The world is a hyper-competitive place. Plenty of experts say they have your next competitive advantage. Think about what it means to have a collaborative advantage.

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.

Your customers and employees have enough negative experiences and surprises. With a methodology that enforces collaboration and elegance, you can create positive surprises. Build Moments That Matter.

Although your innovation team is not literally a symphony, you should manage it like one because you want all the same things: accountability, clarity, harmony, attention to detail, synchronization, forgiveness, and a great performance. The language, habits, and culture of making music form a Graceful Factory.

Ruthless Grace is the combination of discipline and empathy. Ruthless - not cruelty or punishment - but the likelihood of a sunrise and sunset tomorrow. Grace reminds us that we are human and our teams are human.

Although your innovation team is not literally a theater company, you should manage it like one because you want all the same things: a great environment, a great story for your customers, a great experience for your actors, auditions for the right roles, a sense of belonging, low re-invention of the wheel, and the integration of numerous moving parts. Memories, Moments That Matter, and a Standing Ovation.

To manage the People side of Change, apply a framework such as ADKAR (owned by PROSCI). Shepherd your stakeholders through Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement with corresponding assets.

Before you leap into testing a new process or technology, formalize the general expectations about test planning and execution. For example, the number of test phases, test environments, and the documentation expectations for the test plan.

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.

Everything you learn on the dance floor is valuable off the dance floor - especially on an innovation team. Hygiene, attentiveness, self-awareness, trust, mechanics, style, mistakes, gentleness, community, diversity, interchangeability, and elasticity. The learning never stops. Leaders, meet your partner where they are!