The Wise Company: How Companies Create Continuous Innovation

Summary

High-velocity change is the fundamental challenge facing companies today. Few companies, however, are prepared to continuously innovate—because they focus on the short-term and do not emphasize the wisdom needed.

In The Wise Company, legendary management experts Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi highlight how various companies have confronted the challenge of rapid change. The key: a relentless self-renewal process where companies realize the future they envision, rather than only responding to changes in the environment.

Companies that have resilience, longevity, and sustainability share a number of characteristics, Nonaka and Takeuchi show. Strategies are based on alignment of organizational and societal benefits. Leaders grasp the core of any situation or problem quickly, and intuitively comprehend the nature and meaning of people, things, and events. But wise leadership is not enough: wisdom must infuse the organization through informal as well as formal shared interactions and communications that focus on metaphors and stories that convey the essence and meaning of strategies and actions. Nonaka and Takeuchi demonstrate how continuous innovation results from companies creating new knowledge, disseminating knowledge throughout the organization, and converting that knowledge to action.