Regardless of the size of your enterprise, change is here to stay and you have to embrace it if you’re going to thrive. Knowing your employees, your key assets, and how to motivate them is going to be key in meeting business challenges. Embracing change, and providing your employees a climate and culture to succeed, will build a strong foundation for your longer-term objectives. Melissa provides some incredible insights to actions that we as leaders need to take to enable the innovation that will be required for the success of their employees and business.

For those of you with children, remember that obligatory gift we got, the “What to expect when you’re first expecting?” Most made immediate intuitive sense (e.g. don’t forget to change diapers often) while others were obscure bits of lore that you may not need now, but when you do, you’re SUPER glad there’s a reference.

Well, Kennedy’s “Innovation Revolution” is the business equivalent for leaders navigating and driving in today’s controlled chaos. Hyper-matrixed organizations with one official boss and 9 unofficial ones? Distributed budgeting and planning? Tension between digital natives and folks who knew a world without smartphones? All check. (young people, that first scene in the original Ghostbusters featured what historians now call a “card catalog.” Look it up in Wikipedia – that would be the ultimate in irony…)

This is the reality we all work in. Many of us are leaders today because we recognized how our teams can thrive in this context out of trial and error…and with a dash of luck. Boy, what I would have done for a rule book! Well, now we have one. Go read this and start your own movement.”

This book reinforces essential leadership skills that every leader should be reminded of, regardless of how much experience they have. The situation-based applications for the many-faced Leadovator are especially powerful and practical. I’ve experienced working at every type of organization described in The Innovation Revolution (a Hierarchical Innovation Crusher, an Innovation Comeback Kid and a Nimble Innovation Powerhouse) – and the latter is, by far, the most exciting to be a part of!

The world is littered with dinosaur corporations who just can’t find a way to innovate and as a result become less relevant every day. Could this be you? Today’s best practices around startups can be yours as well. Simply take a read of this book and be both inspired to start as well as build a framework for effective innovation inside your company. I have been there through stints inside a $6B company, the Federal gov’t and as co-founder of MapQuest. The best business books are easy to consume and leave you with some great insights.

If enterprise leaders want the spirit, secrets and success of startups translated to work inside big business, this is the one must-have book.

Finally! A text that embraces—rather than grimaces at–Millennials and their fast-paced, crowd-sourced, quick-decision, digital-denizen approaches as the next great stage in the evolution of effective business. From one person’s idea, through the leanest of lean startups, to the rise and fall of behemoths we all know, Kennedy offers her hands-on, well-researched, tried-and-tested methods that not only span the range from entrepreneurial to intrapreneurial but from intimately introspective to explosively impactful.

The Innovation Revolution is a resource treasure trove for managers who want to cut straight through the faddish jargon that plagues this topic and get down to doing business, more creatively. After reading it, they’ll have at their disposal Melissa’s level-headed breakdown of the latest research and best practices in innovation management and a clear–and quick–path to generating and strategizing ideas. Melissa has no trouble with stalling, or stalled out creative plans. While her book attends to things like theories and cultural contexts, and generates richer and deeper action plans because of this, it’s also obsessed with getting results. To that end she equips her readers with tools, like individual and organizational diagnostics to help give them an informed and customized start;targeted practice exercises and challenges to help get things moving when moving is hard; an analysis of the physiology and cognition of mind-changing, because sometimes to work our brains we need to move our legs; a no-holds-barred management manifesto that will create time, flexibility, and the space for change within organizations; and diverse plans for overcoming all kinds of typical emotional, organizational, managerial, and personal obstacles. Bottom line: you could attend all those innovation seminars, workshops, symposiums and MOOCs. Or you could read this book, and get started.