Who are the Leaders in Your Field?

Sir Isaac Newton once said:

If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants.

(Although this appears to come from Bernard of Chartres)

And, in his recent blog post, Seth Godin updates this quote by saying:

If you don’t know who the must-reads in your field are, find out before your customers and competitors do.

You can’t stand on the shoulders of giants if you don’t know who are the giants.

Isaac Newton image from Wikipedia

The Masters of Innovation

I’ve started this process in the field of innovation. And a great book recommended by my well-read colleague Sean Spence is Scott D Anthony’s The Little Black Book of Innovation. In Anthony’s book he has a chapter called The Masters of Innovation. He presents his list of 12 innovation masters. Here they are and the name of their seminal work (mostly books):

1. Steve Blank: The Four Steps to the Epiphany
2. Clayton Christensen: The Innovator’s Solution
3. Peter Drucker: Innovation and Entrepreneurship
4. Thomas Alva Edison: The incandescent light bulb (not a book! LOL!)
5. Richard N Foster: Creative Destruction
6. Vijay Govindarajan: Then Rules For Strategic Innovators
7. Bill James: The New Bill James Historical Abstract
8. AG Lafley: The Game-Changer
9. Roger Martin: The Design of Business (At Book Rapper we rapped this as The Design Advantage)
10. Michael Mauboussin: More Than You Know
11. Rita McGrath: Discovery-Driven Growth
12. Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracry

[Tweet “12 Masters of Innovation #innovationleaders”]

QUESTION: Who are the leaders in your field? And, what are you doing to learn from them?

PS: Book Rapper can help you short cut this process…