Your innovation team is a factory. Hopefully not just a factory of meetings and emails. Hopefully not just a software factory. Your collaborative team is an expectation factory.

The RACI matrix almost got it right but still harbors too much ambiguity. In your team’s formal planning, govern only what is worth documenting outside email, and nothing else. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

Surely some activities in your organization are important to measure. A scorecard captures the “Metrics That Matter” - Leading and Lagging. Historical, Current, and Target values.

Your innovation team is a factory. Hopefully not just a factory of meetings and emails. Hopefully not just a software factory. Your collaborative team is an agreement factory.

Verb Sprawl is a real problem that slows teams down. In planning your team’s work, instead of governing meetings or emails, govern what is worth documenting outside email. Govern with just Five Verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute.

Three metaphors give structure to the book. The metaphor of a factory shapes the Why. The metaphor of an Asset Portfolio - a documentation inventory forms the What. The metaphor of the Performing Arts shapes the How of the Innovation Factory.

What is worth documenting inside your organization? For starters, ALL these. Execution’s best two friends are simplicity and transparency. These documents ruthlessly keep you simple and transparent. These are valuable for months, YEARS, elevating documentation to a title of ASSETS. Building and maintaining these in your innovation work ensures a healthy, Ruthless Asset Factory.

Your organization might be caught in meeting gridlock and email overload. You cannot just talk and email your way to success. You must document things outside email. It’s dry, sterile, unforgiving, and ruthless. But documentation keeps its value. A ruthless factory results in a valuable Asset Portfolio.

Use Five Verbs to pace, synchronize, and assign building your project’s Asset Portfolio.

High-level and detailed names of how your customer experiences your products and services, in their language and through their lens.

Every organization must welcome and capture ideas for change. A Change Log is a form of Suggestion Box. Let stakeholders know you understand their ideas, and you are prioritizing them among other ideas.

Every week, every team member should share a snapshot of their recent accomplishments and their near-future plans. “Manage up” without “kissing up.”