The June 9, 2007 issue of The Economist ran an article titled “Lessons from Apple.” After many had left it for dead a decade earlier, the article started, this is the company that now, unequivocally, sets the pace in the consumer electronics industry.

The article highlighted four main development strategies:

First, Apple looks freely outside its walls for new product ideas, an approach referred to as “network innovation.”

Second, Apple orients product design around the needs of its users, rather than technology.

Third, Apple seems particularly gifted at knowing when to ignore market input and go with its gut—Apple was ridiculed when the iPod launched, for example.

And fourth, Apple is able to “fail wisely,” as the authors put it—use mistakes to learn, and then move on.

Robin Hanson suggests that there are at least five reasons to be less creative when it comes to new product development (“The Myth of Creativity,” BusinessWeek, July 3, 2006):

1. Many big ideas and innovations tend to stay around for a long time. Smaller changes to those big ideas will likely benefit industry the most.
2. The big ideas that result from creativity often go unimplemented. Effecting change requires resources. Most businesses just don’t have the resources available to put the new innovation into action, especially given the large risk.
3. Looking back, many of the most useful product innovations are a direct result of a utility problem, not a creative idea.
4. Creativity is often thought to be its own entity that is meant to control the thinker. In business, it’s best to never lose control.
5. Productivity can suffer when product development is guided by creativity in innovation. More time ought to be spent learning what to do with the existing innovative ideas rather than trying to think of more new ones.

Ed. Note: It’s true, that creativity can easily get out of control. But, at the same time, creativity is too important to ignore: it can be a significant source of competitive advantage. Creativity always needs to be grounded in problem solving and creativity for creativity’s sake is always dangerous. The better strategy is to be aware of the pitfalls and prepare well in advance for effective implementation.

I often get asked how products like Facebook do it—grow so fast and so organically. Facebook possesses four messaging attributes that can be difficult to come by individually, let alone in one package:

1. A universally appealing value proposition
2. The network effect (where the value proposition grows even stronger as individuals bring their friends into the fold)
3. A user experience that is second to none (yes, amazing design is a messaging variable)
4. A “price” that is free.

Even still, the growth of sites like Facebook is never 100% viral, because media support is always present—a factor caused, of course, by their rapid growth rates.

A few years ago,BusinessWeek recounted how, in a joint survey with the Boston Consulting Group, one thousand senior managers ranked slow development times as the number one obstacle to innovation. Innovation, the publication said, is about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time (Jena McGregor, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” BusinessWeek, April 24, 2006).

A critical success factor is so essential to achieving a desired outcome that if it’s missing, or falls below an acceptable range, your project is destined to fail.

D. Ronald Daniel of McKinsey & Company started the discussion about critical success factors in 1961, and Jack Rockart of MIT gave it renewed and expanded life in 1986. Every aspect of your business has at least some critical success factors. What they are depends on what you’re trying to do and its scope. They can apply to one specific task, or they can apply to your business in its entirety. They can be specific and unique or they can be broad and universal.

Once in place, critical success factors become ideal “filters” for subsequent decision making.

Years ago, a major U.S. consulting firm, Arthur Andersen, created a database of best practices for business activities. Later on, after this information and experience had seasoned through many years and possibly thousands of implementations, clients asked the firm if there were any fundamental lessons, or principles, that had emerged from the more than thirty-thousand pages of accumulated knowledge.

The response was, yes, there were three things that stood out: the most successful companies constantly search for a better way to do things, they develop deep relationships with stakeholders, and they adopt a strong process view of their businesses.

For simplicity, we distill those practices down to three core words: Proactive, Relationships and Processes.

Shortly after I began collecting background material for my book, I came across a press release from Bain & Company with this headline: “Less Complex Companies Grow Nearly Twice as Fast as Competitors.”

Bain examined the complexity of product and service offerings across a range of companies. Too many choices—product proliferation—were impeding customer action and a sure sign of lack of customer understanding. “Complexity is often a company’s largest hidden liability,” according to Bain’s head of global performance improvement practice.

Less complex companies grew revenue 1.7 times faster than their peers, reduced costs and accelerated customer decisions.