Sunday, November 27, 2011

Managing Innovation: quest for the perfect cookie



Assigned to manage an innovative project, how can we organize it's members for the most efficient and creative output?


Malcolm Gladwell's "The Bakeoff" (The New Yorker, 2005) is a story to introduce the manager to three types of innovative team concepts and lots of fun details about recipes, ingredients, and the food industry.

Project Delta sought to create the perfect healthy and tasty cookie. The three innovative concepts were pitted against each other: Open Source model (citing the success of the Linux operating system), eXtreme Programming (XP), and traditional hierarchy.


The story reports all of the color behind the recipes and struggles of each team type, but most notably demonstrated that open source is not the best model for innovation.



Malcolm Gladwell, The Bakeoff : http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/bakeoff.pdf



I appreciated this article's contrast to Rod Collins "everybody is better than anybody" message so that project managers don't just throw everyone in the room and expect magic to happen.


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Program Manager

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I have delivered management and technology consulting solutions for Deloitte, BearingPoint, Department of the Interior, TRICARE Military Health System, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Raytheon, Lockheed, Northrop, and Boeing on various projects in manufacturing, software development, systems engineering, testing, and ITIL management.