Review: How Stella Saved the Farm

Innovation is a force to bring significant positive change. It’s easy to say one is innovative, but it’s quite an achievable feat to be innovative. It’s a tough job for an organization to foster innovation and reward teams that show signs of being innovative, even though if the results were not positive. That is one risk to take with innovative teams, there are chances that they will not be able to deliver, for the simple fact that innovation is a high bar and not easy to achieve a state of.

How Stella Saved the Farm is a short and fun read about a farm in trouble and how innovation was brought into the farm. It eventually talks about the process of managing innovation that worked for the farm. The story is like one of the stories told by grandmothers, one with a great story line, a moral in the end and a lot of things to think about.

My takeaways from the book were the following

• In any innovation, Idea is just the beginning.
• Building a dedicated innovation team is like building a new company. You cannot control everyting, just get the right individuals involved and create the right conditions for success.
• Nurturing partnerships between innovation team and the existing team is essential.
• Learning leads to profits.
• The innovation leader’s job is to execute a disciplined experiment.

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The last point was the most interesting to me. It was always confusing about how innovation leaders were graded; the whole idea of judging them based on the experiment they made and their findings makes a lot of sense.

So, go save your farm!