Market Rebels: Professor Rao's New Masterpiece

I confess that I am biased when it comes to Hayagreeva (Huggy) Rao's work. We are good friends and work on various projects including an executive program on Customer-Focused Innovation and writing projects, such as our recent article on The Ergonomics of Innovation.   Huggy is great to work with because he not only is deeply smart, he is an unusually broad and open-minded academic.  And, also unlike many academics, nearly everything he says and writes is clear and easy to understand.  If you want to see Huggy at his best, check his new book Market Rebels: How Activists Make Or Break Radical Innovations, which will be published by Princeton next month.  Don't let the academic press put you off, this is an engaging and useful book, showing how innovations ranging from the automobile to micro-brewing spread -- and why many innovations (like the Segway) did not. 

The book is full of useful ideas, but perhaps the central one is that, if you want to mobilize networks of people and markets to embrace and spread an idea, you need the one-two punch of a "Hot Cause" and "Cool Solutions."  A hot cause like deaths from tobacco or medical errors can be used as springboards to raise awareness, spark motivation, and ignite red-hot outrage.  And naming these as enemies is an important step in mobilizing a network or market. But creating the heat isn't enough; the next step needs to be cool solutions.   This doesn't just mean identifying technically feasible solutions, it also means finding ways to bind people together, to empower them to take steps that help solve the problem, and to create enduring commitment to implementing solutions.  Huggy focuses on radical innovations in this book, but the logic and general principles can be applied in any setting where a group or organizations wants to mobilize action -- be it to solve a social problem or to sell a product.  Indeed, that is why the book received such strong endorsements from Andy Grove (as you can see above) and from Mozilla CEO John Lilly -- who praises the book for providing practical ideas that help him run his organization. 

Indeed, Diego Rodriguez, Perry Klebahn, and I are stealing a host ideas from Huggy (both from the book and conversations with him) for our Spring d.school class on Creating Infectious Action. Our theme, which Huggy suggested, is "Kill Gas."  Diego posted about the class last week -- don't miss the picture.  Certainly, most of us know that the U.S. dependence on foreign oil is bad for the economy and a national security risk.  And the resulting global warming is bad for the planet.  But -- even with Al Gore's impressive accomplishments -- it strikes us that this issue could be emotionally hotter.  So we are going to challenge our students -- using ideas from Market Rebels and from Huggy directly -- to invent and spread solutions that crank-up the emotional heat around this issue and, perhaps, to develop and implement some cool solutions.  We are still designing the class, so we would love suggestions and reactions --and if you are a Stanford master's student, please sign-up for the class.

To return to Huggy's book, it isn't the One Minute Manager, it is a detailed and thoughtful book.  But it is approachable and remarkably useful to any person or company that seeks to spread ideas, products, or practices throughout a marketplace or network. Most university press book sell just a few thousands copies, but -- my bias aside -- this one deserves much broader attention. 

Comments

[Chris Lyddy]

For your class, I highly recommend "Leadership without Easy Answers" by Ronald Haifetz and "Fostering Sustainable Behavior" by Douglas Mackenzie-Mohr and one other author. Also, you might talk with people at the New Hampshire Carbon Challenge. (http://carbonchallenge.sr.unh.edu/) and Clean Air Cool Planet (http://www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/).

[Bruce Lewin]

I love the one-two punch of a "Hot Cause" and "Cool Solutions"

Isn't that how much of the world works?

[James B]

I always thought that the fact that fossil fuels are derived from decaying organic matter never got enough airtime.

Running our cars on rotting corpses would seem like a non-starter to me.