Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time

Five

What It Takes to Master the Hype Cycle

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

—W. Edwards Deming

LET’S START OUR JOURNEY into the world of process with a trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country. Here we find the Old Order Amish, a centuries-old Christian community widely known for its apparent rejection of all things modern. At first glance, the Amish would seem a poor model for our innovation-hungry modern-day corporate cultures, but a closer inspection yields some important insights for our own adoption process.¹

Living in settlements concentrated in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio, Old Order Amish still use horses to pull carriages and farm equipment. They eschew automobiles, radio, ...