The Three-Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation 04 -14

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The Three-Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation

This book is about Strategy Innovation and Business Models.

This book is a must for you, whether you are a Business School, Management Faculty, Management Professional or a Business owner.

The author Professor Vijay Govindarajan (VG) has requested me to promote this book among my friends and contacts. I am trying to do my bit, firstly because it is an excellent tool to practice innovation and strategy and secondly because I owe a lot to VG by way of the learning I have received through his works and lectures.

Prof. Vijay Govindarajan serves on both Harvard Business School and Tuck School of Business faculty. He is Marvin Bower Fellow at Harvard Business School and Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck School of Business Hanover.

About “The Three Box Solution”

We need critical and some times even competitive skills sets to keep a thriving business growing and still keep reinventing it. Doing both simultaneously is a challenge, that many executives find it hard to cope with.

Even Ambidexterity falls short of making an executive capable of handling both. A simple tool is needed to equip managers to work on both the aspects on day to basis. VG thinks that there is a third equally big problem which is highly intractable, and that is to forget the yesterday’s values and beliefs that make the organization stuck with the past. VG feels that “The Three Box solution” is a strategic solution for these problems. It also aligns the organizations and teams on the same plane for innovation.

 How to Innovate and Execute. Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business--one that is still thriving--while dramatically reinventing it? How do you envision a change in your current business model before a crisis forces you to abandon it? Innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan expands the leader's innovation tool kit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organization's energy, time, and resources--in balanced measure--across what he calls "the three boxes": Box 1: The present--Manage the core business at peak profitability;

Box 1 :  This deals with the process of running the core business efficiently at peak and using linear innovation within the business model to extend brands and /or offer new products.

Box 2: The past--Abandon ideas, practices, and attitudes that could inhibit innovation; Box 3: The future--Convert breakthrough ideas into new products and businesses. The three-box framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring these different sets of behaviors and activities across all levels of the organization. Supported with rich company examples--GE, Mahindra & Mahindra, Hasbro, IBM, United Rentals, and Tata Consultancy Services--and testimonies of leaders who have successfully used this framework, this book solves once and for all the practical dilemma of how to align an organization on the critical but competing demands of innovation.

Box 3 :  This deals with the methodology for generating breakthrough ideas and converting them into products and  businesses. The non linear future is built by experiments that tests assumptions and resolves uncertainties. New thinking either strengthens the idea or reveals its weakness.

With the three boxes kept in balance a business can change dynamically in time.  By controlling the behavior of the boxes, organizations can make inventing future a daily activity over a period of time rather than making it a one time do or die activity. Simply put the future is shaped by what is done or not done today. 

Inspiration from Hindu mythology and the Trimurti of Brahma Vishnu and Mahesh. VG links very interestingly to Hindu  mythology to "The Three Box Solution

Please read further to find it out for yourself.

"In Hindu faith, the three main gods are Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma. Vishnu is the god of preservation, Shiva is the god of destruction, and Brahma is the god of creation. The triumvirate of familiar Hindu deities corresponds to the work of sustaining a thriving business. Like Vishnu, the firm must preserve its existing core; like Shiva, it must destroy unproductive vestige of the past; and like Brahma, it must create a potent new future that will replenish what time and circumstances have destroyed.

Hindu myth makers paired each of the three gods with symbolically relevant wives. Vishnu whose wife is Lakshmi, who bestows wealth, just as Box 1 produces current profits. Shiva's wife is Parvathi, who symbolises power, a vital Box 2 necessity when selectively destroying the past. Brahma is betrothed to Saraswti, who symbolizes creativity and knowledge-the critical inputs for Box 3 innovations and wellspring of future profits.

According to Hindu philosophy, creation-preservation and destruction is a continues cycle without beginning or end. Each of three gods plays an equally important role creating and maintaining all forms of life.

Further the Hinduism states that, while the changes can be quite dramatic, the processes leading to those changes are quite evolutionary involving many smaller steps. Consistent with this philosophy, the work of sustaining an enterprise is a rhythmic and dynamic process on that never ends.

I have never before encountered an organization that has encoded the Three-Box Solution is not its organization scheme as Mu Sigma, a rapidly growing decision science and big data firm with head quarters in Chicago and development center in Bangalore. Inspired by the stories from Grandmother from mythologies, Mu Sigma founder and CEO Dhiraj Rajaram has used the three main deities of the Hindu faith to conceive a sustainably harmonized approach to the cycles of preservation, destruction and creation."

A Tool Kit is also provided for the implementation of “The three Box Solution”

You can view the short trailer video Here


View the video of  Prof. Vijay Govindarajan's one hour lecture on The Three Box Solution at ISB

The book is published Harvard Publishing

In India the book is available at www.amazon.in

Price : 

hard Cover :   Rs. 746

Kindle edition : Rs. 1,310

In United states it is available  at  www.amazon.com

Price :

Hard cover: USD 20.71

Kindle : USD  19.72