Book Review -- How Stella Saved the Farm

My next read on innovation is a fable called How Stella Saved the Farm: A Tale about Making Innovation Happen. This is just a great book and I look forward to reading Govindarajan's prose book. Of course everything works out in the end, so I enjoy that. The book isn't a tragedy. 

A middle or elementary school person could read this book. Yet its business principles are superb. Let me just summarize some of the elements:

• The problem is that the human farms are big and use farm equipment, while the animal-led farm is small and more manual. How could they possibly compete?
• Their normal is "faster, stronger, more efficient," but it just isn't enough. They need to do something new and different. They have a contest to make proposals.
• The winning proposal is alpaca wool.
• There are all sorts of inter-animal tensions throughout the book. They work through them all. That part might be a little unbelievable, given that these represent people with their varying personalities.
• I note that gathering information from customers is part of their research ("ethnographic study").
• The head horse has to change the new org chart repeatedly. She has to find the right people for the right positions. It involves some trial and error. There's resistance to change and complaints that they don't have the money or capacity to innovate.
• She decides they need a dedicated team. Then they find some overlap. But it is likely building a new company from the ground up.
• It costs way more than they planned. There were fails and complications. 
• The rooster comes up with three laws for running business experiments:
• 1) Learning first, profits second. "If you put learning first--learning through disciplined experimentation--you'll make better decisions and you'll actually get to profitability sooner."
• You make a hypothesis. You predict what will happen. You measure results. You assess lessons learned. You start over.
• 2) The second law is that "inside a big experiment, there are little experiments." I thought of the saying, "Fail often. Fail fast. Fail forward."
• 3) The third law is that the innovation leader's job is to exercise a disciplined experiment. The evaluation of an innovator is whether she has a clear hypothesis, is identifying the most critical unknowns, is investing time and analyzing results, is communicating the plan to the team, is reacting quickly to new information, etc.

This may be the best business book I've ever read.