanding of this, and our ability to positively manage relationships for both short and long-term can be integral to our success, and is the aim of Smith’s work with this book.